Adventures of a Sea Hunter: In Search of Famous Shipwrecks

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.

USS UTAH

On the opposite shore of Ford Island, off Battleship Row, lie the remains of USS Utah, sunk on December 7 and, like Arizona, never raised after the battle. Unlike Arizona, Utah is rarely visited, and the memorial to the ship and her dead is in a non-public area on the island’s shore.

^{The remains of USS Utah, sunk at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Photo by Gary Cummins, USS Arizona Memorial/National Park Service}

Lenihan, Larry Murphy, Jerry Livingston and Larry Nordby had made a number of dives on Utah, and in the summer of 1988, took me on my first and only dive there. Commissioned as battleship 88–31, Utah, by the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, was serving as a target ship: aerial bombers practiced by dropping dummy bombs on her decks. For protection, the decks were covered by thick timbers. They were no protection on December 7.

Japanese planners had ordered their pilots to ignore Utah, but despite this, two torpedo bombers skimmed along the surface of the water and launched their weapons. Ensign Tom Anderson was running on the deck to sound the alarm when the first torpedo struck the port side, “staggering the ship.” A geyser of water shot up the side and came down on him. Picking himself up, Anderson reached the alarm gong and pulled it. Utah continued to list to port as the second torpedo detonated. Captain James Steele was ashore, and Lieutenant Commander Solomon S. Isquith was in command. As Utah started to go down, Isquith gave the order to abandon ship over the starboard side, so that the capsizing hulk would not roll over on top of them. Eleven minutes after the first torpedo hit, Utah sank.

Utah’s crew had more chances to escape than the men on Arizona, but it was often a harrowing, near thing. Seaman 2nd Class James Oberto started to climb through a hatch as “an alarming amount of seawater came cascading in the hatch opening just above our heads. We started to climb in single file to the second deck. Compounding our situation were the tons of water pouring in on use from the open portholes on the port side. We were standing in water nearly to our knees.” Oberto made it to the deck, as did Radioman 3rd Class Clarence W Durham. But as Durham climbed out, he looked back and saw that the steel “battle bar” grates had broken free and blocked off the escape route of some of the engine room crew. “I will never forget the faces of those men trapped in the Engine Room. I knew there was no way I could lift those steel grates and I also knew at that point that my chances were very slim of getting out of there myself.” Durham made it out as Utah rolled. He slid down the “rough barnacle- encrusted steel hull,” ripping himself open.

One of the trapped men, Fireman 2nd Class John Vaessen, got through a battle grate just before it slammed shut, trapping his shipmate Joe Barta. As the ship capsized, Vaessen said, “Batteries began exploding. I was hit with deck plates, fire extinguishers, etc.” Climbing up into the bilge, once at the bottom of the hull and now exposed to the air, he “could hear the superstructure break and the water would rush closer.” Taking a wrench, he beat against the hull to call for help. “I got an answer then silence, then rat-a-tat-tat. I thought that was a pneumatic tool. It was strafing.” Japanese planes, firing at men in the water and across the hull of the overturned battleship, were claiming more lives. Vaessen’s rescuers did not give up and used a blowtorch to cut open the hull and pulled him out of the steel tomb. But fifty-eight of his shipmates did not make it, including Chief Water Tender Peter Tomich, who stayed at his post to shut down the boilers and prevent an explosion. Tomich’s sacrifice so that others might live was recognized by the posthumous award of the Medal of Honor. He still lies inside Utah with most of the ship’s dead.

I think about those men inside the hulk as we motor towards the ship. After the battle, salvage crews tried to right the hull and refloat Utah, but she could not be freed. Abandoned, the ship rests on her port side, festooned with salvage cables; some of the starboard air castle and some of the forward superstructure rise out of the water. We approach the exposed rusting decks and roll out of our boat into the water. Larry Murphy leads me past open hatches to the armored top of the No. 2 turret. Although the battleship’s original guns had been removed when she was converted into a target ship in 1931, the turrets remained. In 1940, the Navy installed new 5-inch/25 caliber antiaircraft guns atop the turrets, part of a new battery that Utah was to test. Dan and Larry point them out to me as a reminder from our predive briefing that, ironically, Utah, with her new guns, was perhaps one of the best equipped ships at Pearl Harbor that morning to fight back, had she not been mistakenly hit and sunk so early in the attack.

The remainder of this summer at Pearl Harbor is spent searching, without success, for crashed Japanese aircraft and the deeply submerged remains of the Japanese midget submarine. Built to be a stealth weapon, the sub remains hidden, even after a highly publicized search by our colleague Bob Ballard in November 2000. But after he leaves, the sub is found intact (just as Murphy’s 1988 side-scan sonar image showed it) by a hardworking team from the University of Hawaii’s Undersea Research Lab. The sub’s two-man crew presumably rests inside, reminding us that like Arizona and Utah, these lost ships are more than historic monuments. They are war graves.

Working at Pearl Harbor, which is steeped with the emotionally charged memories of that day of infamy, had a deep impact on me, an archeologist who hitherto had dealt with a more distant past. The tragedy of the attack and the sunken ships and the memorials reminded me that humanity is at core of what I do — archeology is far more than a scientific reappraisal or a recovery of relics. Lost ships, historic sites and sacred places like memorials are mirrors in which we examine ourselves. Human weakness, human arrogance, heroism, sacrifice and perseverance dominate the story of the Pearl Harbor attack. Diving on Arizona and Utah, which had sunk in a handful of minutes as their crews were propelled from peace to war, and from the here and now to eternity, was a potent reminder of the human cost when nations collide.

CHAPTER THREE SUNK BY THE ATOMIC BOMB

AT BIKINI ATOLL

We’ve been flying for hours over an empty ocean, far out in the middle of the Pacific. Now, the plane’s slow turn signals that we are approaching our destination. Leaning over to look out the small windows in the crowded cabin, we all scan the horizon. The dark sea is giving way to the greenish-tinged hues of shallow water. In the midst of these sparkling waters, the white sand of islands appears. A chain of islands, like pearls on a string, mark the top of a volcano’s rim, now submerged. The shallows of the atoll merge into darker water inside the ring, the drowned maw of the volcano, that now forms a deep lagoon.