Arizona Revisited (Part 2)

After two intense weeks of reconnaissance diving and experimentation in 1983, we returned to do the job in 1984. My cold sweats had ended. I was now confident we could pull it off; had digested my humble pie, and was finally able to absorb the grandeur of this incredible piece of history. The more I could focus on the ship rather than the job, the more I felt privileged to be associated with this American icon in any small way.

Stairs once leading below decks to officers' staterooms on Arizona's stern now lead into sediment. Photo by Brett Seymour, NPS.

For the diver, Arizona emerges from the gloom as some surreal metallic structure of monstrous proportions. The Park Service and Navy divers I was leading followed a pattern of becoming at first overwhelmed with the ship and the difficulty of their job, and then obsessed by it. They knew that their participation was in itself becoming an historic event that would eventually intertwine itself with the legend of the ship, a ship which, until a few minutes after 8:00 a.m., December 7, 1941, was just another battlewagon in the American Navy bordering on a majestic sort of obsolescence.

Swimming fore to aft on Arizona allows one to engage the past on a level alternately provocative and chilling. I recall one evening making a transit alone to check string survey lines and photo stations left from the previous eight hours of diving operations. There had been up to a dozen divers at a time working on various portions of the vessel that day. Clouds of silt had marked the passage of divers' fins and the movement of measuring tapes being dragged over the powdery sediment.

The ship was a different place now, totally still except for the occasional bustle of a snapper or puffer fish hurrying away from me: the odd-looking intruder swimming slowly out of the gloom in Park Service coveralls. The hawseholes through which the huge anchor chains had once clanged are overgrown with thick layers of red and white sponges. Feather duster worms have emerged from their calcareous homes and finger the water tentatively looking for food.

The muzzles of Arizona's 14-inch guns. Photo by Brett Seymour, NPS.

I swim by the muzzles of the 14-inch guns. This whole forward turret had been one of the project's immediate discoveries. Although I’m sure some old master divers in Pearl Harbor must have known it was there, the collective corporate memory of the Navy and National Park Service was that it had been removed with the other three turrets during the war to form shore batteries. These guns had 60-foot-long barrels and each could shoot a projectile the weight of a Volkswagen 20 miles. Finding it immediately vindicated the superintendent's contention that we didn't know enough about a major American shrine-one which happened to be under his care. Not far from the bow are the ragged, torn edges of steel plating that mark the beginning of the prime damage zone. This is where a 1,760-pound, armor-piercing bomb had set off the powder magazine. A million pounds of high explosive and nearby storage of aviation fuel added its punch to the explosion which would end 1,177 men's lives. Most of these "men" were barely out of high school. I figured roughly 60,000 years of potential life had been snuffed out that Sunday morning. Countless hopes and aspirations, part of the silt now.

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