Eighteen ships might have been bombed by Japanese fighters on December 7, 1941, but as Pearl Harbor Tours describes, only seven of them sunk. Out of those seven, only two ships were beyond repair and left to the seas: the U.S.S. Utah and the U.S.S. Arizona. The U.S.S. Oklahoma was stripped for parts and sank after the war ended. The rest of the damaged ships were fixed and back in service by 1944 because the Japanese didn’t attack any repair facilities or dry docks.
As a research paper from the University of Nebraska says, the carbon steel battleship U.S.S. Arizona was commissioned in 1916 and got some upgrades in 1930 in the form of new weaponry and armor. Nonetheless, the U.S.S. Arizona presented an easy, stationary target for Japanese fighter planes, whose bombs finally broke through the Arizona’s armor when a 1760-pound bomb went straight through the front of the battleship and caused a cascade explosion within the battleship’s armaments. It wasn’t only the ship itself that suffered a mortal wound, though, but 1,177 men on board. The Arizona and its crew sunk into shallow water, and haven’t moved since.
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History reported that the battleship held 1.5 million gallons of fuel oil at the time it was attacked, as it had recently finished a complete refueling. In 2018, the University of Nebraska reported that more than 2,500 tons — around 79,000 gallons — remained. Bit by bit, it’s still seeping into the ocean.
