Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [13]
The bomb struck Arizona near the No. 2 turret and punched through three decks before exploding deep inside the bowels of the ship, setting off about a thousand pounds of high-explosive black powder stored in a small magazine. The force of the blast smashed through an armored deck and ignited the ship’s forward powder magazines. Each 14-inch gun magazine held 10 tons of powder, and each 5-inch gun magazine held 13 tons. Nine of these magazines, holding altogether 99 tons of powder, erupted in a low, rumbling roar that released heat so intense it softened steel. The blast and the wave of heat bucked the ship out of the water, nearly taking off the bow as it twisted. The decks collapsed as the armored sides of the battleship blew out. The No. 1 turret, engulfed by the inferno, fell forward into the maw of the explosion’s crater. A massive fireball climbed into the sky. Fragments of bodies and debris from the ship fell onto nearby Ford Island, onto the decks of other ships and into the water. A few survivors, most of them badly burned, were hurled through the air and into the water.
Many men never made it out from their battle stations inside the ship. Trapped below, they were either incinerated by fire or drowned as water poured into the ruptured hull. I think of them as we swim past the side of the No. 2 turret, its guns stripped away by U.S. Navy salvagers, and arrive at the top of the No. I turret, whose three 14-inch guns angle down. The U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor was sent to the bottom by a new force in naval war: aircraft. In a matter of minutes, aerial torpedoes and bombs devastated the American ships at Pearl Harbor. In a heartbeat, Arizona, a mighty battlewagon bristling with huge guns capable of hurtling massive steel shells across the horizon, died, and few of her complement of 1,177 men escaped. Inside this turret, the gun crew, like their ship, sleeps for eternity.
As we drop down into darkness, we see no trace of the fatal wound, the hole punched through the decks by the last bomb, but the destruction of the magazines and the fierce flames that burned for forty-eight hours created a deep depression into which the No. 1 turret has fallen. Moving forward, we reach a twisted mass of metal that looks like a tangle of giant flower petals and ribbon. This is the peeled-back armored deck, once horizontal but now vertical, and its sheared supports. We see more evidence of the force of the blast at each side, with hull plates pushed out as much as 20 feet. I rise along this wall and reach the gaping maw of the hawse pipes, which stand open and empty of anchor chain. Forty feet of the bow survives intact.
At the bow, we turn and head back, swimming up to the decks. As we swim, I think again of those who survived this tragic day. One of them, Don Stratton, was the farthest forward of Arizona’s crew to live through the blast. Stationed inside a gun director with a shipmate, Stratton felt the concussion of the magazine explosion. He and his shipmate watched in horror as the steel that surrounded them grew red, then white hot. Both sailors, dressed in T-shirts, shorts and boots, started to bake. Stratton’s shipmate wouldn’t stand and wait to die, so he rushed to the hatch and grabbed the steel “dogs” that latched it shut. He left his charred fingers on the steel but managed to push open the hatch as the flames reached in and took him. Stratton pulled his T-shirt over his head and ran through the flames and jumped over the side of the ship. The heat stripped the skin off his exposed legs, arms and torso, but he lived.
In 1991, I met Don