And what's happening with the metal on the hull
and the internal portions of the ship.
And so that is what we're trying to do is fiind out is
there a way that we can contain that oil.
Today, the oil has begun to leak from more places than ever.
To understand the extent of the threat to Pearl Harbor,
the park service is conducting a detailed survey of the Arizona.
Dan Lenihan is a park service diver and archeologist.
If it's all released at once, it will probably be a major problem.
For the park service, the challenge it to avert a fiinal catastrophe:
An oil spill in the middle of Pearl Harbor.
There's no excuse for having this happen here.
There's no excuse for not knowing enough about this ship
that is would go to the point that
we would have a travesty like that on our hands.
We need to get ahead of it and fiind out what's happening.
The problem is complicated by the ship's designation as a gravesite
and by the oil's symbolic meaning.
Many visitors and survivors to the Arizona memorial
consider the oil to either be the tears of the ship or that the ship is bleeding
we'll also be dealing with that emotional feelings
that people have about the oil and the signifiicance.
It'll be a balance between what protecting the ecosystem is all about
and protecting the tomb, the shrine that this place symbolizes.
Joining the park service on its survey is National Geographic
underwater photographer David Doubilet.
Even though parts of the Arizona were salvaged
and the rest is slowly corroding it is still impressive closeup.
These huge naval rifles.
They could fiire something that weighed
something almost the weight of a Volkswagen 20 miles away.
The Arizona, in fact every battleship, was built around these main armaments.
We gotta fiind out number 31.
Hidden in the oily murk of Pearl Harbor,
gun turret number one was forgotten for forty years.
Now Doubilet is trying to document its massive guns
for National Geographic Magazine.
Almost every problem that I had related to visibility.
One foot fall, a fiin stroke, would kick up this very very soft mud,
and the clouds would billow out of the bottom
and the visibility would drop instantly
from a my wonderful 7 feet or 5 feet down to nothing.
The guns are as long as a bus,
and bringing enough light down here to photograph them is an arduous operation.
Doubilet needs a crew of six people, to bring this submerged shrine to life.
His moody images recall the ghostly legacy of the Arizona.
I think I got the shot.
The shot of the three main guns of turrent number one.
And they come out of the gloom like three fiingers,
and I'm looking up at them with a green background in the background.
It's very gloomy, it's very dark
And Dan Lenihan from the Park Service is down examining
the central barrel of the guns
it's a very gloomy, secret picture of the Arizona.
To its survivors, the Arizona is much more than a sunken ship.
This national park is probably the only one
that has the intense emotional reaction that this one does to all visitors.
And the survivors have taught me that.
I mean the survivors have really shown me what it is to be an American.
And I'm probably the strongest American you'd fiind out,
after having worked here for fiive years.
I think this place can really teach
what the price of war is and what the price of freedom is.
Inside the memorial
a wall lists the 1177 service men who dies on the battleship.
Every returning survivor knew someone who died on December 7th.
They never had a chance.
They didn't know what was coming.
Nobody knew about it. They never woke up."
Aloha, aloha.
I was going to ask you for a hug but I'm gonna get one anyway.
Big, big hug.
I thought maybe that you wouldn't want to hug an ugly old man like...
I do, I do.
Carl Carson was a twenty year old sailor on the Arizona
the day she went down.
He decided to come back to Pearl Harbor
when doctors told him he didn't have much longer to live.
"I lost a lot of good dear friends over there.
It's just awful hard to even think about it.
And I almost lost my own life.
I hope I can make it over there all right.
Carl has never talked very much about what happened to him that day.
Now, at last, it's time.
"This is where I came out of, turret 3 here.
Came back on this.
There used to be ladders up and down
and I came up the turret and went down the..."
I was out on deck doing the morning chores
all of a sudden this plane come along and didn't pay much attention to it
because planes were landing at Ford Island all the time.
And all of a sudden the chips started flying all around me
and the plane it was strafiing me.
And uh somebody hollered it's the damn Japs, get under cover.
The bomb went off, I learned later,
it was back about turret number 4
about where I've been working about 10, 15 minutes before.
And evidently it knocked me out,
ruptured both my lungs and I got smoke inhalation.
And all the lights went out.
I don't know how long I laid there.
But when I woke up it was no panic down there or anything.
But there was smoke and water knee deep.
I ran into a friend of mine that he was crying and, and asking me for help.
And I looked at him in horror.
And the skin on his face and his arms
and everything was just hanging off like, like a mask or something.
And I took hold of his arm. Skin all came off in my hand.
And there, there was just nothing in this world I could do for that boy.
And that has bothered me all my life.
Well they gave the word to abandon ship
and we just practically stepped off of the quarter deck into the water
and I guess I must have passed out.
And went down in the water and everything was just as peaceful and nice
that it would have been so easy to just let go.
And I saw this bright light and something made me come to.
And so I got back up to the surface of the water and, and oil all around.
And I had water in my, oil in my teeth, down in my throat and everything.
Tasted horrible. I still taste it today.
And the oil was a fiire all around.
A man saw me down there and the fiire was approaching me,
wasn't but two feet from me
and he reached down and pulled me up out of the water.
And that man saved my life.
Bob Ballard has spent the entire mission
searching the flats outside the harbor
without fiinding any sign of the lost midget sub.
This is a mile, so what we're going to do
we are going to drop you down here at the base.
Now he's turning his attention to the steep coral escarpment
running roughly parallel to the shore an area he calls the wall.
In an expedition like this
you have to put your mind in the mind of the commander of the submarine
because his actions are gonna defiine the size of the search area.
What he does at that moment is going to tell you
how big a search area you have to have.
Clearly if he was killed outright
then you didn't have to put yourself in his mind at all
because he's dead and he's going to be right were they say he sank
But if he's still alive, he's going to then take certain evasive actions
and you have to then say,
well if I were that person, what would I do?
And there were two options he had.
One was to continue forward into Pearl Harbor
or the other was to turn and run for the high seas.
If the midget made a run for the high seas, and sank farther out,
there's no hope of fiinding it in the remaining time.
But if it had continued toward the harbor,
Ballard's team might stand a chance
with the help of their own miniature submersible.
"Head north turn left."
The one disadvantage of using a submersible
is that Ballard's team won't be able to see
what the sub pilot is seeing during the dive.
They'll have to rely on his descriptions over the radio
and look at a videotape later.
We've landed the sub.
It's going to land about 200m of water, head due north.
As you can see the airport's right there so it's going to run into something
and it's going to run into a wall,
and then it's going to head west along that wall,
because if the submarine hit against that wall
it's going to fall down to the base.
So we're going to spend the day exploring the base of the steep scarp
that leads right up the channel into Pearl Harbor.
To me deepworkers look like sort of manned robots.
They've got a human inside of them
but they have this big, you know, this exoskeleton.
But what they do is they permit a person to be highly maneuverable.
They can spin on their axis.
And they can go into very dangerous places because they're so small.
In the control room, all anyone can do is listen to the squawk box.
They just reported fiinding a pile of batteries
and this submarine was a lot of batteries.
So, starting to look like, smell like, but we're not sure.
Then the sub pilot spots a torpedo.
We're right where it should get interesting
and it is getting interesting.
He's picked up a torpedo and debris right in the area
where we'd expect the submarine to have impacted with the wall.
Ballard feels they are getting close but they can't be sure of anything
until they retrieve deepworker and take a look at the video tape.
December 7th, 8:35 a.m. And the begining of a brief,
twenty minute lull in the action.
At airfiields all over the island,
crews scrambled to clear the runways so American planes could get in the air.
Anti aircraft guns were made ready.
Field hospitals were set up to take care of the wounded
many of them burn victims.
The fiirst stories of individual acts of heroism began to make the rounds.
One of them was about a mess attendant on the West Virginia
named Dorrie Miller.
Miller had carried the wounded captain of his ship to safety,
then taken up a machine gun and shot down at least two Japanese planes.
What made the story remarkable is that
Dorrie Miller had never handled a machine gun,
much less trained on one because he was black
and like all African Americans in the 1941 Navy,
restricted to the lowest ranking jobs.
Fourteen men received America's highest military award
the medal of honor
for their heroism on that day but Dorrie Miller wasn't one of them.
He got the Navy cross instead.
The only reason why he didn't get the congressional medal
is because he was black
You know the Navy being what it was at that time
you only could be a servant to the offiicers.
He never gave any thought for his life or anything,
he grabbed a machine gun and started blasting away over the side of the ship.
What he did was courageous and many of us thought
that man should have been given the congressional medal of honor"
Two years after Pearl Harbor,
Dorrie Miller died when his ship went down,
torpedoed by a Japanese submarine.
Pearl Harbor 8:55 a.m.
The seas were still boiling with smoke and flame
when the second wave of the Japanese attack struck the island.
This time, 167 aircraft split into two main groups.
One headed inland.
The other hugged the eastern coast, and continued south to Pearl Harbor.
But this time, the Americans fought back
The smoke in the harbor was now so thick
the Japanese pilots had trouble seeing their targets.
One of their targets was the battleship Nevada,
with a hole in her side, steaming toward the channel.
Dive bombers honed in on the crippled giant.
If they could sink the battleship now,
it might block the channel and trap the fleet in the harbor.
With all of these planes coming in when the, Nevada got under way
the planes come in, dive bombing that.
It looked like bees coming back to the hive.
There were so many of them in there at one time
that it was amazing that they didn't collide.
With bombs falling all around,
Nevada's commander was able to run his ship aground on hospital point
which kept her from sinking and left the channel clear.
By ten o'clock it was over.
He second wave of attackers headed back to their carriers,
leaving behind a shattered Pacifiic Fleet.
December 7th 1941 a date which will live in infamy
the United Sates of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked
by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan
The United States was at peace with that nation.
On the mainland, Americans were stunned by the news
they we're hearing from Pearl Harbor.
Every American alive over 65 years of age can remember exactly
where they were and what they were doing when they got the news.
It was unifying event. It brought us together.
Nothing else could have done it in that way.
"And Attacked by Japan on Sunday December 7th 1941
President Roosevelt addressed the Congress the following day.
A state of war has existed
between the United States and the Japanese Empire."
And by December 11 th,
the United States was at war with Germany and Japan,
plunging it into a conflict that would forever change its place in the world.
Back in Pearl Harbor, one problem survivors faced
was notifying people back home that they were okay.
The Navy told us that everybody sent a postcard home to your parents
letting them know everything is all right.
Well I got one of the last postcards out of there
and I sent it home on December the 9th is exactly when I sent it home.
And my mother didn't get that post card until February
the fiirst week of February some time.
I don't know why it took so long but that's what it did.
She didn't know if I was alive or dead.
When the mailman got the card at the post offiice,
he closed down the offiice and ran all the way to my house.
He woke my mother and step father up at 6:00 in the morning
and told them, your son's ok Here's a card.
Ha, I still have that card.
My mom she couldn't be, believe it.
I get emotional when I think about it.
How she says she, she felt.
I just don't know it just turns me on.
Jack McCarron had been married to his high school sweetheart Roberta
for seven weeks when the attack came.
It wasn't until Christmas day that she found out
what had happened to her husband who was stationed on the Arizona.
The Navy Department deeply regrets to inform you that
your husband John Harry McCarron, gunners mate second US Navy
has been reported wounded in action in the performance of his duty
and in the service of his country.
This was received by me
Christmas morning, 7 am, December 25th, 1941.
Yuck You know I hate to say this but in my entire 81 years of living
that was the worst time in my entire life
was to have received this telegram.
Because I had no idea
whether or not my husband of 49 days was alive or dead.
Lying in a hospital on Oahu, badly burned,
Jack decided to spare his new wife the horror of seeing him again.
I said tell Roberta to forget about me and go back to Saugus,
cause you know I had been burned and I had my, I didn't look like me,
I guess my face and my hair was only like a, you know, short.
On top of which it being Christmas.
I was 3000 miles away from my home.
3,000 miles away from my husband. I didn't know anybody.
I guess I never did write to you for, I didn't write to her for a long time.
The state of shock I was in was almost as bad as his.
Some time passed before I, I probably started coming out of it
and I was aboard ship and you know I love this girl.
And now I realize that if I was going to survive it would be with her.
My friends and shipmates took me over to the sick bay at Ford Island.
And they laid me alongside the bulkhead over there.
I looked over another ship mate laying across from me against the bulk head
and he was holding his intestines in with his hands.
And he looked up at me
and he said that it sure, war sure is hell isn't it, shipmate.
And I said yeah it is.
Well, lately I was diagnosed with stomach cancer
and I don't fiigure I have too many more years to live
and I thought that perhaps I might be a poor spokesman so to speak
for my shipmates in telling my story so that they wouldn't be forgotten
and that's the one and only reason that I came back
And I'm a kind of a private person.
It's been hard to do.
But I think it was time that it needed to be told.
And I think it has been well worth it.
I, I feel a lot better now.
It's the fiinal day of the search,
and Ballard has had his machines in the water for hours.
But he's not hopeful about the outcome.
We're in the fiinal throes of this expedition.
I mean today's the last day, we have two subs going in the water right now,
but we're, you know it doesn't look good
because we've looked at all the high priority sites
and we haven't found the midget submarine.
We're now out in the very low priority areas
and that can go on forever because it's a big ocean.
So I'd be very surprised if we succeeded today.
Deepworker returns from its pass at the wall
and is hoisted out of the water for the fiinal time.
With it is a videotape of the debris it encountered.
The news isn't encouraging.
"We have a possibility but I'm personally not hope it...
A quick review of the videotape confiirms Ballard's fears.
On closer examination,
what had looked to the sub pilot like a pile of batteries
turns out to be something else.
"Looks like anti aircraft gun clips isn't that what it looks like to you
And the torpedo the pilot spotted has had its warhead removed
so it can't be from the lost midget sub.
You reach a moment when you know you're not going to succeed
because you've given it the best shot
you're going back over the same territory
seeing the same targets for the second or third time.
Well, we've found a bunch of junk
We don't really have a defimitive set of objects
that says that the submarine broke up but it could have.
So...
clearly the sub did not survive
and did the ward play a role in its demise?
Certainly it did.
But how did it fiinally meet its end?
Gloriously in battle in Pearl Harbor?
Was it sunk by someone else later on?
What was it's fiinal moments?
And for now we don't know what they were.
The mystery of what happened to the midget subs would have been even deeper.
Had it not been for a surprise development
on the morning of December 8th, 1941.
In the early morning hours,
a small submarine washed ashore on Oahu's east coast.
It was the one piloted by ensign Kasuo Sakamaki
the sub with the gyroscope problems.
Sakamaki also washed ashore exhausted and delirious.
He was captured before he could kill himself
and thus became America's fiirst prisoner of war.
Of the ten submariners who set out before dawn on the 7th,
Sakamaki was the only one who survived.
Historians have generally labeled the submarine mission a failure
since only one midget that we know of entered the harbor
and was sunk during the attack after fiiring two harmless torpedos.
But analysis of a photo taken from a Japanese airplane
just as the battle began suggests something else.
It shows battleship row already under attack a few minutes after eight
and in the water just beyond a shadowy shape
that appears to be a small submarine
and the wake of a torpedo aimed directly at the West Virginia.
While some historians remain skeptical,
that analysis could explain a message Dewa received on the night of the 7th
more than twelve hours after the attack
It came from his friend, ensign Yokoyama.
"Successful surprise attack"
Then silence.
Yokoyama's sub never made the rendezvous
and neither did any of the others.
For years Dewa has wondered what happened to Yokoyama
and all the others who didn't come back
All he knows is that somewhere, in these waters they died,
as they expected they would.
Of course I hoped they would return, but the commander told me.
If I come back I'll come back with a wolf as we say in Japan
and put the mother sub in danger so I don't think they planned to return
even if they had succeeded.
Before he set out on his mission
one of the submariers left behind a poem he'd written earlier that day.
AS THE CHERRY BLOSSOMS FALL
AT THE HEIGHT OF THEIR GLORY
SO, TOO, MUST I FALL
THAT MEN MAY CALL ME
A FLO WER OF YAMOTO,
THOUGH MY BONES LIE SCATTERED
IN THE BLEAK WILDERNESS
OF STRANGE AND DISTANT LANDS.
On the last day of his visit, Dewa asks to see the Arizona memorial
to pay his respects to the Americans who died on December 7th.
America and Japan must have had their reasons for starting a war.
But after coming here and seeing the waves of the Pacifiic
I question why we had to go to war.
Japan and the United States are brothers.
Pacifiic peace is world peace.
This trip has made me feel that together we must protect it.
Jack McCarron and Carl Carson are also there
to remember their ship and their shipmates.
Underwater, the National Geographic camera prowls through the empty ship,
these are the fiirst images of the offiicer's quarters.
Images from a another era, frozen in time.
A bathroom, with it's regulation soap dish.
An offiicer's deskits papers still arranged in their pigeon holes
a washbasin now fiilled with sand beneath a shaving mirror
For Jack McCarron, the pictures of his old ship are almost too painful to bear.
"For over 40 years over 40 years I couldn't
if I was asked I couldn't talk I didn't talk about it,
I didn't think about it, I had erased it from my mind
I didn't have any memories,
I really didn't
I saw that barnacles on that doorknob,
and the lights overhead, and I thought
who was that offiicer down there, did he survive?
At one time that knob was real nice and shiny
and he turned on that light to read.
I don't remember the ship as that."
The legacy lives on in a Navy ship called the U.S.S. Pearl Harbor.
For survivors, a journey on this ship is a chance to see the advances
that have taken place over the decades
and to participate in some things that never change.
Wandering through the galley,
Clark Simmons recalls his service in the segregated Navy of 1941.
There was only one duty open to you.
And that was serving the offiicers.
I've been very impressed by the achievements of the black Americans
abord the ward the young ladies.
Some of the leading pay off abord the ship of Black Americans,
I don't know the word should put it, how happy I am to see
the things that they have done
For veterans like Charles Christiensen,
this is a chance to pass on the legacy of the battle
to a new generation of sailors.
'Oh, I look at them and I see me when I was eighteen when I joined
I was nineteen when the attack went off.
I can't even imagine it.
I mean I can't imagine if I would panic or not.
I can't imagine my world being turned upside down,
and my whole world to be on fiire.
For three days after the attack the Arizona continued to burn.
The fiinal totals from the surprise assault were staggering.
More than 2400 deaths and almost 1200 wounded.
21 ships of the U.S. Pacifiic Fleet had been sunk or damaged,
including all eight battleships.
Over 300 airplanes had been put out of commission.
Admiral Yamamato had accomplished everything he set out to do
except destroy the American aircraft carriers.
And in the fiighting to come, that would proved to be a critical failure.
One of the best things that ever happened to the United States was
our carriers were not involved in the attack
Yamamato sank battleships.
The battleship was not the queen of the seas any longer after that day.
From now on it's the aircraft carrier.
And the attack on Pearl Harbor for all of the losses of live,
which comes fiirst of course, and the losses of ships,
they didn't sink any aircraft carriers and that made,
what was already a very bad mistake on Japans part even worse.
But perhaps the greatest miscalculation was
how the defeat would affect the American fiighting spirit.
Instead of a crippling blow, it became a rallying cry.
The next morning, the fiire was still burning,
and there was the ships, some of them not for sure
some of them still had the flag flying from yesterday,
and at 8 o'clock guess what?
These ships were sitting there in the mud,
its time to raise the flag and there's the American flag flying,
everything is fiine.
And then the Americans went to work
Every ship that had been hit
except the Arizona, Utah and Oklahoma was refloated,
repaired, and put back into service.
Many would take part in the battles yet to come
Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa
And so would the men who survived that day.
I grew up in the Navy. I learned a lot.
When I came out of the Navy I was 6ft even, weighed 200lb.
I actually grew up.
I learned to be, you could say, a man.
When I walk with the Pearl Harbor survivors
especially when I have my uniform on I walk very proud.
I represent the country and I will represent it 'til the day I die.
And I will always be proud to be part of it.
Well Pearl Harbor to me is like beginning a new life.
I may be a certain age but it seemed that I was reborn that day.
Pearl Harbor survivors are special.
They have a feeling for each other and for their country.
They have a comradeship that is not matched anywhere in the civilian world.
The only people that I've ever met
that have that kind of comradeship are foxhole buddies.
These guys were in foxholes together,
It's not a feeling of 'we showed them,' it's not a feeling of triumph.
It's a feeling of we did it together, we were there, and that's what matters.
It's kind of a hallowed place. It's very beautiful.
I'm amazed that it's this beautiful.
And I understand that this millions of visitors every year
that come by to pay their respects to my shipmates.
To a lots of them I know a lot of them they were just names
but to me they'll always be my shipmates.
I don't think we'll ever be done with Pearl Harbor.
I think Pearl Harbor is like Gettysburg,
it's like Appamatox its like Lincoln's assassination it's like Yorktown
and the surrender to General Washington.
God help our country if it's ever forgotten.