Transcription
Every day, thousands of tourists stand above the USS Arizona. But just a few hundred yards away on the other side of the very same island sits another battleship from the exact same attack. And almost none of those visitors know she's there. 58 men are still inside her. You can find her on a map. You can see satellite photos of her. But if you flew to Hawaii tomorrow and tried to walk up to her, you couldn't.
The reason has very little to do with tourism and everything to do with what happened after the attack. A failed rescue attempt at the bottom of the harbor, a decades-long political fight nobody won quickly, and a piece of land the Navy never gave back. By the end of this video, you'll understand exactly how those things combined over 80 years to leave one of Pearl Harbor's own war graves harder to reach than almost any other memorial in the country.
Before we keep going, I want to say thank you to everyone watching this channel. Drop a comment and let me know where you're watching from and if you've got any personal connection to Pearl Harbor at all.
The USS Utah was moored off the west side of Ford Island on the morning of December 7th, 1941, the opposite side of the island from battleship row entirely. By then, the Utah wasn't even a battleship anymore. Not officially. She'd been stripped of her main guns years earlier and reclassified as a training and target ship. Her decks covered in heavy timbers to absorb the impact of practice bombs. Japanese commanders had specifically ordered their pilots not to waste torpedoes on her since she wasn't considered a real target. Some pilots either misidentified her or ignored the order anyway. Two torpedoes tore into her hull. The Utah began rolling almost immediately. The mooring line snapped under the strain, and the shock of that break was violent enough to shatter part of the concrete quay she'd been tied to, throwing several men who'd already made it into the water even further from the ship. Within about 12 minutes, the Utah had gone completely over.
Below deck, chief water tender Peter Tomage stayed at his post in the boiler room instead of running for the exit, making sure every man under him got out and the boilers were shut down safely before the ship rolled too far to escape. He never made it out himself. It took the Navy decades to even find his family. His Medal of Honor sat undelivered for over 60 years until it was finally presented to his relatives on the deck of the USS Enterprise in Croatia in 2006.
A young electrician named John Vason stayed at his post, too, keeping the ship's power running so other men could find their way out in the dark. He later described grabbing whatever he could as the deck itself became a wall beneath him, crawling over machinery just to keep from falling. By the time he tried to leave, the Utah had rolled too far, and he was trapped near the bottom of an upside-down battleship with nothing but a broken flashlight and a wrench. He banged on the hull until his hands blistered until a rescue party topside finally heard the knocking and using cutting equipment borrowed from a nearby cruiser burned a hole through the hull to pull him out. He survived the war, was still attending Pearl Harbor remembrance ceremonies decades later. 58 men didn't make it out of a crew of just over 500.
And that's where the real story of why you can't visit this ship actually begins. Because what happened to the Utah after that morning is completely different from what happened to every other wreck in the harbor. Just across the island, the USS Oklahoma had also capsized that same morning. And by 1943, the Navy had pulled off one of the largest ship salvage operations in history to bring her back upright. The method was called parbuckling. Engineers anchored a system of massive shore-based winches to the harbor floor, ran cables under and around the capsized hull, and slowly, patiently rolled the ship back onto her keel, inch by inch over months. It worked because the Oklahoma's hull had something solid to grip against as it rolled, and because the Navy considered her important enough to justify the enormous cost.
So in February 1944, flush with that success, the Navy tried the exact same thing on the USS Utah. 17 winches, the same parbuckling technique, cables anchored into the mud of the harbor floor, and it went wrong almost immediately. Instead of rolling cleanly the way the Oklahoma had, the Utah's hull simply dug into the soft bottom with every pull. The harder the winches strained, the deeper she sank into the silt instead of coming up. The winching itself happened in stages called pulls. Each one hauling the hull a few more degrees before crews stopped to reassess and let the cables reset. It wasn't one continuous motion. It was weeks of grinding incremental effort watched and adjusted after every pull.
Down in the water, conditions were about as bad as salvage work gets. Much of the harbor was still thick with spilled fuel oil from the attack itself. So visibility was close to zero. Divers worked from memory using blueprints they'd studied beforehand, feeling their way past jagged, torn metal that could slice an air hose in seconds in water that could trap pockets of hydrogen gas without any warning. It was dangerous work in the clearest possible sense. In June of 1943, a diver named Tom Carry was inside the wreck when the valve controlling his air supply jammed shut. It took 1 hour and 40 minutes to bring his body back to the surface. He's rarely mentioned in any account of the Utah, but he died trying to recover a ship that in the end the Navy would decide wasn't worth recovering at all.
By March of 1944, after more than a year of preparation and weeks of active winching, engineers had only managed to roll the Utah to about 37°, not even halfway back to upright. The official report at the time put it plainly. Continuing would cost more time and money than the ship was worth. On March the 15th, 1944, diving on the Utah stopped completely. No one ever tried again. She sat at that same angle, 37° tilted but never righted, for more than 80 years since.
That failed salvage effort is one reason the Utah ended up sidelined. But there's a second reason, and it's almost more frustrating because it wasn't an engineering problem. It was a political one. For nearly 30 years after the attack, the Utah didn't even have a proper memorial. In 1960, survivors of the ship asked their home state senator, Wallace Bennett, to petition the Navy for something modest, just permission to fly a flag over the wreck as a mark of respect. The Navy said no. It took another Utah senator, Frank Moss, years of repeated requests to Congress before anyone in Washington took the idea of a real memorial seriously. In 1966, he finally got a powerful ally, Hawaii Senator Daniel Inouye, himself, a decorated World War II veteran. Even with that support, it wasn't until 1970 that Congress actually authorized construction. The memorial wasn't dedicated until Memorial Day 1972, more than 30 years after the men inside the ship had died, with Moss himself standing there as guest of honor. He said afterward that the Utah's story, in a sense, never really ended, that her wreckage was ruined, but her legacy carried on in the ships and air crews that fought the rest of the war in the Pacific.
Compare that timeline to the Arizona. The Arizona Memorial was proposed, funded, and dedicated in 1962, a full decade before the Utah even got equivalent recognition. Both ships suffered nearly the same fate on the same morning. One became a national symbol almost immediately. The other needed two senators, over a decade of lobbying, and a direct request that was flatly denied before anyone in the government agreed she deserved so much as a flag.
Even after the memorial finally existed, official recognition kept lagging behind. It wasn't until July of 1988, 16 years after the memorial's dedication and nearly 47 years after the attack itself, that the Utah and the Arizona were jointly nominated for the National Historic Landmark Registry. The federal government's highest form of historic recognition. Both wrecks were formally added to that list in May of 1989. The Arizona had already been the most visited war memorial in the Pacific for decades by that point. The Utah, sitting less than a mile away, was only just being told by the federal government that her wreck officially mattered, too.
Even today, the story isn't fully resolved. The current memorial, a 70ft white concrete walkway leading out to a small platform with a flagpole and a brass plaque, has been sitting exposed to ocean weather for more than 50 years now, and the shoreline underneath it has been quietly eroding. As of this year, the National Park Service and Pacific Historic Parks are actively raising money, a $5 million preservation campaign just to stabilize the ground the Utah Memorial stands on and keep it from being lost to the water it faces. The site nearly disappeared once back in 1944 when the Navy simply gave up on her. It is now facing a much slower version of the same threat.
Ford Island isn't a museum piece or a historic district frozen in 1941. It's still an active United States Navy base. Right now, today, sailors are stationed there. There are runways, hangars, administrative buildings, and residential neighborhoods. Real streets with real houses where Navy families actually live their day-to-day lives. There are roughly 440 family housing units on the island today along with a Navy lodge and a NOAA research facility. All part of the same joint base that includes Pearl Harbor itself. And it's worth pointing out the restriction isn't blanket across the whole island. The USS Missouri, also moored on Ford Island, has her own dedicated shuttle running constantly from the visitor center. No special tour required because she sits on a different part of the island entirely. It's specifically the stretch where Utah and Oklahoma rest, the stretch closest to where people actually live, that stays locked behind a limited tour.
Because of that, civilians can't drive onto Ford Island or walk over on their own to reach Utah's memorial. The only way most of the public gets there is through one specific program, the Ford Island bus tour, run jointly by the National Park Service and the Navy. It operates just three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, for a single 90-minute round trip in the afternoon, with each group capped at 25 people. Even then, the tour can't stop and let visitors linger the way people do at the Arizona because the memorial sits too close to where people actually live. You get a look, you don't get the kind of unhurried, reflective visit that's become completely normal everywhere else in Pearl Harbor.
There is one other way in, once a year. On or around December 7th, the Navy holds a sunset ceremony right at the memorial itself. It's technically open to the public, but "open to the public" still means you need a valid military, government, or State Department ID, or a sponsored guest pass from someone who has one. For almost everyone without a service connection, that's still a locked door, just a more ceremonial one.
That ceremony is also when something remarkable still happens, even now. The Utah is one of only a handful of places in the world where military burial at sea can happen directly inside the wreck itself. And it's reserved specifically for men who survived the attack and served aboard her. In December of 2024, the family of Gilbert Meyer, a Utah crewman who lived to be a hundred years old before he passed away, gathered at that same sunset ceremony and handed his ashes to Navy divers who carried them down and placed them inside the wreck alongside the men he'd served with in 1941. According to the National Park Service, it was the 17th interment recorded on the Utah since the tradition began. More than 80 years after the attack, men who survived that morning are still one at a time choosing to go back.
If none of the public access options work for you, there is one more way to see the Utah, though it isn't the real thing. In recent years, the National Park Service partnered with a nonprofit called SCARAK to build a detailed 3D digital scan of the memorial and the exposed sections of the wreck, combined with underwater documentation collected by park divers, survivor oral histories, and historic photographs into a free virtual experience anyone can access online. It's the closest thing to standing there that most people will ever get.
So, put all of this together. A failed salvage attempt in 1944 that left the wreck permanently unrecovered. A political fight that took over a decade just to secure a memorial at all. And a piece of land that never stopped being an active military base. One that's now actively eroding underneath the small tribute that finally got built. None of it is a cover-up. None of it is anyone being ashamed of the ship or the men inside her. It's simply what happens when a tragedy doesn't get chosen as the symbol, and the recovery of the site itself, in every sense, is still ongoing more than 80 years later.
And there's one more detail about that wreck that took nearly 60 years to come out. In the early 2000s, a woman named Mary Wagner Cree finally told a story she'd been sitting on for most of her life. Her father, Albert Wagner, had served on the Utah. Years before the attack, his infant daughter, Mary's twin sister, had died shortly after birth overseas. Wagner had her cremated, and rather than leave the ashes behind, he quietly carried the urn aboard ship with him. When the Utah capsized in 1941, that urn went down with her. 54 of the Utah's crew were never recovered at all, untouched since the moment they died in a hull that hasn't been opened since a Navy diver lost his own life trying to save a ship nobody would ultimately decide was worth saving.
She sits less than half a mile from one of the most visited war memorials on Earth, and most of the people who visit it will never know she's there at all. If a memorial holds the remains of servicemen, but almost nobody can reach it. Is it still doing what a memorial is supposed to do? I'd genuinely like to know what you think.