The USS Arizona: a ship, her crew, and the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor
Written: Jul 27 '06 (Updated Oct 07 '06)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Overall, a fascinating, informative read, featuring the tales of several of the ship's survivors.
Cons: The wrong ship is pictured on the book's cover and there's a few errors inside.
The Bottom Line: Despite some small errors, this remains a fascinating story of a famous ship, the USS Arizona, and her crew. The events before, during and after Pearl Harbor are well-told.
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| Don_Krider's Full Review: |
When the dean of TV journalists, Walter Cronkite, recommends a book, I pay attention.
When I saw that Cronkite had praised The USS Arizona: The Ship, The Men, The Pearl Harbor Attack, And The Symbol That Aroused America by Joy Waldron Jasper, James P. Delgado and Jim Adams, it sold me on buying the book.
I haven't been disappointed. What Cronkite called "a memorable book about ground zero on the day America entered World War II" truly is a fascinating book about a legendary ship, about the men who served on her, and about an event that brought the United States into World War II.
There are a couple of problems with the book, but relatively minor ones, in my opinion.
One problem with the book is that the cover of the paperback edition --- viewable at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/031299351X/ref=nosim/104-4541763-6460736?n=283155 --- features a photo of a battleship with foreward dual gun turrets. That photo is not of the USS Arizona, which was built, launched and sunk with four triple gun turrets, not double gun mounts (an amazing error, I might add).
Another repeated error is the incorrect identification of officers' ranks in the book, such as Kentucky-born Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, who is variously described as a rear admiral, a full admiral and as a fleet admiral. The authors also refer to Lieutenant-Commander Samuel Fuqua as a first lieutenant at one point (not nice to misidentify a man who was awarded the Medal of Honor).
Still, those are relatively minor complaints, and I find the details presented in the book to be very factual otherwise. As a presentation of history (with small errors like those mentioned), this is fine reading, detailed and informative.
The book has received some mixed reviews, but I agree with newsman Walter Cronkite, author Clive Cussler, Publisher's Weekly and The Washington Post in their praise for this volume. I found the book to be very well-written, even if there is little new information in it.
The interviews with 10 survivors of the sinking of the USS Arizona add to the emotional impact of the story here, as they relate the events that happened to these aging veterans when they were once young men. The authors should be applauded for seeking these men out (living USS Arizona survivors, sadly, are very few now).
The authors
The book's authors know their subject and tell it well in "The USS Arizona.
Joy Waldron Jasper is an investigative reporter and a magazine feature writer by trade.
James P. Delgado was executive director of the Vancouver Maritime Museum when this book was published. He is a professional underwater archaeologist and historian who has dived on the wrecks of U. S. and Japanese warships.
Jim Adams had a career in the U. S. Marine Corps. He later joined the National Park Service and became cultural resources manager for the USS Arizona Memorial. His father was Val Adams, a Navy radioman in a watch tower in Pearl Harbor's shipyard who witnessed the attack and saw the Arizona explode (Val Adams later wrote for The New York Times and The New York Daily News and his best friend, radioman Willie Wilson, died on board the Arizona).
This book
Two versions of the hardcover edition of USS Arizona (one in small print and one in large print) were published in 2001 in time for the 60th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. In 2003, the book appeared in a normal-sized paperback from the St. Martin's Press.
I'm reviewing the 10th printing of that paperback edition, purchased in June from Amazon.Com with a list price of $6.99 (I'm old enough to remember when paperbacks were less than $1 new, so the price of books continues to amaze me).
The paperback edition is 269-plus pages in length.
Featured among the 16 pages of black-and-white photographs of the USS Arizona are shots of her launching at the Brooklyn, New York, Navy Yard in 1915, on gunnery practice in 1917, of the inferno following the explosion of her ammunition magazines in 1941, and shots of her remains at Pearl Harbor where she rests as a much-visited memorial today.
There are also photos of her Navy and Marine crew drilling on deck and the gunnery crew at work, of the ship sailing up the East River in New York and beneath the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, and of her catapult-launched observation seaplane being lifted onto her rear deck by the ship's crane.
Of course, there's also a number of shots from the Pearl Harbor attack, all of which help tell the story of the USS Arizona.
The book also has separate listings for the 1,177 Arizona crewman killed in the attack and for more than 300 Arizona survivors of the attack, complete with the states the men came from (the nation had 48 states at the time, and it would appear that almost every state had someone who died or who was wounded on the ship, including several from my home state of Kentucky).
The book also lists every Japanese ship sunk in World War II and lists the survivors' who have since passed away who have had their final remains placed back on the ship, where most of the men killed in the attack remain entombed to this very day. The book has a bibliography and a through index as well.
The subject
I've read dozens of books on the events of Sunday, December 7, 1941, when the armed forces of the Japanese Empire attacked the sleeping U. S. fleet, with eight battleships at anchor, at Pearl Harbor. Besides the fleet, they attacked Army military barracks and destroyed hundreds of U. S. planes on the ground.
The attack happened around 8 a.m. in the morning. As noted in The USS Arizona, various Navy witnesses say a single 1,760-pound bomb passed through the ship's teakwood deck between the ship's bow turrets setting off a hundred tons of ammunition in the ship's magazines (the place where ammunition and black powder were stored) between 8:05 a.m. and 8:20 a.m.
The Japanese, who were attacking Allied forces elsewhere at the same time and in the days to follow, planned a massive strike that would cripple the U. S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. They hoped to catch U. S. aircraft carriers, but found none were in port (the carrier USS Enterprise was at sea, but some of her aircraft did fly into Pearl Harbor during the attack where they were attacked by both Japanese aircraft and nervous U. S. gunners (some were the victims of "friendly fire").
The failure to destroy U. S. carriers, not destroying U. S. fuel reserves and leaving the dry dock operational (able to repair damaged ships) were major failures of the Japanese attack.
The USS Arizona
The authors take a close-look at the mighty battleship. Battleships were a unique breed and none are currently in the U. S. fleet.
All Navy combat vessels are correctly called "warships," but today's news media and the public at large often mistakenly refer to all Navy vessels as "battleships" (terms I've seen the national media convey in recent years upon the aircraft carrier USS America and the destroyer USS Cole).
Battleships, like carriers, PT boats, destroyers, and assorted other categories of Navy vessels, should be referred to by the generic term of "warships," not as "battleships" since "battleship" is specific to a certain type of "warship" (my rant for the day).
The authors of USS Arizona describe a time less than a century ago when capital ships of the world "could not cross the international dateline, so American military vessels steamed west close to the dateline, turned south and crossed the equator" to hold an ancient sea-going ritual which in 1940 involved veteran sailors celebrating the equator crossing by dunking new sailors in water and washing their hair with raw eggs.
Such U. S. Navy traditions sound weird, but they give the men on a ship a common bond, the authors' explain. A ship (referred to as "she" since Roman times, according to the authors) is a home away from home for its crew. A military ship survives only with a well-trained crew who are bonded together like brothers, depending on one another in order to survive.
Brothers on board
In the case of the USS Arizona, the ship's crew on December 7, 1941, included 37 different sets of actual brothers. There was one set of twins among the brothers.
Among the brothers, 34 families had two sons on the ship. Three families had three sons on the ship. Most died in the attack, but in some cases one brother among a pair of brothers or one brother out of a set of three brothers survived the attack.
The 1,177 men killed on the Arizona were the first of more than 408,000 Americans killed in the four years of U. S. involvement in World War II; more than 670,000 Americans were wounded in the war (source: http://members.aol.com/usregistry/allwars.htm).
The Navy has long frowned on siblings or father-son combinations on ships, but the practice has still been allowed in the service (the five Sullivan brothers killed when the USS Juneau went down later in the war is another instance of multiple family members dying in a single naval event).
According to the U. S. Navy --- http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq72-5.htm --- neither Congress nor the president "has ever issued any executive order forbidding assignment of family members to the same ship/unit." So this could happen again.
The fighting ship
The authors' tell of a Navy with only men allowed to serve on warships. African-Americans were allowed to do little more than be cooks and laundry-men on board ships at the time.
Because of their firepower and thick armor-plating, they were also desired assignments in the Navy. One crewman is quoted as writing his mother from the USS Arizona in 1940:
"Well, mother, a battleship is about as safe a vessel as you can find in a fleet, so you don't have to worry about my well-being!"
The USS Arizona (the "USS" means "United States Ship") was authorized to be built by Congress in 1913. World War I broke out in 1914. The ship was "officially" completed in June of 1915, according to the authors, who note that when she was christened with a bottle of champagne and slid down the ways at the Brooklyn Navy Yard she was actually not yet finished.
She was the third U. S. Navy ship to carry the name "Arizona" during the Navy's history. U. S. battleships were named after states while U. S. cruisers were named after cities. The USS Arizona's designation was BB-39 (the "BB" for battleship) and she was commissioned as a Pennsylvania-class of battleship in October of 1916.
Her first station after her shake-down cruise was Norfolk, Virginia. She was launched as a ship that was a steel-hulled 608-feet long and a maximum width of 97 feet.
The USS Arizona had four huge gun turrets (two in front and two in back), angled at 15 degrees for an effective firing range of 10 miles. Those 12 14-inch/45-caliber guns were backed up by the additional firepower on the ship provided by 22 5-inch/51-caliber guns, four 3-inch/50-caliber guns, and two 21-inch submerged torpedo tubes.
Additional anti-aircraft guns were, sadly, scheduled to be installed in 1942, but the ship had been sunk by that time.
If those weapons didn't scare off an enemy, she was protected by up to 18 inches of armor at her thickest point (some areas had more or less protection). With new watertight compartments, she was considered almost unsinkable (unfortunately, most of the U. S. battleships at Pearl Harbor had their watertight doors open in case of an inspection).
The ship was modernized in 1931 with "torpedo bulges" on her sides to protect against torpedo attacks, increasing the ship's beam by another 106 feet. Her engines were modernized that year and she was given new boilers, producing 33,375 horsepower to the ship's four propeller shafts. This produced a maximum speed of 21 knots.
The authors' tell of a ship that once carried President Hoover on cruises. For a time in 1921, she was the flagship of the U. S. Atlantic Fleet. Moved from the Atlantic Fleet to the Pacific Fleet in 1921, the USS Arizona made numerous foreign port calls during her career, including France and Turkey, to show the flag.
The USS Arizona was stationed in Oahu at Pearl Harbor in June of 1940, as fears of war with Japan gripped the United States government. Japan had invaded China in the 1930s (sinking the gunboat USS Panay in Chinese waters in 1937) and war was anticipated years before the Japanese attack in 1941.
Washington already had its hands full in the Atlantic, as well, with three U. S. destroyers being torpedoed in 1940-41 in an undeclared shooting war with German U-boats as American ships escorted supply conveys to England and Russia.
The crew
In interviews with the USS Arizona's survivors, the authors' create a fresh portrait of the mighty ship.
One interview with a man who was only 18 when he boarded the huge ship in 1940, James Lawson, has the man going up the ship's gangplank and forgetting to salute:
"I was just overwhelmed by the size of it," the sailor says years later, then noting that the ship's officer of the deck was less than overwhelmed at having to remind the new crewman to salute and ask permission to come aboard.
They describe a crew with many young men such as Lawson. Having just come out of The Great Depression with jobs scarce, many young men had enlisted. In Lawson's case, he volunteered 13 days after his 18th birthday because he couldn't get a college scholarship and couldn't find a job.
Through interviews with survivors, the authors' describe the average seaman's day on the ship, from "hard physical work" in hot and cold weather, such as "chipping paint, polishing brass, airing mattresses, whatever the boatswain's mate ordered."
The ship was steel-hulled, but the deck was made of teakwood, which required the sailors to "swab the deck."
For penance, sailors were made to do what's called "holystoning the deck," which involves using holystones (in modern times, these were bricks with holes in the center of them) with a broom handle stuck through the hole in the brick. After sailors tossed sand on the deck and flooded a space on the deck:
"The holystoners pushed the bricks over the teakwood until the decks glistened..."
Such tales are a wonder to behold. Most military histories tell you who shot at whom, but in The USS Arizona the authors reveal many such stories from the average day of young sailors. The tale of one of the ship's cook about his many duties feeding more than a thousand men three square meals a day is quite interesting.
Many members of the crew had families in Hawaii and a large number had shore leave the weekend Pearl Harbor was attacked, but most of the Arizona's crew had returned to the ship by midnite of the night before the attack. About 50 crewmen are believed to still have been onshore during the attack.
Enemy sightings
What I found very interesting were the tales of survivors in the book about cruises in 1941 around the Hawaiian islands in the months before the Japanese attack. They tell of numerous "contacts" with Japanese submarines monitoring the fleet's movements.
On the Arizona's last cruise on December 5, 1941, two days before the attack, the authors tell us:
"In a bold display of confidence, the Japanese submarines followed the fleet in close quarters around the Hawaiian Islands, coming dangerously near the anchorage of Lahaina Roads off the island of Maui..."
As one survivor relates to the authors:
"...the general quarters alarm went off - 'Man your battle stations!' The picket submarines and picket destroyers had detected a bunch of sonar contacts. Every man on board knew that meant Japanese submarines."
After deciding the submarines were not a threat, the fleet relaxed and returned to Pearl Harbor for the weekend on December 5th.
Those little events have been largely ignored by history and it's that level of detail that makes The USS Arizona a fascinating read.
Japan
The authors describe in detail the Japanese Empire, as well, and its "reasons" for a first-strike against the U. S. Navy at Pearl Harbor on Sunday, December 7, 1941 --- that her huge military machine had only a six-month supply of fuel remaining and wished to invade Southeast Asia to seize fuel oil supplies, a move the U. S. was expected to oppose with military force.
Solution: "Sink the American fleet!" at Pearl Harbor.
The authors note that a British author, Hector Bywater, had published The Great Pacific War in 1925 and had envisioned a simultaneous attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor, Guam and the Philippines, 16 years before Japanese did just that.
They detail and note Japanese interest in the 1932 U. S. Navy "war games" in which a successful "sneak attack" by aircraft against the fleet at Pearl Harbor was practiced by U. S. forces. Though Admiral H. E. Yarnell's plan proved successful in the war games, Washington was unimpressed, saying "it is doubtful" such an attack could ever be carried out in reality! In Japan, the war games were studied seriously.
Day of infamy
The authors take us to the waters off Hawaii on December 7, 1941, as six Japanese aircraft carriers, unopposed and undetected, launch the first of two waves of aircraft against the U. S. forces at Pearl Harbor.
They take us through early morning errors. Radar reports of large numbers of Japanese aircraft are ignored by officers who believe the targets are just 12 U. S. B-17 Bombers flying in from the U. S. west coast. A U. S. destroyer's report of sinking of a Japanese submarine outside the harbor's entrance is written off as "highly unlikely."
Just before 8 a.m., all hell breaks lose. The authors in a well-written, very long report tell of the skies over Pearl Harbor filling with enemy aircraft. Torpedoes from Japanese planes and midget submarines in the harbor strike home. Explosions everywhere. High altitude bombers dropping bombs on anchored ships and parked aircraft. Japanese fighter planes strafing men on ships, on shore and in the water.
It's a tale of burning fuel on the waters of Pearl Harbor dived into by men from sinking ships who try to swim to Ford Island while being machine-gunned by Japanese planes. Of sleeping men awakened in a most violent way. Of men trapped on the battleship USS Oklahoma as she capsizes.
But it is mostly a tale of the agony witnessed by the USS Arizona. She was hit the hardest.
The survivors tell the authors of their disbelief at the initial attack. They thought Army trucks on shore loaded with explosives had exploded, or that this was a surprise military drill, or a thousand other thoughts about anything other than what was happening. But trained men soon awaken to reality as an alarm sounds and the boatswain shouts:
"This is no drill! This is no drill! General Quarters! We're Under Attack! This is no drill..."
Not long after the attack began, the authors tell us:
"...Then a huge shockwave shook the aircraft overhead and the harbor below, as a pillar of smoke and fire climbed into the sky and pieces of debris - and bodies - rained over Battleship Row and Ford Island. The USS Arizona had exploded..."
The explosion lifted the ship out of the water and broke the ship's back, and she began to sink. One of her turrets (held in place by its tonnage of weight) had been blown completely off the ship. Among the 1,177 men who died on the USS Arizona were her captain, Franklin Van Valkenburgh, and Rear Admiral Isaac Kidd, both killed when a bomb hit the ship's bridge.
On board the flaming wreckage of a once-proud Navy ship, crewmen tried to contemplate what had just happened, and then they tried to survive.
The survivors tell of being strafed on deck as they tried to escape enemy bombs. One survivor remembers seeing the faces of Japanese pilots --- "You could see their faces. It looked like they were laughing." The cruelty of war is apparent.
Crewmen awarded the Medal of Honor
You'll encounter several men on the USS Arizona who were awarded the Medal of Honor, including Admiral Isaac Kidd from Cleveland, Ohio, whose flagship as commander of Battleship Division One was the Arizona, who tried to direct the defense of the fleet from the ship's bridge, only to be killed in action minutes into the battle.
Other recipients you'll meet include the ship's captain, Franklin Van Valkenburgh from Minneapolis, Minnesota, who tried to direct his ship's defense from its bridge, only to die beside Admiral Kidd when a bomb hit the bridge.
And then there's Lieutenant Commander Samuel Fuqua from Laddonia, Missouri, knocked unconscious by the blast that crippled the ship, he awoke and directed the ship's firefighting, under enemy fire, which allowed wounded and burned men to be carried off the ship. The loss of life would have been much worse without him; he refused to be evacuated from the ship until he was sure he had saved all the men that could be saved.
All of their stories are a major plus in this fine book.
Final recommendation
In The USS Arizona: The Ship, The Men, The Pearl Harbor Attack, And The Symbol That Aroused America, you experience the complete life of the battleship, for a warship is a living mother to its crew.
I have seldom read such an inspiring tale. I would rank this with the best book biographies of a ship and her crew that I have ever read (now, if they could just get a photo of the right ship on the paperback's cover and correct some of the misidentified officers' ranks in the book, I'd be totally happy, but I still rank the book as a five-star read none-the-less).
In the book, the authors, all born many years after the ship's sinking, not only tell of the ship's short military life, but they tell you about her creation and about the aftermath of her sinking.
We learn about salvage operations, about the Navy's refusal to remove the dead from the ship (considering them already "buried at sea" in a 1947 decision), about the ship's transformation into a national memorial in the early 1960's, and modern dives by the authors onto what is left of the ship, which is rusting away and collapsing in on itself in modern times, still leaking oil nearly seven decades later.
If you're a history buff or just want an exciting read, this book will fill your reading needs, and non-military families might learn a bit about military routine.
On the web
The Pearl Harbor Survivors Association: http://www.pearlharborsurvivorsonline.org/
A National Geographic article about the ship: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0106/feature5/index.html
A web page for the USS Arizona: http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-a/bb39.htm
A photo gallery of the USS Arizona: http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/events/wwii-pac/pearlhbr/ph-az.htm
Another photo gallery of the USS Arizona: http://www.ibiblio.org/phha/arizona/gallery_PH_fire.html
A massive list of online sources for photos and info on the USS Arizona: http://dizzy.library.arizona.edu/images/USS_Arizona/links.shtml
The stories of the 15 U. S. servicemen awarded the Medal of Honor in the attack on Pearl Harbor are told at: http://www.homeofheroes.com/pearlharbor/pearl_8moh.html
The story of an African-American cook named Dorie Miller on the battleship USS West Virginia, which was also sunk at Pearl Harbor, who manned a machine gun he was never trained to use to defend his ship, which led to him being awarded the Navy Cross for bravery, is at: http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq57-4.htm
Recommended:
Yes
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