Uss Arizona : The Enduring Legacy of a Battleship (9783981598452) by Bauernfeind Ingo

Author:Bauernfeind, Ingo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / World War II
Publisher: Casemate Pub & Book Dist Llc
Published: 2018-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

The massive 14-inch barrels of gun turret No. 1. When NPS archaeologists first dove the Arizona in the 1980s they were surprised that this turret was still in place. Gun turrets No. 3 and No. 4 were completely removed and converted into coastal artillery batteries, while only the barrels of No. 2 were removed, with the turret itself still in place at the wreck site.

I was first shown the ship in 1982 by Gary Cummins, the memorial superintendent. Gary was deeply wedded to historic preservation and had ulterior motives for serving as my rubber-finned tour guide. He found himself the steward of a major American shrine he couldn’t see–and he wanted help. As chief of the National Park Service’s underwater archaeology team, I was supposed to provide such help to park managers.

Although a large white memorial spans the site, it doesn’t touch the ship the only knowledge its builders needed was the ship’s footprint on the bottom so they could avoid it. There were as-built plans of the ship but no maps or renderings of it since the attack. The only photographs were of the ship under way, of it being destroyed, and a few of the 1943 salvage efforts. Postcards sold in the visitor center provided a modern aerial perspective of the ship with the memorial straddling it, but those too were deceiving. The postcards gave you a good sense of the lay of the wreck and its size. But gaping round holes left in the deck where the turrets had been salvaged reinforced common belief that the ship’s 14-inch guns had all been moved to shore batteries during the war. There was a stunning lack of facts about the remains of the vessel, which would have been unthinkable if the Arizona were on land.

Biography

Daniel J. Lenihan has dived as a NPS underwater archaeologist since 1972. He founded a team of diving ranger/archaeologists in 1976 that in 1980 became known as the Submerged Cultural Resources Unit (SCRU). In 2000, when he retired, the team was renamed the Submerged Resources Center (SRC). Dan is the author of Submerged: Adventures of America’s Most Elite Underwater Archaeology Team, in which he describes his many years as a Florida cave diver and chief of SCRU. He co-authored three novels with actor Gene Hackman.

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