Transcription
On the morning of December 7th, 1941, eight American battleships are sitting quietly in Pearl Harbor. Within two hours, every one of their stories will change forever. Most people know how the attack ended. Almost nobody knows what happened next. Some of these ships never left Pearl Harbor. Others came back from the bottom of the harbor to fight again. One survived two atomic bombs. Another vanished into the Pacific forever. By the end of this video, you will know what really happened to every battleship at Pearl Harbor.
But before we keep going, this channel is closing in on 2 million total views. And I genuinely want to say thank you to everyone watching. Where in the world are you watching this from? And does anyone here have a personal connection to Pearl Harbor? A family member who served there, someone who's visited, anything at all? Drop it in the comments.
Let's start with the one everyone already knows. The USS Arizona was moored on battleship row that Sunday morning. A bomb tore through her deck and detonated the forward magazine. The explosion was catastrophic. The Arizona sank in 9 minutes. 1,177 men died. She was never raised, too damaged, left exactly where she sank as a grave for the men still inside. Still leaking oil today, more than 80 years later. People call it the tears of the Arizona.
Most people know that story. Here's the one they don't. Right next to the Arizona sits another battleship, the USS Utah. Nobody talks about the Utah. By 1941, the Utah had actually been stripped of its main guns years earlier and reclassified as a training ship moored in a berth that aircraft carriers usually used. Japanese commanders had specifically ordered their pilots not to waste torpedoes on her. Some pilots either misidentified her or ignored the order. Two torpedoes tore into her hull. The Utah capsized in about 12 minutes. 58 men were trapped inside. Attempts were made to right the Utah using the same cable winch system that worked on another battleship we're about to get to. It failed. The Utah slid instead of rolling upright, and the effort was abandoned. The battleship is still there today, lying on its side in the harbor, just a few hundred yards from the Arizona Memorial. Almost nobody visits it. There's a small memorial on the shore. And that's it. Same harbor, same day. A fraction of the visitors.
Now, here's the one that genuinely surprises people. The USS Oklahoma also capsized that morning, hit by at least five torpedoes in the space of minutes. 429 men died. And unlike the Arizona, the Navy actually did raise the Oklahoma. It took nearly 2 years. Divers worked in pitch black water for months, cutting away wreckage and patching thousands of holes by feel alone, while electric winches anchored to the harbor floor slowly dragged the hull upright inch by inch over about 3 months. It remains one of the largest ship salvage operations ever attempted. By November 1943, the Oklahoma was floating again.
And then, here's the twist. The Oklahoma was too damaged to ever fight again. The Navy decommissioned it, stripped it of guns and superstructure, and in December 1946, sold what was left for scrap. In May 1947, two tugboats began towing the hulk from Pearl Harbor toward a breaker's yard in San Francisco Bay. Roughly 500 miles into the journey, a storm hit. The Oklahoma began listing hard and started dragging both tugboats backward with it. Both crews had to release their tow cables to save their own ships. The Oklahoma sank in open ocean. Its exact resting place has never been found. A battleship that survived Pearl Harbor, got raised from the dead, and still never made it to the scrapyard.
So, three of these battleships never really left Pearl Harbor or the Pacific at all. But the other five, that's where the story gets strange.
The USS West Virginia took two bombs and at least seven torpedoes and sank upright at its mooring. 106 crew members died. One of the men on the West Virginia that morning wasn't even supposed to be near a gun. Doris Miller was a mess attendant, one of the only roles the Navy allowed black sailors to hold at the time. When the attack started, Miller's assigned station had already been wrecked. Instead of taking cover, he helped carry his mortally wounded captain to safety, then found an anti-aircraft gun with nobody left to fire it. Miller had never been trained on it. He fired it anyway for about 15 minutes until he ran out of ammunition and the order came to abandon ship. Six months later, Miller became the first black sailor in American history to receive the Navy Cross, presented personally by Admiral Chester Nimitz. He never got the training the men next to him got. He picked up the gun anyway. In 1942, the Navy raised the West Virginia and rebuilt it almost from the keel up, giving it the newest fire control radar in the fleet. It didn't rejoin the war until mid-1944. When it did, it was a better ship than the one that sank.
The USS California took on water slowly over the course of days as damage control crews fought to keep it afloat. One of her machinist mates, Robert Scott, was stationed at an air compressor that kept oxygen flowing to her gun crews below decks. When a torpedo hit flooded his compartment, the rest of the crew evacuated. Scott stayed behind. Witnesses say his last words were something like, "As long as I can give these people air, I'm sticking." He never left. 98 of California's crew died that morning. And Scott was one of four men aboard her awarded the Medal of Honor. She eventually settled to the harbor floor anyway. Raised, rebuilt, and fitted with the same advanced radar as the West Virginia, California was back in the war by January 1944 and went on to survive a kamikaze strike during the invasion of Lingayen Gulf.
The USS Tennessee was more directly inboard of the West Virginia, which actually saved her from torpedoes. Nothing could get through to her hull. But when the West Virginia sank, its wreckage pinned the Tennessee against her mooring quay, trapping her in place. Burning oil from the Arizona drifted straight toward her stern. Rather than try to break free, her crew kept the engines turning just enough to churn the water and push the burning oil away from the ship. For hours, while fighting fires on the West Virginia beside them, two bombs hit the Tennessee directly. Fragments from one of them killed the West Virginia's own captain standing on his bridge next door. Damaged but repaired fast and rebuilt with the new radar system just like the others.
The USS Maryland was moored inboard of the Oklahoma, which meant the Oklahoma took the torpedoes meant for her. Maryland was hit by two bombs but never came close to sinking, and her gunners were among the first in the entire harbor to fire back at the attacking planes. Four of her crew died. She was repaired within weeks.
Now, here's where these ships stopped just being repair stories. On the night of October the 24th, 1944, a Japanese battle force was steaming toward Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, trying to break through and attack the American invasion fleet. Standing in their way in the Surigao Strait were six American battleships. Five of them had been damaged or sunk at Pearl Harbor less than 3 years earlier. West Virginia, California, and Tennessee were the ones with the new radar. And that radar meant they could find their targets in the pitch dark from over 20 miles away before the Japanese ships even knew they were there. Maryland was there, too. She didn't have the new radar, but her crew got a visual fix on the target anyway and fired six salvos of her own into the Japanese line. West Virginia opened fire first, hitting the Japanese battleship Yamashiro with her very first salvo at a range of nearly 13 miles. California and Tennessee opened fire moments later. Japanese ships without that radar couldn't even see what was hitting them. The battleship Fuso was torn apart by torpedoes. The Yamashiro was pounded by shellfire until it sank, taking the Japanese admiral down with it. It became known as the Battle of Surigao Strait. It was the last time in history that battleships fought battleships directly, and most of the American ships that won it were the same ships the Japanese had tried to sink at Pearl Harbor 3 years earlier. West Virginia didn't stop there, either. She went on to support the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, shooting down eight kamikaze aircraft along the way before one finally got through and hit her in April 1945, killing four more of her crew. She kept fighting anyway. Four battleships, all sunk or damaged on the same morning, all rebuilt, and four of them ending up in the last battleship duel the world will probably ever see.
That's already a strange enough story. But one of the eight battleships didn't just get repaired and sent back out. This one refused to die twice. The USS Nevada was the only battleship that actually got underway during the attack. While every other ship on battleship row was taking hits at anchor, the Nevada's crew got the engines running and tried to make a run for open water. Japanese pilots saw it happening and tried to sink the Nevada in the channel itself to block the harbor entrance for every other ship in Pearl Harbor. They hit the Nevada with bombs and at least one torpedo. Fires broke out. The crew deliberately beached the Nevada near Hospital Point rather than let it sink and block the channel. 60 men died. The Nevada was salvaged, fully repaired, and sent back into the war. It shelled German positions at Normandy on D-Day. It supported the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. By the end of the war, the Nevada was one of the most experienced battleships in the entire US Navy.
And then the Navy did something to the Nevada that Japan never managed to do. In 1946, the Nevada was selected as the primary target for Operation Crossroads, the first atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. The Navy assembled nearly 100 ships there for the tests. Obsolete warships from both sides, American and captured Japanese and German vessels alike, anchored in a circle around the target point to see exactly what an atomic bomb would do to a modern fleet. The Navy painted the Nevada bright orange so bomber crews could aim directly at it. The first bomb dropped from a B-29 missed by nearly a mile and detonated over a different ship instead. The Nevada survived. Weeks later, the Navy detonated a second atomic bomb underwater directly beneath the anchored fleet. The Nevada survived that, too. Damaged, radioactive, still floating. The Navy decided the Nevada was too contaminated and too old to keep. So in 1948, they towed the Nevada out into open water off Hawaii and tried to sink it on purpose. Cruisers shelled it for days. Aircraft dropped bombs on it. The Nevada would not go down. Finally, a single aerial torpedo did what two atomic bombs and days of naval gunfire could not. The Nevada sank on July the 31st, 1948. For decades, nobody knew exactly where. Then in 2020, a survey team found the wreck sitting upside down, over 15,000 ft down, roughly 65 miles off the coast of Hawaii. Sailors who served on the Nevada used to call it too tough to die. The wreck footage proves they weren't exaggerating.
The Nevada wasn't the only battleship the Navy sent to Bikini Atoll. The USS Pennsylvania, which had barely been damaged at Pearl Harbor at all. She was sitting in dry dock during the attack, was also anchored in that lagoon for the same tests. The Pennsylvania survived both blasts, but she came out of the second one so radioactive that engineers couldn't safely work on her. The Navy towed the Pennsylvania to Kwajalein Atoll, studied her from a distance for over a year, and then quietly scuttled her in deep water there in February 1948. Think about that for a second. Out of eight Pearl Harbor battleships, two of them were ultimately destroyed by their own Navy's atomic bomb tests. More Pearl Harbor battleships were killed by American nuclear tests than were sunk outright by the Japanese attack that started the war.
So out of eight battleships, only two are still exactly where they started, on the bottom of Pearl Harbor itself. And that brings us to the one ship almost everyone already knows, standing over all of it. The USS Missouri never saw Pearl Harbor as a warship during the attack. It wasn't even commissioned until 1944. The Missouri joined the war late, bombarded Japanese positions at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and then on September the 2nd, 1945, hosted the ceremony that ended the war entirely. Japanese officials signed the instrument of surrender on the deck of the Missouri in Tokyo Bay with General Douglas MacArthur presiding. 23 minutes and the deadliest conflict in human history was over. The Missouri went on to serve in Korea, then the Gulf War, becoming the last American battleship to ever fire its guns in combat. Decommissioned in 1992.
And then came the question of what to do with it. Most retired battleships get scrapped or shipped off to some port nobody visits. The Missouri could easily have ended up the same way. Instead, in 1998, it was donated to a memorial association in Honolulu with a plan to bring it to Pearl Harbor. The National Park Service, which runs the Arizona Memorial, pushed back hard. Nearly 2 million people visited the Arizona Memorial every year. It was quiet, a war grave. The fear was that parking an 887 ft battleship right next to it would turn Pearl Harbor into a spectacle instead of a place of remembrance. Eventually, a compromise was reached. The Missouri would come, but it would sit well back from the memorial, positioned so visitors on its deck couldn't see the Arizona during ceremonies. Two separate experiences kept apart. But one decision was deliberate. The Missouri's bow would face the Arizona directly, not side on, not turned away. Facing it, watching over it. The official explanation was simple. The Missouri stands watch over the Arizona so the men inside can rest.
Here's what makes that arrangement mean more than people realize once you know the rest of the story. Out of eight battleships that sat on battleship row that morning in 1941, most were raised, repaired, scrapped, or deliberately destroyed in US nuclear tests within a few years of the war ending. Four of them ended up fighting Japan's battleships in the last battleship duel in history. Only the Arizona and the Utah are still down there. The Missouri isn't just watching over one wreck. It's the only battleship still standing guard over what's left of the entire fleet that was there that day. The Arizona will never move. The hull is too fragile now, dissolved too far into the harbor bed. Moving it would destroy what's left and disturb the men still inside. The Missouri isn't moving either. It's exactly where someone decided it should be. Facing the wreck, the beginning of the war and the ship that ended it. 400 yards apart in the same water for as long as anyone keeps watching.