The Salvage of Pearl Harbor Pt 1 - The Smoke Clears

[Music] [Music] as the smoke billowed from the still-burning pyres of oil and shipping on the morning of the 8th of december 1941 the u.s navy faced a significant challenge six battleships including the old training ship utah had either been sunk or were sinking and the remaining three had all been damaged to various degrees in addition the japanese assault had hit three cruisers four destroyers four auxiliary vessels and a floating dock sinking some and damaging others this posed a two-fold challenge firstly there were now a lot of wrecks and damaged ships occupying valuable space in the pacific fleet's main anchorage and secondly the strength of the us navy had just been drastically reduced it needed ships and thanks to the shallow nature of pearl harbor it might be possible to bring some of the sunk ones back into service there were plenty of challenges oil slicks still flowed thick in the harbour with the oil reaching a depth of up to two inches on the surface in some places as did mats of wreckage and inevitably bodies lightcraft such as the minesweeper uss turn and its compatriots which had survived when battleships had not now found themselves playing hoses across the larger vessels that were still a flame and running pumps to vessels that weren't whilst it was fairly clear that arizona was probably a total loss although this wasn't a hundred percent clear since she was still covered in a pool of smoke that obscured the forward part of the vessel efforts to fight the fires on the parts of the arizona that remained above the waterline did continue partially because efforts on behalf of tennessee were being hampered by thick clouds of choking black smoke that was rolling off of the arizona and partially because there were fears of a follow-up japanese air attack for which a giant plaque pool of burning oil and ship would make an excellent marker of the battleship's float maryland was perhaps the least affected but it was still dangerously down by the bow and still fighting flooding whilst on the other side of ford island the cruiser uss raleigh was cutting loose everything that they could to keep the ship upright after a torpedo had blown a hole in her side amid ships but even as crews fought to keep some ships afloat the salvage efforts were actually already underway elsewhere indeed in some ways they'd actually been ongoing since before the japanese aircraft had even left after the uss oklahoma had rolled over for example a number of men had escaped via some rather daring underwater swims through the upturned hull to report the locations of other survivors trapped within and soon there were divers drills and cutting equipment working on trying to free anyone who could be contacted by hammering on the hull in all these efforts would save 26 men in four groups whilst another two were tragically contacted but then accidentally suffocated by the fumes of the oxyacetylene cutters that were being used to try and reach them elsewhere the cruiser helena was shoring up against her own torpedo hit the destroyer shaw had lost its bow to a magazine explosion but what was left was still afloat amidst the remains of the floating dry dock that she'd been in and the battleship nevada was in a slow but losing battle with progressive flooding as a mixture of water and oil advanced through bulkhead after bulkhead as it was found that paths through areas that were supposed to be watertight weren't for various reasons only her beaching on a coral ledge had kept her from slipping beneath the waves like many of her companions luckily there were some transient officers who would be especially helpful lieutenant commander lebus curtis v for example was in transit to the red sea to help with the royal navy clearing some ships that the italians had sunk in a port in eritrea what's now ethiopia he was a salvage expert and so he was heading over there to help them reopen the port but now instead of being in hawaii for a couple of days stopover he was called into action to help with his own fleet's efforts the carrier uss enterprise put in a brief appearance but no matter how useful the crew and pumps of the carrier and her escorts might have been she was needed elsewhere and the force was soon back out to sea back in the harbour california's commanding officer captain wallin had the dual advantages amongst the other battleship captains of being both alive and uninjured and having his ship on a relatively even keel compared to some others even if it wasn't going anywhere fast still had fires aboard and was gradually settling as such he was dispatched on to begin a tour of the harbour to work out which ships were still operational and what equipment was still operational starting with the cruisers uss new orleans could be mostly ready within a day the uss san francisco was absolutely fine but it had been in the middle of dock work that still needed a couple of weeks to complete uss honolulu had taken a near mist that flooded several magazines and was still working to counter the flooding but could be ready again relatively soon or at least mobile uss helena was of course going nowhere fast and was given priority for dry docking as she could at least be moved in by tugs which was more than could be said for the battleships that all had significant underwater damage or else were trapped only pennsylvania and maybe tennessee were in any state even begin to think of moving much less fighting there was however a silver lining to the big oil fueled cloud apart from the floating dry dock that the destroyer uss shaw had been in and which was now sunk all of the other docks were basically intact as was the railway system that the base used to move things around like heavy machinery the machine shops as well as the static and floating cranes were all undamaged and the piers repair ships tenders and most of the bases on-site engineering and ship working staff were also all intact with the exception of the vestal which was in the process of trying to save itself the intact oil tanks also meant that any and all machinery could be run pretty much 24 7 if needed and dry dock 2 which hadn't actually been scheduled for completion for quite some time anticipating opening around about eastern 1942 was actually well ahead of schedule and to a limited degree could already receive ships nonetheless additional staff machinery and materials were requested from the continental united states and a kind of warship triage began pennsylvania was to be extracted from dry dock 1 and replaced with honolulu as although she'd been hit the damage was to her upper works and didn't threaten her watertight integrity maryland was scheduled for dry dock 2 as soon as helena had been patched up you might think a battleship would be a higher priority than a cruiser but maryland was currently trapped by the upturned hull of the oklahoma and was burning out pumps one after the other in an effort to stay afloat and upright she only had one major hole below the water line but it was letting in a disturbing amount of water it was hoped that this could be isolated and pumped out with the help of a portable case on which would allow her to then be moved to the dry dock in good time demands on some of the specialist work crews were quite intense some officers wanted the divers to check out the torpedo nets to see if there were any holes that a [ __ ] submarine might use to slip into the harbour as it was known that there had been a few on december the 7th but these skilled personnel were instead kept back for work on the damaged and sunken vessels for as long as possible instead the major infrastructure such as dry dock gates as well as some of the damaged and sunken vessels were protected by a series of impromptu torpedo defenses consisting of a mixture of sheep piling that was simply hammered into the seabed ahead of them on the most likely attack vectors as well as a number of gunnery target rafts which had a relatively deep draft anyway and whose draft was further artificially increased with sheet metal as well as grids that had hastily spot-welded wire fencing attached to them which were hung underneath them with the intention of forcing any torpedoes that might be incoming to detonate against these relatively expendable aspects of the harbour rather than the more valuable ships or were still the gates to the dry docks that would be needed to patch up the ships wary of a follow-up air attack power cables were also run out to the california and nevada the ships themselves were without their own power and partially resting on the sea floor and in california's case and gradually heading further down but for the moment the 5-inch anti-aircraft guns and their crews where these were still above water were pressed into service using the external power supplies to keep the guns running just in case there was a return of the japanese navy the various ongoing efforts would be formally consolidated into the base for salvage organization a week after the attacks on the 14th of december under the command of james mortimer steele formerly commander of the uss utah which of course was a position that now no longer needed filling the new organization's role was self-explanatory and would allow the base itself to focus on repairs refits and resupply of the still active combat forces that will be cycling through pearl harbor over the next few months and eventually years lieutenant commander curtis the salvage officer we mentioned earlier found himself in charge unsurprisingly of the ship's salvage section with other sections being services and material ordnance dealing with the sunken vessels guns ammunition personnel diving salvage stores public works to liaise with the civilian contractors especially those who are rushing to complete dry dock 2 and working on dry docks 3 and 4 and finally the repairs section but all of these vital personnel hadn't sat around for a week waiting for an official title dry dock 2 had actually been declared operational on the 10th of december with helena being moved in immediately and once the ship was on the blocks and the dock was pumped out the repair crews were competing for space with the civilian workers who still had to pour the concrete floor of the dry dock which would allow for larger ships like the battleships and carriers to be accommodated whilst above them engineers were cobbling together steam and high pressure water jets to clean both the ship and the dock of oil which had drifted in with the ship and would be a continuing problem for any dockyard work eventually it would have to be skimmed off and cleared from the harbour but for the moment there were significantly more important priorities with that said the problem it posed for the dockyard work cannot be understated because you could bring a ship in but when you drain the dock the ship itself being covered in oil could be hosed down relatively quickly but when your entire working surface including the steps and ladders down into the basin of the dry dock were covered with a thick sludge of decomposing oil everything got very dangerous very sticky and very flammable very fast and so it was absolutely vital that the engineers perfected their steam and high pressure water cleaning equipment first before anything caught fire it was quickly established that with the limited dockyard space available at pearl harbor repairing the helena fully was off the table it could be done but it would take far too long instead anything that was brought in was to be patched up and repaired only as much as was needed to make the ship seaworthy for a trip to the west coast where longer term repairs and where applicable modernizations could be made ships like the san francisco were to have their remaining overhauls completed as soon as possible and sent on their way this should allow the cycling through of some of the still technically afloat ships before their systems could break down and they sunk as well and it would also mean that the full capacity of pearl's docks could be used in the salvage effort whilst still being available at relatively short notice in case of ships returning with battle damage the rule of thumb was that anything that needed more than a month's work unless it was patching a ship up to make it seaworthy was to be done back on the continental united states the first issues that the new organization needed to overcome were a lack of storage space for recovered material from the ships a lack of manpower and the fact that one of the key assets the repair ship vestal had been hit by two bombs and then the shock wave of the arizona exploding right alongside it as a result she was currently beached and having to see to her own survival the manpower issue was at least solved by drafting in newly arrived sailors as well as portions of the crew from california west virginia and nevada the ships identified as priorities for the salvage efforts were tennessee california and nevada as these were the ships that would appear to be the easiest to recover maryland wasn't on the list because as she'd not technically sunk yet she didn't fall under the remit of the salvage operation but rather the main naval base each ship was assigned its own project officer as well as a group of men with engineers and damage control officers from the ships themselves also assigned to the groups due to their pre-existing knowledge of the layout of their own ships west virginia was then identified as a fourth priority and a similar arrangement was set up for work on that ship whilst this was going on both saratoga and enterprise with their respective escort groups would cycle through the harbour on different occasions which complicated matters somewhat as ships and boats did a merry dance around each other heading in all sorts of directions unfortunately despite heroic efforts the california was gradually slipping beneath the waves water was coming in faster than the pumps could keep up with and the ship slipped into a silt bank until only parts of the superstructure and the upper main battery turrets were visible it wasn't for lack of trying however horses wire cabling and even a chain around the second turret barbette would tried in an attempt to keep the ship close to the key side but all this accomplished was a series of loud bangs as the various moorings parted and in one or two cases where the cables were particularly strong the bollards that they were attached to were simply wrenched out of their sockets focus instead switched to nevada which had been chained in place as well to stop her sliding off of the large rock that was supporting the stern with drydock 2 able to accept ships of up to 42 foot in draft the estimate to get the ship from its current 48 foot in draft down to 40 foot would mean pumping out over 10 000 tons of water some other schemes to reduce her draft still further were considered but the amount of water that would have to be displaced was truly ridiculous divers instead set to work in cutting away parts of the hull that had been blasted outward and would get in the way of any patch whilst the upturned hull of her sister ship was used to measure the size and shape of the patch that would be needed this effort needing over 500 dives was complicated by the fact that most of the salvage gear on the island had been bought in the 1920s and shoved into a warehouse somewhere and improperly stored meaning that most of it was broken and what was left worked sub-optimally with many of the leather and rubber seals and gaskets having been expended strengthening the jaw muscles of several generations of the local rat population fortunately however more up-to-date and less nord equipment was being rapidly flown out along with more specialists from the west coast the tennessee was another matter entirely once the fires were out the ship was actually mostly ready for action with one major problem west virginia moored outboard of her had rolled to port when struck by torpedoes with the west virginia's underwater hull catching and wedging on the tennessee's armor belt then as counter flooding leveled the ship with the wedging having bought enough time for this to take effect west virginia had settled in such a way that it pinned tennessee in place maryland was at this stage still in front of her there was enough room a stern in theory for a tug to pull her out turn her 90 degrees and then extract her between the stern of west virginia and what was left of the bow of the arizona except that no tug on earth was going to be able to pull the ship out from between the key and west virginia so tightly was she wedged eventually it was decided they'd have to demolish a section of the key to enable her extraction and whilst that was getting underway the onboard repairs to fire damaged areas of the ship could begin men with pickaxes and breakers began work on the key side but they barely made a dent the workers who'd originally built it had done a little bit too good of a job logically of course the next step was to bring in dynamite and try to blow up the recalcitrant masonry but in the event even this proved to be a remarkably slow process by the time it had actually been done patches had been applied to various minor holes in the hull and maryland had actually been towed away for her turn in the dock and so it was decided to tow tennessee out forwards instead as this would avoid the rather delicate 90 degree turn whilst california had settled it had been something of a slow motion process and so various items such as secondary guns fire control equipment and ammunition had been able to be salvaged as the water rose whilst a similar but somewhat slower effort was being made on the resting hulk of the west virginia this recovered equipment was then used to replace and or supplement the armament of various ships that were still afloat as well as the island's own defenses meanwhile it was decided to try and salvage the california which by now had become deeply embedded in the silk beneath it by building a sheet pile cofferdam around the ship and draining all the water several other more esoteric methods such as freezing the water in the area of the hull breeches had been suggested but whilst this had worked in more northern climes it was pointed out that the amount of cooling equipment needed to keep an ice plug intact in hawaiian temperatures would be truly monumental with the initial decisions and priorities made efforts now turned to implementing these plans and also beginning an extensive cataloguing of all the damage found the repair and salvage methods that were used and how well they worked as well as any suggestions on remedying the weaknesses that were identified in the various ships construction as the work progressed this would all prove invaluable in the years ahead in both the design and refit of ships and in briefing and training the crews of ships that were heading into combat at the same time a limited amount of salvage work was being done to the mine sweeping command vessel oglala which had been moored just alongside a pier due to the priority list she was slated to just be removed from her position as she was mainly taking out valuable birthing space to make things easier she was stripped down to a basic hull and superstructure strapped to a couple of pontoons and pumped full of air unfortunately it turned out her old hole wasn't strong enough to take all the new stresses and she leaked air faster than it could be pumped in by the 20th of december that effort had been abandoned and the works crews dispersed to other efforts on other ships but in better news what was left of the destroyer shore was recovered from the sunken formerly floating dry dock put into a working dry dock and stripped of all her armament she could be repaired but between the missing bow the shock damage and the water infiltration she'd be in refit for quite a while and her guns could be used on other ships and so back to the battleships it turned out that part of the breach caused by the torpedo hit to nevada was actually beneath the mud which that portion of the ship was laying in luckily the patch they'd been making was wood so it could be modified unfortunately the dredging and diving efforts that ascertained this also found numerous other smaller holes probably from various near-misses these would also need to be patched up to get the ship afloat but at least she wasn't going anywhere by the 20th of december the list of things to do in priority order were issued as follows first priority was removal of the main battery of the california a second was to try and remove the oklahoma from her present birth third was the salvage of anti-aircraft guns fourth the refloating of the nevada fifth the refloating of the floating dry dock that shaw had been in yfd-2 sixth the re-floating of the california seventh the docking of the rally eighth the removal of miscellaneous ordnance equipment and ammunition that hadn't been covered in any of the above ninth the refloating of west virginia tenth the recovery of material that the bureau of ships and the bureau of supplies and accounts identified eleventh the recovery of a japanese submarine and 12th the recovery of sunken boats torpedoes tubes and various miscellaneous gear now in the harbour that had been thrown off of various ships in an effort to keep them afloat in the first few hours after the attack the reason that they wanted california's guns so urgently wasn't to try and build a couple of copies of fort drum in hawaii it was because california unlike nevada seemed to be on the move again the pier she'd been birthed at was as mentioned previously in an area of mud and silt the pilings that had been installed to support the pier in the first place had in some cases needed to go down over a hundred feet into the seabed before they'd actually hit something solid enough to support the pier and now it looked like this very fine mud was slowly swallowing the battleship and removing around 2 000 tons of top weight by taking off the main battery might it was hoped lightened the ship enough to at least slow this process down and the idea for her salvage was still to go in with a sheep piling cofferdam but that material was winding its way to a port in the continental united states by train and well over a month away from even arriving let alone being installed if the ship sank considerably lower in the mud in the interim this might completely obscure the damage and make it almost impossible to patch or pump out and of course the suction fighting her removal would be immense and so off came the turret tops and out came the guns elsewhere in dry dock one the removal of pennsylvania meant that the dock could be drained and the two destroyers present cassin and downs could be looked over the news here really wasn't good between multiple bombs and their own torpedoes going off plus being set on fire the two ships were effectively warped heaps of scrap metal whose only real value was the prime dry dock real estate that they were currently occupying and whatever internal machinery might have survived as it would eventually turn out the wrecks of both ships would be stripped down and brand new ships built around whatever salvageable machinery was left inside and given the old destroyers hull numbers and names but that was for the far future elsewhere still they'd managed to find the wreck of a japanese [ __ ] submarine and so when the battleships were done being swallowed by the seabed some efforts were being made to haul this up as well there was some good news though on the same day as all of this maryland tennessee and pennsylvania all patched up to varying degrees headed out on the voyage back to the west coast for further repairs pennsylvania heading to mare island and tennessee and pennsylvania headed for puget sound once that work was done they would join colorado idaho new mexico and mississippi in guarding the west coast against any further possible assault the four battleships on their way at various stages from other postings with the harbour thus somewhat less crowded and drydock space opened up again the piling for california on its way and the patches for nevada being manufactured whilst divers headed into the latter ship through some of the larger holes in order to close up internal bulkheads and valves which would help with later salvage efforts attention was turned to uss west virginia knowing that she'd been hit multiple times and keeping in mind the lessons of the nevada the salvage crews knew that they had no idea just what state the hull might be in and so a program of dives was begun so as to gather this data this was very difficult work as not only was the state of the diving equipment still relatively primitive by what we might imagine but they were also operating in near darkness the water was not especially clear anyway and of course the thick coating of oil on top of it meant that they were effectively trying to chart out an entire battleship by feel alone which of course came with its own inherent risks as if you were in a diving suit and you happened to grab onto a sharp bit of protruding metal there was every chance you might breach your suit and have to do an emergency surface there was also a much grimmer task for some of the divers as they progressed along the hull with large hammers every 15 to 20 feet stopping to hammer repeatedly on the outside of the hull hoping to hear some echoes back from men trapped inside closer to the surface aboard all ships the removal of delicate equipment like rangefinders and fire control systems was accelerated they'd need to be cleaned and checked which would take a while and the idea was to have them ready to go back on the ships once they were raised and patched whilst the individual elements didn't weigh all that much collectively that did all add up and of course these items were relatively high on the ships whose stability at this point in time was of course somewhat questionable and would become even more so as differential buoyancy started up when air was being pumped into them some thought was being given to putting a cofferdam around the arizona the ship was clearly a write-off by this point but it would make salvaging equipment and recovering bodies somewhat easier in the end though the expense was not considered to be worth the effort and aside from some minor salvage on the stern section and a prolonged series of dives to access some of the higher value low bulk items like the safe containing the ship's pay chest the ship was largely left alone by the end of the year also around this time the first reports from west virginia were coming in and despite the hull resembling something of a swiss cheese from various near-misses direct hits and splinter damage the ship was actually in much better shape than many had suspected and it began to become apparent that she could actually be salvaged and with that news the salvage crews swung into what was now a semi-familiar routine clearing the decks recovering equipment and removing damage or extraneous bits of the superstructure and making preparations to remove the main battery as 1941 turned into 1942 everything was changing admiral kimmel had been relieved of command and admiral nimitz was appointed in his place the pace of salvage operations was beginning to swing towards preparations for raising the ships and the entire salvage operation was about to receive a new boss captain steele was about to be promoted and california's former commander captain wallin was to now take charge and that's a good point to leave things for this week tune in next week as the efforts to raise california nevada and west virginia get underway and people start to ponder what to do about the oklahoma that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry dock questions

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Views: 550,445

Rating: 4.949254 out of 5

Keywords: wows, world of warships, Pearl Harbour, December 7th, USN, USS Arizona, USS California, USS Maryland, USS Utah, USS Oklahoma, USS West Virginia, USS Tennessee, USS Nevada, USS Pennsylvania

Id: bB-V9cCSC8o

Length: 30min 7sec (1807 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020