Submerged: Adventures of America's Most Elite Underwater Archeology Team
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The door was very heavy, a couple hundred pounds. Larry was levering the damn thing up (sideways?) to spring it from its hinges. It kept slipping from the end of his pry-bar and falling several inches to the metal deck below. We felt we were swimming in a steel drum while someone pounded it with a sledge hammer. Sound travels faster underwater than on land, so it is very hard to tell where it is coming from, but it loses nothing in intensity. I wedged myself into a corner of the ceiling and pointed the camera at Larry’s herculean efforts. The crashing was mind-numbing and the cold in my right glove, hand-numbing. As I hung from the ceiling like a bat with various parts of my anatomy losing feeling, the absurdity of the situation struck home. I started to laugh.
Murphy, due to his exertion, generated a lot of carbon dioxide, which greatly aggravates the effects of nitrogen narcosis. During a pause, he noticed my shoulders moving and came closer where he could faintly hear my hysterical laughter. He gave me a concerned okay query with his circled thumb and forefinger, to which I nodded affirmatively since my hands were encumbered. His okay sign changed slowly to an obscenely extended middle finger, after which he returned to the door. Even at eighty feet, a depth not normally associated with nitrogen narcosis, heavy exertion, cold, the tricks played by visual distortion from silt, and the angle of the ship, all took their toll. Minutes later, there came the most enormous crash of all, and the door fell heavily to the silty floor. The job was done.
Archival records tell us the America went down with no fatalities except for an Irish setter chained to the fantail. Hopefully it will claim no more than it already has since its sinking. On our return scuffle up the stairway I noted the purser’s cabin. There are mail slots in the wall of his booth that are partially filled with silt. The slots have collected underwater dust, which shows from the angle it has settled and filled the box, the direction true “up” really is. We emerged from the port hull of the ship into a shower of sunlight. Then we headed to our decompression stop, leaving a place where time and even the rules of physics have only tenuous hold.
At the ten-foot stop we had our only real brush with danger. A bull moose swimming past our boat to a nearby island saw our bubbles and came over to investigate. Luckily, the hooves of a swimming moose don’t quite reach ten feet below the surface. It would have been a terrible irony to have exited unscathed from a risky working penetration of a wreck in freezing water only to be brained by a moose.
During the six years that we spent a part of each summer working on the shipwrecks of Isle Royale we learned not only of the richness of a special collection of maritime relics but that they were special places where those with the will and stamina could find touchstones to the past rarely equaled on land. It was the place where I and most other members of the team solidified a real sense of mission. If Isle Royale was an awakening, our next assignment would cement the revelation as nothing else could.
Cocooned on a bunk in the V-berth of our research boat in a remote cove on the north shore of the island, I heard the high-speed whine of a park patrol craft. Soon I was handed an official looking letter to be opened only by Dan Lenihan, c/o Chief Ranger, Isle Royale National Park. As usual, the seal was broken. Stu Croll admitted he couldn’t stand the suspense of not knowing what was in these occasional missives I received from Washington. That evening, I assembled members of the SCRU team after dinner. I told them that next year, after their hitch at Isle Royale, they would be diving the rest of the summer in very different waters. They would be working on the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor.
CHAPTER TWELVE
PEARL HARBOR: USS ARIZONA
A s we entered the water from the Arizona Memorial’s floating dock, the Navy raised pennants to warn boats that diving operations were commencing. A red-and-white “diver down” flag and a blue-and-white “alpha” were soon flapping toward the southwest. From the mast on the memorial flew the same colors in a more familiar form: Old Glory, the wind keeping her parallel to the others.
On a similar bright morning on December 7, 1941, flags were just being raised on the ships when sailors, standing at attention on deck, were distracted by a group of show-off fly-boys buzzing the fleet. Even when the first bombs tore into the ships, most thought there had been some sort of accident. Only when the red “meatball” insignias on the planes became visible did there come full realization of what was happening. Flight commander Mitsuo Fuchida had moments before radioed “Tora, Tora, Tora,” and watched, with what must have been great relief and satisfaction, the initiation of a complete surprise attack on the American Pacific fleet.
The Japanese had gambled the whole pot on one winning hand. They were trusting that a surprise attack on the home port of the Pacific Fleet would break the spirit of the American people and bring the United States to the negotiating table while Japan commanded a position of strength. It was a terrible miscalculation.
The underlying motivations were nationalism and racial pride; the immediate source of provocation to the Japanese was oil. A crippling embargo initiated by the United States would crush any hopes for the Japanese dream of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In this vision, Japan would be at the apex of a new Asian Empire of the Sun.
The decision to attack Pearl Harbor to achieve these ends was tactically wise but strategically disastrous. A U.S. populace, which suffered a deep ambivalence over becoming engaged directly in yet another punishing war in Europe, was united literally overnight. The Japanese, their German and Italian allies, and anyone or anything associated with them were immediately the focus of a sweeping and violent reaction. America, the industrial giant, which entered World War I with great reluctance, was playing out the same isolationist instincts during World War II, after three years of conflict had transpired. But on December 8th , after the attack, the United States entered the war with a vengeance.
Although it may be argued that Germany would have eventually capitulated to the Soviet Union and Great Britain, the Pacific was primarily an American battlefield. The single act that precipitated changing the face of nationalism in Asia and hastened the end of the war in Europe took place in this harbor. The Arizona was at the heart of the storm. Half of the deaths from the Pearl Harbor raid occurred on this vessel, and the remains of almost a thousand of the 1,177 men that died on the Arizona that day are still here.
Superintendent Gary Cummins’s words ran through my head as Jerry Livingston, Larry Murphy, and I swam slowly on the surface toward Arizona’s sunken bow. The depth of water over the wreck varied from eight to thirty-eight feet. We breathed through our snorkels, intending to switch to scuba when we reached the bow and reconnoiter the ship from stem to stern.
Gary had said, “I need a map of this thing, pictures, and an idea of what’s happening to it down there.” Like many park managers, Gary had an eclectic background. He had graduate degrees in archeology and history, and many ranger skills including diving. As soon as he took over as first superintendent of the Memorial in 1980, he knew the quality of information about the major American shrine he was responsible for was sorely deficient and totally unacceptable.
The biggest problem facing him in initiating a survey of the hulk was resistance from the Pearl Harbor military establishment. A mythology had grown about the ship that caused most admirals to believe it was too dangerous to dive. It took two years of discussion and negotiation to gain all the clearances necessary to begin surveying the ship.
There wasn’t much question about what had been there in 1941 before the attack. Historic photos, ship plans, and even movie footage of the ship in its death throes tell that story. But what was left after more than a million pounds of explosives in the forward magazine and a load of aviation fuel were ignited by a Japanese bomb—that wasn’t so clear. The Navy had also spent a year removing the tall masts and superstructure, further altering the remains.
By 1980, there was a Memorial straddling the ship to which five thousand visitors a day were transported by Navy launches for a brief visit. But what were th
e rusted metal features that extruded from the water? What was still down there aside from what could be discerned from aerial photographs sold in the visitor center as postcards? No one had a clue. We were about to find out.
As we switched from snorkels to our regulators and began our descent, some strong association emerged from my subconscious. Diesel fuel. That’s what it reminded me of: diesel fuel like I smelled as a volunteer fireman—overturned eighteen wheelers and diesel fumes, masculine, harsh, intrusive. Scents are powerful stimuli and distinct odors underwater are rare, so when they occur, it leaves an impression.
Was it coming through my airtight face mask? No, I was probably smelling it through my regulator. Droplets of water, making their way through the one-way exhaust valve as vapor then into my throat—I was tasting the wreck. And feeling it. The ship has a unique texture: rough, unforgiving, jagged metal. Most of it was coated with a crust of barnacles and tube worms—a strong contrast to the smooth, sometimes slippery-with-algae, surface of the iron-hulled wrecks at Isle Royale. If we weren’t clothed head to toe with neoprene and denim, we would have been scraped raw every time we touched the ship.
And the eye. The Arizona plays on the eyes in tune with its taste and feel. Stark, as if it had been there for eons—a force of nature not the work of man. When the silt wasn’t disturbed, we could see clearly for only five to seven feet. Past that distance, objects became shapes, and beyond; the shapes blurred into indistinct forms, eventually merging into a greenish-gray metallic mass. Something here was the ultimate expression of profound finality.
We were swimming the site to assess the problems we would face in our research. Biofouling, marine organisms mixed with products of corrosion, covered the Arizona like a thick scab. Studying the composition of the crust would tell much about the structural integrity of the ship and also the environmental history of Pearl Harbor.
We had descended at the “bullnose,” near the very stem or prow of the ship. From this perspective, two holes cut into the hull above us for accommodating mooring lines appear much like the flaring nostrils of a bull. The Arizona is amazingly narrow at the bow; I find I can wrap my gloved hand over the stem as if it were the edge of a door. Hawse pipes through which chains for the four huge anchors used to descend are carpeted with sponges, mollusks, and other colorful organisms. But sunlight still makes its way through from the deck. Rays of light from the midmorning sun pierce the gloom.
We move on to the area of major blast damage. The thick metal plates and beams are radically ripped and folded here reminiscent of crumpled paper. This is where the huge ammunition magazine was struck by an armor-piercing Japanese bomb. Its delay mechanism allowed it the necessary fraction of a second to penetrate several decks before detonating in the heart of the ship. Such an explosion begins to compare with nuclear detonations—equivalent to approximately five hundred tons of TNT, which amounts to a one-half kiloton blast. By comparison, the bomb that destroyed the federal building in Oklahoma City was about four tons.
The stories of survivors are often jumbled and conflicting, as one might expect of people witnessing such a traumatic event. Particularly interesting are eyewitness accounts provided by men standing on the stern of the Vestal, a ship moored outboard of the Arizona on the morning of the attack. They swear that a torpedo traveled directly under them and struck the deeper-draught battleship, causing the massive explosion. One survivor visited me in Santa Fe to adamantly make this point. We veered off toward the starboard side to check for ourselves. We found a crack that begins at the top of the torpedo blister and followed it to the mud line. Larry looked back at me and shook his head. There simply is no torpedo entry hole where they say it should be. It is possible one exists below the silt line, but we would expect to see “washboarding,” a rippling effect on the hull, or some other sign of the hull being compromised below. This interplay of documents, people’s memories, and physical evidence comprises historical archeology, its answers, and mysteries.
An early version of SCRU logo.
Little River cave, Florida 1972. Tex Chalkley and the author. (Photo by Greg Fight)
Author working in tight space in a cave in an Arkansas park, 1974. (NPS photo by Larry Murphy)
Exploring Rio Coy cave in Mexico, 1979. Standing: left, author; right, Paul DeLoach. (Photo by Sheck Exley)
Amistad Lake, Texas
Inundation study, author in video helmet, 1976.
Rescue-recovery exercises for park rangers, 1979. (NPS photos by Eric Reubin and Toni Carrell)
Dry Tortugas
Fort Jefferson aerial view, 1960s. (NPS photo by Jack Boucher)
Anchor from 1800s. (NPS photo by John Brooks)
Mapping operations, 1993. (NPS photo by John Brooks)
Larry Murphy reading survey instruments in patrol boat, 1993. (NPS photo by Tim Smith)
Mexico Rio Choy, 1979. Left to right: author, Paul DeLoach, Sheck Exley.
Biscayne
Mapping, 1990s. (NPS photo by John Brooks)
Author monitoring the magnetometer, 1980.
Larry Murphy backfilling excavation with dredge, 1990s. (NPS photo by John Brooks)
Biscayne
Mapping the HMS Fowey, 1990s.
HMS Fowey shot locker. (NPS photos by John Brooks)
Isle Royale, 1980
Diver and wreck below Royale Diver. (Photo by Mitch Kezar)
Toni Carrell above the remains of the paddle wheel from the Cumberland. (NPS photo by John Brooks)
Inside the Emperor shipwreck at Isle Royale. (NPS photo by Larry Murphy)
Isle Royale
Surveying the Kamloops in excess of 200 feet with robotics, 1986. (ROV photo of second ROV courtesy of Emory Kristof, National Geographic magazine)
Larry Murphy videotapes (black-and-white, reel-to-reel) the aft cabins of the Emperor, 1981.
The wheel of the Kamloops, 1986. (ROV photo courtesy of Emory Kristof, National Geographic magazine)
Kalaupapa, Kauhako Crater, Marine Corps helicopter retrieving survey gear. Author at center of concentric swirl in water, 1988. (Courtesy of Emory Kristof, National Geographic magazine)
Bikini Atoll, Larry Murphy at propeller of upside-down Japanese battleship Nagato, 1989. (NPS photo by Daniel Lenihan)
Bikini Atoll, : Jerry Livingston sketches over the submarine Pilotfish, resting 180-feet deep, 1989. (NPS photo by Larry Murphy)
Decompressing, Jerry Livingston, Jim Delgado (obscured), author, Larry Nordby, 1989. (NPS photo by Larry Murphy)
Author examining bombs inside hangar deck of USS Saratoga. (NPS photo by Larry Murphy)
Aleutian Islands (Kiska Harbor)
Larry Murphy and author, 1989.
Midget sub, Murphy and author.
Author enters Japanese submarine. (NPS photos by Michael Eng)
Doug Cuillard, Superintendent of the National Park of American Samoa, making photo inventory of coral, 1992. (NPS photo by John Brooks)
Pohnpei, coral column, Nan Madol, 1992. (NPS photo by John Brooks)
In American Samoa, author examining coral killed by discarded disposable diaper, 1992. (NPS photo by John Brooks)
Kosrae, preparing for videotaping of Leonora, 1981. Left to right: Toni Carrell, Larry Murphy, Julian Jonah, Teddy John. (NPS photo by Paul Ehrlich)
Kosrae, survey of Bully Hayes’ Leonora, copper-clad water tank, 1981. (NPS photo by Bob Adair)
Guam, Ranger Jim Miculka videotaping turret on invasion beach at War in the Pacific National Historical Park, 1983. (NPS photo by Daniel Lenihan)
Kosrae, Larry Murphy and author doing photo mosaic on Leonora, 1981. (NPS photo by Bob Adair)
Author and Larry Nordby mapping lava cave, Kaloko-Honokohau National Historical Park, Hawaii, 1992. (NPS photo by John Brooks)
Forward hatch of Civil War submarine HL Hunley, Charleston Harbor, 1996. (NPS photo by Chris Amer, South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology)
Author over wreckage of CSS Alabama, off Cherbourg, France, 1993. (NPS
photo by John Brooks)
Pearl Harbor, 2000. SCRU and friends pay tribute to Cal Cummings, senior NPS archeologist, on hearing of his death, from left to right: Dan Lenihan, Matt Russell, Deb King, Larry Murphy, Jim Adams, Jim Bradford, Kathy Billings, Art Ireland, Brett Seymour.
Pearl Harbor, 2001 (NPS photos by Brett Seymour) Top left: USS Arizona Memorial. Top right: Deb King mapping artifacts on deck of USS Arizona. Below: Oil samples being taken for analysis by Larry Murphy.
Pearl Harbor
SCRU five-part drawing of USS Arizona, by Jerry Livingston and Larry Nordby, won awards for graphic display in 1985. Project was funded by Arizona Memorial Museum Association.
No. 1 turret 14-inch guns of USS Arizona.
Looking up at the Arizona Memorial through oil splotches. (NPS photos by Brett Seymour)