Adventures of a Sea Hunter: In Search of Famous Shipwrecks

by James Delgado

  * * *

  On return dives to Isabella in 1994, Mike Montieth and Jerry Ostermiller, the director of the Columbia River Maritime Museum, discovered that more of the wreck had been exposed by shifting sand. So ten years after the first dives, I returned to Astoria with a team of divers from the Underwater Archaeological Society of British Columbia. With more of the hull exposed, we could see that the brig had literally unzipped along its keel, splitting in two as the bow and stern broke apart in the flying surf that battered Isabella. I also found the ship’s rudder post, torn free and broken, the thick fastenings for the rudder shattered by the force of the ship’s stern hitting the bar. We had hoped to find some of the brig’s fur-trade cargo, as the Hudson’s Bay Company archives showed that not everything had been recovered from the wreck in 1830. But the hull was empty of artifacts, and the only tale this shattered wreck could tell was the sad one of just how she had died.

  James Delgado examines the exposed bow of the British four-masted bark Peter Iredale, wrecked near the entrance to the Columbia River in October 1906. Unlike Isabella, whose wreck is shrouded in underwater darkness in the nearby river, Iredale is a visible victim of the “Graveyard of the Pacific.”

  © Dartyl Leniuk Photography

  CHAPTER TWO

  PEARL HARBOR

  DECEMBER 7, 1941: A DAY OF INFAMY

  Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy — the United States was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan… The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. Very many American lives have been lost… Always we will remember the character of the onslaught against us. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” The indignant and stirring words of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as he addressed Congress on December 8, 1941, ring through my mind as my plane crosses the United States. I’m on the way to Pearl Harbor to join a long-standing National Park Service survey of USS Arizona and other ships that lie beneath the waters of that battlefield.

  Being an archeologist thoroughly at home in the mid-nineteenth century, I am surprised by the realization that I’ve worked on more World War II wrecks than any other type of ship. That includes a decade of work for the National Park Service, studying and documenting World War II fortifications and battle sites. Recently, I have been posted to Washington, D.C., as the first maritime historian of the National Park Service, to head up a new program to inventory and assess the nation’s maritime heritage, and the work included dozens of visits to preserved warships and museums.

  I’ve already studied one shipwreck, the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor, for historic landmark status. Now I’m on my way to Pearl Harbor to carry out a similar study of the battle-ravaged Arizona and the nearby USS Utah, both sunk on December 7, 1941. Dan Lenihan and the Submerged Cultural Resources Unit of the National Park Service have invited me to join them to dive at the site of the first action in America’s war in the Pacific. Congress had passed a law making Arizona, still the responsibility of the Navy, a memorial to be jointly administered by the Navy and the National Park Service.

  Most of the initial survey work on Arizona and Utah has been done, but I will dive with the team on both wrecks as part of the historic landmark study. I’ll also be participating in a side-scan sonar survey of the waters outside Pearl Harbor to search for a Japanese midget submarine that was sunk just before the attack commenced, a warning that was not heeded in time. The midget sub sank in deep water and has never been found.

  BATTLESHIP ROW! USS ARIZONA

  Standing on the narrow concrete dock while a group of tourists slowly files into the Arizona Memorial, I look across the waters of Pearl Harbor’s Battleship Row. The battleships are gone, their places marked by white concrete quays that the U.S. Navy has kept painted for more than four decades. The names on the quays are those of the battleships that were moored to each on the morning of December 7, 1941: USS Nevada, USS West Virginia, USS Tennessee, USS Oklahoma and, directly in front of me, USS Arizona. Unlike the other ships, which have only a painted name to mark their passing, Arizona rests in the water below me.

  Around me is a group of other divers drawn from the ranks of the National Park Service and the U.S. Navy, all of us preparing our gear and suiting up to jump into the dark green waters of the harbor. The water is too warm for a wetsuit, but bare skin is no protection against barnacles and rusted steel, so I pull on a pair of Park Service dark green coveralls before strapping on my weight belt, tanks and gear.

  A perspective view of USS Arizona, from the stern. Drowing by by Jerry L. Livingston, courtesy USS Arizona Memorial Association

  After reading dozens of books and poring over files and interviews with men who fought here on that tragic day, I’m ready to explore a ship that precious few have been allowed to visit. Arizona is a war grave, and as many as nine hundred of her crew are interred within the crumbling steel of the battleship. This is sacred ground for Americans, and a potent symbol of a long and terrible war that, for the United States, began here. Only a handful of divers have been allowed to go beneath the surface and explore the ship.

  The large American flag flying over the wreck of Arizona waves lightly in the warm breeze against a bright blue sky. I pause for a second, then turn back to my gear checks and final preparations. With my dive partner on one side, we stride together off the dock, splashing into the murky water and sinking 45 feet to the soft muddy bottom. We can’t see more than a couple of yards ahead as we adjust our buoyancy. Floating gently over the mud, we swim slowly towards the wreck.

  My subconscious registers the looming presence of the hulk before I realize that I see it. Perhaps it is the shadow of the wreck’s mass in the sun-struck water, masked by the silt, but there, suddenly darker and cooler. My heart starts to pound and my breath gets shallow for a second with superstitious fear. This is my first dive on a shipwreck with so many lost souls aboard. I flick on my light and the blue-green hull comes alive with marine life in bright reds, yellows and oranges, some of it the rust that crusts the once pristine steel. As I rise up from the muddy bottom, I encounter my first porthole. It is an empty dark hole that I cannot bring myself to look into. I feel the presence of the ship’s dead, and though I know it is only some primitive level of my subconscious at work, I can’t look in because of the irrational fear that someone inside will look back.

  Not once throughout this dive, nor ever in the dives that follow, do I forget that this ship is a tomb. But the curiosity of the archeologist overcomes the fear, and I look into the next porthole. As my light reaches inside, I see what looks like collapsed furniture and a telephone attached to a rusted bulkhead. This is the cabin of Rear Admiral Isaac Kidd, who died on that long-ago December morning. His body was never found. Salvage crews found Kidd’s ring partly melded to the steel at the top of Arizona’s conning tower, apparently blown there by the force of the blast that sank the ship.

  From here, we rise up to the deck and follow it to the rim of the No. 4 turret. The turret, stripped by U.S. Navy salvagers during the war, is now a large round hole in the heart of the battleship. Half filled with silt, it has been designated as the receptacle for the urns of Arizona’s survivors, who, years after the battle, choose to be cremated and interred with their former shipmates for eternity. It is a powerful statement about the bonds forged by young men in service together, bonds that even the passage of decades and death itself cannot fully sever. I gaze at the first urn placed inside here in March 1984 and pause for a respectful moment of prayer before rising again to the deck. I turn to my right and head for the stern, and there, in water that is only a couple of yards deep, I float on the surface and look down at the empty socket for the jackstaff where Arizona’s flag once flew.

  After the blast that split open Arizona and set her ablaze, the crew abandoned ship. Flooded and sun
k to the bottom, Arizona rested in the soft mud, which gradually, as the next few days passed, yielded to the weight of the massive ship. Ultimately, the decks disappeared beneath the water. Today, they lie just a few feet below the surface and nearly half the hull is buried in the mud. But on the evening of December 7, even as fires blazed forward, the stern was not touched and the ship’s huge American ensign hung off the jackstaff. One of Arizona’s officers, Lieutenant Kleber S. Master son, was ashore during the attack. He returned to assist with first aid and muster the surviving crew members. “There weren’t many,” he later said. “Out of eight-four men in my fire control division, I think there were only five survivors.”

  After being temporarily reassigned to the battleship Maryland, Masterson decided to return to Arizona to take down the flag. “It was the big Sunday ensign flying from the stern, and it was dragging in the water and getting all messed up with oil.” With another Arizona survivor, Ensign Leon Grabowsky, Masterson motored over to the still-burning ship in a launch. Jumping aboard, they found only an eerie silence. “We heard no noises, because there were, of course, no survivors under that little bit of deck we could walk on.” As the sun set, Grabowsky lowered the flag while Masterson gathered up the oily cloth in his arms. They returned to Maryland and handed over the flag to the officer of the deck, who sent it off to be burned. Drifting over the spot where the two officers performed that final ceremonial duty, I think not only of Masterson and Grabowsky but of all the men who died that day.

  Backing up, I drop down to look at the fantail. A buoy chained to the wreck here marks the stern to passing boats. The buoy’s mooring chain drags across the steel hull, back and forth, scraping off corrosion and marine growth. The thick steel letters that spell out the name ARIZONA are bright and shiny, polished by the incessant movement of the chain. They reflect some of the sunlight that drifts down through the water, and for brief moments, the name of the ship blazes as if on fire again. It is an awe-inspiring sight, and I hang there listening to the beat of my heart and the air moving through my regulator.

  Swimming back to the edge of the deck, we follow it along the starboard side, coming up to an open hatch near the No. 3 turret. I hover over it, looking down into the darkness, my light picking up the tangle of debris that blocks it. Then, to my surprise, I see something rising up to meet me. It is a blob of oil, no bigger than a child’s marble. It passes the edge of the hatch and floats to the surface, where it turns into an iridescent slick. Six seconds later, another globule of oil follows it, and I, like so many others who have watched this phenomenon, am struck by the fact that Arizona still bleeds.

  The light-filled warm waters on the shallowly submerged deck give way to darkness as we pass beneath the memorial. I look up through the water and notice visitors staring down, some of them seeing me, others gazing out and a few tossing their offerings of flower leis into the sea. We pause here for a drop over the side, past the empty mount for a 5-inch gun, and drop down to the top of the torpedo blister. The blister, a late addition to the ship’s armored sides, was supposed to protect Arizona from submarine attack by absorbing the impact of a torpedo. The defenses of Pearl Harbor were focused on a submarine attack, not an aerial assault.

  The hatches that line the top of the torpedo blister are open, but what we are looking for should be resting atop the blister. In April 1982, the widow of an Arizona survivor who wished to rest with his shipmates dropped his urn from the memorial onto the wreck. With the decision to place urns in the open well of No. 4 turret, the National Park Service has just received her permission to relocate his urn from the blister. I think I see the urn, but it lies inside a corroded section of hull that cuts deep into my thumb when I try to pull it free. We leave the urn there. It is wedged in too deeply, so this is where it will remain.

  The dropping of that urn and the decision to allow the interment of other survivors inside the hull of Arizona attest to the ongoing emotional pull of the wreck. I am reminded of that as we drift past the overhanging memorial again and look down at the deck, lit brightly by the sun. Combs, sunglasses and camera lens caps lie where they were dropped accidentally. Coins carpet the deck, so many coins, in fact, that the National Park Service sends in snorkeling rangers to collect these offerings to the sea and donates them to charity. But as we swim along, we spot photographs, some weighted down, others waterlogged and moving loose with the swell. They show women whose hair has gone gray or white, some with younger men and women and babies. I wonder for a second, why these are here, and then it hits me. These are wives and sweethearts, now grown old, sharing children and grandchildren with Arizona’s dead.

  We continue on over the remains of the galley. The stubs of the legs of the steam tables, mess tables and the bases of ovens protrude through the mud. Here and there, bright white hexagonal tiles are uncovered as our fins sweep the deck clear of silt. Broken dishes, coffee cups and silverware lie scattered, reminders of a breakfast forever interrupted. The tile on the decks gives way to teak, unblemished and still polished in places. Despite the passage of decades and the onslaught of corrosion, there are places that time has not touched. In addition to the teak decks, we find a porthole with its glass in place, and inside it, the steel blast cover set tight and dogged down in condition “Z” for battle. Between the steel and the glass, the space is only partially flooded with oily water.

  Another moment stopped in time lies on Arizona. Snaked-out lines of fire hose show where some of the crew fought not against the attacking enemy but to save their ship. As thick, choking smoke smothered the decks, men dragged out hoses to deal with the fires caused by the several bombs that hit the ship. Those men were wiped clean off the decks by the final blast that sank Arizona. Seven bombs hit the battleship before the last blow, at least three of them massive 1,750-pound, armor-piercing bombs made from 16-inch naval projectiles taken from the magazines of the Japanese battleship Nagato. Flying high above the harbor, Petty Officer Noburo Kanai, in the rear seat of a Nakajima B5N2 bomber from the carrier Soryu, trained his sights on the stricken Arizona. He released his bomb from 9,800 feet and watched as it spiraled down and struck the battleship’s decks. He yelled “Ataramashita!” (It hit!)

  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 Stratton and his wife at the fiftieth anniversary reunion at Pearl Harbor and sat through an interview as he again recounted his story. At the end, he unbuttoned his shirt to show us his seamed, scarred flesh. His wife, tears in her eyes, told us not only did Arizona still bleed, so too did her husband, who had just undergone yet another operation on his burned skin. As she talked, I thought back to my dive and how I had drifted past the spot where Stratton made his dash for life. Don Stratton’s ordeal makes that spot of deck special, just as all the lives lived and lost on Arizona make the whole ship special.