Submerged: Adventures of America's Most Elite Underwater Archeology Team

by Daniel Lenihan

  The cavernous muzzles of three fourteen-inch-diameter guns began to take shape in the murk ahead of me. They weren’t supposed to be there. Park Service and Navy officials in charge of the site told us the forward turret had been removed along with the other three during salvage operations. The presence of the huge turret underscored Gary’s point—how ignorant we were of the present state of the ship. Earlier in the week, other discoveries were made by park divers, such as live ordnance for the five-inch guns decomposing under the busiest part of the memorial. We called the Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal teams in to remove the shells.

  I followed the dim shape of the sixty-foot barrels—they appeared incongruously large. Everything around them is amorphous in the cloudy water, except for these encrusted steel tubes: guns capable of heaving a projectile the weight of a small automobile twenty miles. Only battleships had guns like these. Although the importance of these huge sluggers in naval warfare was soon to be overshadowed by the aircraft carrier, in 1941 they were still the symbolic pride of the world’s navies.

  The knowledge that the majority of the battleships in the Pacific fleet were on the bottom after only a few hours of fighting one Sunday morning—before war was even declared—had an extraordinary effect on the American public. That the Pearl Harbor attack was flawed, because it emphasized the wrong targets and was ended too quickly, is easier to understand from a historical perspective. In 1942, after news of the full damage leaked out, the attack seemed apocalyptic. Matters weren’t helped by the fact that German U-boats were then pounding merchant shipping in sight of U.S. beaches in places like New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina.

  I shined my light down the barrel of the port fourteen-inch gun and spied a puffer fish. His choice of a home was ironic. What might have been the most inhospitable place in the world for anything to live on December 6, 1941, became ideal fish habitat a day later.

  We caught up to Larry, his swimming pace slow, subdued. He pointed at an intact porthole, then gestured there were more ahead. We cleared a mat of sponges and other organisms covering the glass. Faces glued to the port as the silt cleared, we saw blackout covers closed tight from the inside—evidence of the state of readiness the ships were supposed to observe with clouds of war gathering to the west. As we checked other portholes, we found some in which air remained in the spaces between the glass and the cover, air dating from 1941.

  Jerry elbowed me and pointed down at shiny teak decking exposed where the silt seemed to have been fanned away. It is rare to see wood preserved so well in a warm, saltwater environment because of the insatiable appetites of teredos, marine-boring worms. The silt covering the deck apparently helped by creating an anaerobic environment. Then the mystery of how the decking became exposed was solved when we observed Tilapia wallowing to clean an area to deposit their eggs.

  As we passed over the top of the ship in shallow water in front of the Memorial, a crowd of spectators watched over the rail. We entered the remains of the ship’s galley, where coffee cups and forks used by the crew in 1941 still lay. Intermingled with them was modern detritus from millions of visitors who have been to the Memorial over the years. Camera lenses, sunglasses, and hairbrushes accidentally dropped, plus hundreds of coins, purposely thrown on the ship.

  We found something else amid the other offerings and lost items: photographs. They seemed to be mainly of children or the very old. I wondered if they were mementos from the living to the dead. Photographs of the siblings, children, and grandchildren of the men who lie here; perhaps a way of sharing the joys and sorrows of unknown offspring. An image flashes through my mind of the black stone wall in Washington, D.C., on which more than 50,000 names are inscribed. Men and women wearing the Park Service uniform stand silently by each day as flowers and photographs accumulate. The Vietnam Wall commemorates the death of the sons of the generation entombed in the Arizona. I wonder how many of the men on this ship never saw their sons, who, in their turn, never saw . . . we move on.

  The water around us turns dark as we pass under the Memorial structure. Aft of the Memorial, the barbette for the number-three turret extrudes from the water, the largest single visible feature at the wreck site. Reminiscent of a huge cylindrical well casing, it was the support structure for one of the huge turrets holding the triple set of fourteen-inch guns.

  Next to this turret is an area where people standing on the Memorial reported seeing the most consistent presence of oil. We found a hatch from which shiny black globules emerged every few seconds. Like lazy liquid marbles they rose gently to the surface. When they hit the air a few feet above our heads, they changed character, losing form to become part of the omnipresent rainbow slick bobbing on the waves under the gaze of onlookers standing in the Memorial.

  The size of the slick seemed disproportionately large compared to the black drops that created it. There was a sense that the Arizona, easy to anthropomorphize anyway , was still bleeding.

  We reached the stern of the ship where the base of the crane used for hauling aboard the reconnaissance planes had been removed. Larry ran his finger over the scalloped metal edges of the hole—the work of cutting torches, not the ragged tears associated with blast damage. The Navy and civilian salvage community accomplished a feat after the bombing of Pearl Harbor almost as dramatic, and easily as portentous, as the attack itself. Within several frenzied months, they raised and sent back into action the majority of ships that on December 7th were considered total losses.

  What must the architects of that attack have thought when their enemy displayed the ability to rebuild ships faster than they could be destroyed? Among the flaws of the Pearl Harbor attack, besides missing the aircraft carriers, the Japanese neglected the ship-repair facilities and aviation fuel depots in favor of the more immediate gratification of seeing battleships in flames.

  Hardly six months passed before the reconstituted American Pacific fleet delivered a blow at Midway that eliminated any serious chance of the Japanese Imperial Navy launching a major offensive ever again. Most of the Japanese aircraft carriers, and their crews, the backbone of the attack on Pearl, took their turn on the seabed in 14,000 feet of water, far beyond any hope of salvage or any vision of a new world order in the Pacific.

  We arrived at the fantail, the very stern, where the Arizona narrows radically and again becomes identifiable as a ship, even in low visibility. We noted the empty flagstaff hole—the flag had been removed, spattered with oil, water, and blood, by two Arizona survivors in the aftermath of the attack. An orange buoy marking the stern bobbed only a few feet above our heads.

  I separated from the others and swam on the surface back under the Memorial to a place where the twisted steel is only a few feet underwater. Waves slapped the concrete supports that straddle the ship; there was a steady staccato of splashing from a light chop stirred by the northeasterly breeze. I let the regulator fall from my mouth and breathed fresh air as the waters parted around me. Again, there was that pungent odor of fuel oil mixed with sea salt. I ran my fingers over the mask strap on the back of my head, and noted a slightly viscous feeling to my hair.

  Standing on the tips of my fins in chest-deep water and leaning against the jagged remains of a bulkhead that used to be part of the ship’s galley, I heard voices in the Memorial. I imagined 1,177 young men exchanging jokes, flexing their muscles, feeling immortal at 8 A.M. on a sunny Hawaiian morning. Ten minutes later, they were consumed in an inferno, transformed instantly into the stuff of history.

  The latest visitors from the tour boat are orienting themselves to the spectacle of rusted metal stretching below them. From my vantage point in the shadow of the white arching Memorial, I observed them strolling along the promenade over my head, but I was visible only from a few points on the walkway. A child looking through the railing at knee height spied me and tried to convince his mother he saw a man amidst the tangle of wreckage in the water beneath them. She knew better and, never glancing in my direction, explained away another figment of
her son’s overactive imagination. Yellow and purple flower leis, tossed onto the ship by a group of Japanese, floated by me in the current, their brilliant colors only slightly subdued by the effects of the oily water.

  During those first few weeks we dived the USS Arizona, I tried hard to see it as just a job. We were going to measure and photo-document the largest object ever mapped underwater—three times the size of the Statue of Liberty—nothing but twisted metal and the unfeeling remains of a long-ago tragedy.

  We made dive after dive. I sent mapping teams and photo teams around the ship, setting reference points, running our mapping line (#18 braided cave-diving line—a habit from my misspent youth). Gradually, we figured out what worked in mapping and photographing a 608-foot-long battleship on the bottom of a murky harbor. Our strategy was to run nylon strings down the deck, carefully mark them in ten-foot increments, and send team after team of Park Service and Navy divers to measure distances from the known lines to features of the ship.

  The lines had previously been marked with numbered clothespins by the project archeologists and illustrators, and miniature versions of them plotted on graph paper. Tape measures stretched between any two known points on the line and any object of interest on the ship formed a triangle. Reduced in scale, the taped distances are transferred to our base map, where they accurately reflect the location of the object in the real world. We made thousands of ephemeral triangles that lasted but a few seconds, two sides of measuring tape and one side of string. A combination of fifth-grade geometry, several hundred clothespins, and almost a half mile of string made up our technological portfolio.

  We worked out the planimetric or bird’s-eye view with variations of the system we had perfected at Isle Royale. But we ran into additional problems with the Arizona on the elevations or profile views. In a word, it was curves—steep curves in low visibility. I had our divers drape our white lines over the vessel at ten points approximately sixty feet apart. We mapped the relation of all the straight lines to each other—then using our mystic triangles, mapped in all the features within these areas on each side of the hull as if they were separate flat panels.

  Larry Nordby, who was in charge of the elevations, came up to me as the process started and pointed out an “issue,” as he called it.

  “Dan.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Uh, I should point out that the ship varies in beam, or width, from about four inches at the stem, to one-hundred-four feet.” That means from an imaginary straight line running parallel to the centerline axis of the ship, the hull varied from two inches to fifty-two feet deep on each side.

  “So?”

  “Well . . . , ” He had crossed his arms in front of him and was snorting his exhalations through his nose; a sure sign of trouble. “If we map all the flat panels between the string accurately, you do understand that we are going to end up with a six-hundred-eight-foot ship that will scale out more than six-hundred-twenty feet long.”

  After a long pause, where I cogitated his meaning, the implications of what he was saying started to sink in . . . along with the embarrassment. Of course! Damn! In low visibility we were not going to be able to compensate for the ship’s very sheer lines. Welcome to another “Hail Mary” moment.

  Nordby smiled and added, “Just poking ya, boss, it’s a problem but I can fix it. A little trigonometry, a little fudging, we won’t have an error factor more than a few inches in each panel—and it won’t be cumulative.” Always, always recruit people smarter than you!

  The mapping progressed beautifully. Nordby concentrated on the port elevation and provided oversight to Mark Senning, a ranger from the park who supervised work on the starboard. Jerry Livingston supervised the plan view but spent as much time assimilating the results of the other teams—he would be responsible for the final rendering of all the drawings. Dave McLean, Chief Ranger from Lake Mead and diving officer from the Western Region, served as project dive officer and liaison with the Navy. I found that, even given a cadre of archeologists made up of diving instructors, it was a great advantage to have a person who could concentrate on dive safety without being distracted by the scientific goals.

  The drawings coming together in the anteroom of the Memorial captivated visitors. Rather than avoid the time-sink involved in satisfying their curiosity, Cummins and I decided the public deserved to have their myriad questions answered. They, after all, were paying for the work with their taxes. So, we had each participant take a shift during the day playing host and interpreter to the visitors. The people were thrilled with the courtesy shown them, and things were going generally well. I started to relax.

  There was only one other component of the project that I needed to tend to; the acquisition of video-imaging of the ship underwater. As I started to come down from the panic of uncertainty about being able to accomplish the job, I noticed that my attempts at distancing from the emotional load of the Arizona started to weaken. The place was starting to get to me. The thing that finally did it was the video footage.

  In 1983, they had just begun coming out with the home color video cameras, and several months later some enterprising folks in California had designed an underwater housing for them. I chose one mounted in a big fat housing, which handled quite well underwater. The housing even had room for a three-inch color monitor that gave me instant feedback of what was being recorded on the VHS tape.

  I loved the practicality of this new self-contained system. No umbilicals to the surface, no one yelling into the coms unit in my helmet: “Pan right, twenty degrees left, come in closer here.” I could see it all real-time on the monitor and, best of all, use an ordinary scuba mask, not the neck-crunching, massive Plexiglas and iron helmets that were our weapons of choice for videotape operations at Isle Royale and the reservoir inundation study.

  I started focusing on the things that I thought might interest people—poignant things. Poignant, that is, to people who weren’t here doing a job. True, 1,177 men had died here, and the remains of over a thousand men were intermingled with the silt. But I was determined not to let that distract me from a job that demanded all my attention. In a sense, I tried to treat it like body recoveries and keep my distance. This all had happened a long time ago. I had a job to do; keep my distance.

  Slow pan of the fourteen-inch gun muzzles, portholes with the blackout covers shut, forks and knives in the galley, firehoses; yeah, that’ll make good footage—melted couplings where the survivors had made futile efforts to . . . Lord, this place must have been hell: keep my distance.

  I took the camera to the surface and handed up the housing. Before changing tanks I toweled down the Plexiglas back of the housing, opened it, and removed the first color video ever shot on the ship. Gary Cummins had placated the media by allowing one representative of all the stations to dub the tape onto a broadcast-quality recorder and share it with the others.

  I was soon back down on another dive. Returning an hour and a half later, I was surprised to find news cameramen still there—I had already given them a twenty-minute cassette of tape. “Anything wrong with that first tape, Gary?”

  Gary said under his breath, “Wrong? Hell no. These guys viewed the first stuff and want to dub every damn inch of tape we bring back.” So I got carried away for a while. That big clumsy rig on the surface was incredibly easy to pan underwater and as long as I kept moving slowly and surely, the harbor water acted like a giant fluid tripod—none of the jumpy, jerky moves you saw in home video footage.

  I felt good by the end of the day. We had obtained decent video documentation, and we were getting excellent measurements with good closure. After shampooing as much of the oil out of my hair as I could, I hopscotched over the roaches at the Pagoda Hotel to fall exhausted into bed beside a very pregnant Barbara Lenihan.

  “Switch on the TV, let’s see if they used any of that videotape.”

  The screen came to life just as an anchorwoman with a solemn expression finished her lead-in discussing what they were about
to show.

  “Wow,” Barb said, “I didn’t think it would look so good.”

  For the next four minutes, an enormously long time for a news-cast, I watched the footage I had shot earlier that day. Beautifully edited, it was a moving montage of twisted steel, eerie hatch openings, ghostly portholes all in vivid contrast to the colorful fish swimming by. They finished with an oil globule I had filmed, working its way slowly to the surface, and ended with a cutaway shot from the Memorial, where the oil burst into a rainbow slick and the camera panned over the names of those killed on the ship, the American flag fluttering above, and Honolulu in the background. The newswoman said simply, “All of us in Hawaii thank the National Park Service for sharing these images with us.”

  The ship was never the same for me again. As silly as it might sound, this was the one place, in my motel room, lying next to my wife, that my defenses were down. The images were absolutely haunting. For the next two weeks we repeated the ritual of handing over our new footage, and all the Honolulu stations played it religiously every night. I could flick from one channel to the other and review footage I shot that day and was too tired to review at the Memorial before coming back to the motel.

  It is a most curious thing that television, the “cool medium” Marshall McLuhan and others have argued distances people from reality, had this effect. It was that very medium that provided me with an oddly personal connection to what I had seen firsthand for weeks.

  As time went by, my connection with the ship increased. My attempts at keeping a distance from the carnage in the forced intimacy of the underwater environment was doomed from the start—but I’m glad it happened early. It would have been a shame to have made hundreds of dives on the Arizona and never really have been there. I increasingly came to terms with the ship and its history over the years. We understand each other; I even found myself talking to the young men, the thousand or so still there, through the portholes—never in words but in feelings.