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7th grade pearl harbor history fair project
Only two bombs hit Arizona that day. The first hit the side of turret #4 and richocheted off into the deck next to it, penetrating the deck and starting a small fire that was quickly extinguished.
The second hit between the forward turrets on the starboard side. It penetrated not only the main deck but two armored decks below and started off a chain reaction in the ammunition stored in teh forward end of the ship. Enormous heat and pressure built up inside, setting off more ammunition and buckling the insides of the ship. Within seconds of the hit, the pressure built up so much that the hull of the Arizona began to deform; inflating outward as if a balloon. Soon it was too much for her hull to take and the sides of the forward end blew out.
An unearthly howl filled the air as a massive explosion erupted from her hull. Flames burst from the shattered steel and leapt hundreds of feet into the air. A thick blast of smoke shot straight up from her smoke stack, leading to rumors that she had been destroyed by a single bomb that had gone down her stack. Fuel Oil tanks had been demolished by the explosion and hundreds of thousands of oil from Arizona fed the conflagoration for days and threatened to destroy other ships as well.
In that instant, nearly a thousand men died. More could quickly follow.
Today the battle-scarred, submerged remains of the battleship USS Arizona rest on the silt of Pearl Harbor, just as they settled on December 7, 1941. The ship was one of many casualties from the deadly attack by the Japanese on a quiet Sunday that President Franklin Roosevelt called "a date which will live in infamy." The Arizona's burning bridge and listing mast and superstructure were photographed in the aftermath of the Japanese attack, and news of her sinking was emblazoned on the front page of newspapers across the land. The photograph symbolized the destruction of the United States Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and the start of a war that was to take many thousands of American lives. Indelibly impressed into the national memory, the image could be recalled by most Americans when they heard the battle cry, "Remember Pearl Harbor."The massive explosion that followed has never been fully explained, since the bomb apparently did not pierce Arizona's armored deck, which protected her magazines. Many qualified authorities have blamed powder storage outside of the magazines as the cause, but this is conjectural and probably will always remain so. In any case, the battleship was utterly devastated from in front of her first turret back into her machinery spaces. Her sides were blown out and the turrets, conning tower, and much of the superstructure dropped several feet into her wrecked hull. This tipped her foremast forward, giving the wreck its distinctive appearance.
More than a million people visit the USS Arizona Memorial each year. They file quietly through the building and toss flower wreaths and leis into the water. They watch the iridescent slick of oil that still leaks, a drop at a time, from ruptured bunkers after more than 50 years at the bottom of the sea, and they read the names of the dead carved in marble on the Memorial's walls.
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