That Peaceful Sunday morning when the first heavy bomb crashed like a falling freight car, exploded like a thunderhead, salvage started. As the anti-aircraft answered with spitting streams of steel, while the streaks of the tracer bullets crisscrossed the blue or darted their bright lines point blank at the low oncoming torpedo planes, damage control and salvage officers were calmly at work. Like a volcano, the ships erupted their vast rolling black smoke high into a heaven as bright as Pompeii’s. In the crater of this Vesuvius, amid the flame and shattering din, these salvage men worked along with the gunners and rescue crews, and planes became glowing meteors shooting to earth, leaving black tails against the sky. Then the last hum of the Jap planes vanished in air to seaward. "Cease firing"—and the gunners rested. Days later the rescue work was done. But all through the warm winter and the bright summer, the salvage work went on. All glory to the men that fought and died. Heroes alive or heroes dead. But the glory of salvage is unsung, the romance little understood.

The resurrection of a ship dead in the water that she fouled in dying. A lifeless gargantuan whale on the beach, the barnacles clinging to her oil-blackened sides, and the stench arises and hangs over her like a vile cloud. Down by the head, her big hawse holes stare like sightless eyes, awash. The knowledge of man created her—and the same knowledge raises her from the dead. In time her vast, unwieldy body, incapable of movement, is hauled across the harbor. The salvage vessels, like internes, stagger drunkenly with her weight, float her into the hospital where the second miracle will be performed. Months later, the repairs have been completed with a speed never before equalled, and she moves proudly out, vibrating with her own power, her rails lined with men in white, her colors snapping defiantly in the breeze.

USS West Virginia

The West Virginia was moored outboard of the Tennessee at Berth F6. She was astern of the Oklahoma and forward of the Arizona. The Senior Surviving Officer was, at the time of the engagement, the Ship’s Executive Officer. He was in his cabin when, at 0755, the word was passed, "Away Fire and Rescue Party." This was followed instantly by General Quarters, and by a Marine rushing into his cabin announcing, "The Japanese are attacking us!" At the same moment two heavy shocks were felt somewhere forward on the port side, as her guns opened fire. As he reached the Quarterdeck, the ship was rapidly listing to port. Another heavy explosion on the same side jarred her. The plane on top of Number 3 Turret caught fire, enveloping the top of the turret in flames. The Quarterdeck sentry informed him that the Captain was on the Bridge, so he remained aft assisting in extinguishing the blaze around the turret and on the Quarterdeck.

Every officer and man aboard the old battle wagon, aloft, on deck or below, courageously performed his duty. They fought her till all available ammunition was gone, all power was dead, and fire had driven them overboard. She had several torpedoes in her port side, and two bombs had penetrated her decks. The vessel, surrounded by fire, rested on the bottom with a three degree list to port, the main deck on that side slightly under water. To the Japanese aerial observers she was a wreck, dead in the mud; to our salvage officers, a problem just begun. The fires were put out the next day, Monday. All that the ship’s company asked was another chance at the enemy. Their devotion to duty and their performance of duty, had given new meaning to those phrases. And this was true of every officer and man throughout Pearl Harbor.

Never mind how the salvage was done, but it was done, the impossible was accomplished. When the California floated out of drydock, the West Virginia floated in. By then the battleships Pennsylvania, Nevada, Tennessee and Maryland, namesakes of our states—and the cruisers, namesakes of our cities—had long since been repaired and gone out to fight for our country. The West Virginia is now a reborn ship, and her big main batteries will have their devastating revenge on the weakening enemy. For Japan made her initial mistake that Sunday morning.

Salvage has triumphed, for in the end only the Arizona will alone remain, and she has long since given up her ammunition, guns and other valuable material. The scrap of her empty twisted hull will be melted into shells, to be hurled by her sister ships at the Jap.

There were plenty of heartbreaks and agonizing worries, the day that the West Virginia floated, the water pouring in streams from her pumps, her colors flying in the bright sunshine. Several days of feverish work, with always the danger that she might sink again, and then she slowly floated in the dock.

I went down in her before she was drydocked. Took off all my clothes and was given a loose fitting covering with white lacings down the front, stuffed the baggy legs into rubber boots, pulled on big gauntlets, and followed the Salvage Officer. The ladders and rails were slippery with thick oil, and movement in the big boots was slow and hazardous. Below, the decks in many places were knee deep in black putrid fluid, the slime beneath treacherous as the foot moved slowly forward, feeling for buried objects that might trip and throw you down into the filth. She had taken on many tons of meat the day before the blitz, and this was festering now. It was like sliding about in a cesspool, the stench was nauseating, the gas vile in the nostrils.

The Salvage Officer rubbed the black incrustation of barnacles on the bulkhead with his thick glove, shot his flashlight here and there and laughed happily at all the improvement he saw here. Not many days before, a man had imprudently opened a petcock in a bulkhead door, and the jet of gas had instantly killed him. Other men had been overcome by gas created by rolls of medicated gauze and cotton in the sick bay—this was a new one. We crawled through narrow openings made by the inward bulge of ragged steel, and went on and down, until I had seen all he wished to show. Grateful, I hid my inner revulsions. But eventually my turn came to laugh and thank him, when we stood on deck in the warm fresh air, as black as two merry minstrels.

And what of the Navy divers, those underwater eyes of salvage? Half afloat, half lumbering like a sleepwalker in an unreal world, they glide and stride in slow exaggeration, over the hard sharp coral and the oozy mud. Trying to remember where the ship’s jagged steel reaches out above them like knives to cut their airlines. The brain detached from the swimming unreality of the murky scene, just as a drunken man’s mind functions beyond the body’s obeying. On six vessels by July 13th, approximately three thousand dives were made, totaling nine thousand diving hours. In all this diving, much of it hazardous, there was not a single casualty. When the ship is finally in drydock and their art is exposed to air and light for the first time, the amazement of all that see is their reward. It is just as difficult inside the water-filled ship. Closing and opening watertight doors and hatches, operating valves and pumps to utilize piping systems on compressed air, removing submerged guns, or recovering confidential matter. Sometimes a poor body with drifting hair comes within their light’s beam, a ghastly meeting on a lonely job.

USS Oglala

The old mine layer, once a merchant liner, lay with her port side flat in the mud, fouling a good berth along Ten-ten Dock. A portion of her curving starboard side and bilge rose amidships, slightly above the surface. The thin skinned old girl was a cranky problem. The Oglala, together with the destroyers Shaw, Cassin and Downes, were listed publicly in February, 1942, by the Navy as total losses. To Salvage, this was an incentive and a challenge. They wanted that old hen up so that she might lay her devilish eggs again. After one try and several different studies, Salvage decided to right the ship first, and then to raise her by building a deck-edge coffer dam entirely around her.

The righting was primarily accomplished by the attachment of ten submarine salvage pontoons to the ship’s weather decks. Chains from these pontoons girdled the hull completely and were secured to stoppers on the starboard side above water. The righting, patching the hole, and raising was accomplished as planned. The principal difficulty was deficient stability, due to the heavy deck load of the coffer dam, and the fact that the free water surface in the ship could not be well controlled. Placed in drydock, reconditioned, she is now finished and afloat. Due to Salvage, instead of a total loss herself, she may cause by the secret laying of her eggs, the loss of many enemy ships.

The destroyers Cassin and Downes were in drydock abreast of each other, forward of the battleship Pennsylvania. A small bomb passed through the Cassin and exploded between them, riddling the side of the Downes and piercing her oil tanks. This caused the oil to flow out
and ignite, starting a fire beneath and around them. A second bomb between them opened all oil tanks, which fed the fire already started. The heat of the flames caused ammunition to explode on the Downes, and later detonated the warheads on Torpedo Tube III. Eventually, due to explosions and precautionary flooding of the dock, the Cassin fell over on the Downes. When the fire was out, the shriveled, blistered sides and the explosion-torn mass of the two ships, appeared a total loss. The paint on the Pennsylvania’s bow was scorched and she had small damage on her fo’castle. The Yard Salvage took care of that, and she rejoined the fleet in a few days. The Cassin and Downes were patched and floated out, their main machinery, fittings and other parts were put in a state of preservation. New hulls were constructed at Mare Island, with the amazing result of saving fifty percent of each of these vessels as first line destroyers.

All the many destroyers afloat moved rapidly out when the bombing started, and none were hit. The Shaw was in a floating drydock at the time of the attack, and was struck by three aircraft bombs. The explosion ruptured the forward fuel tanks, and scattered burning oil through the long narrow bow, the heat causing the forward magazines to blow up, wrecking the hull as far back as Frame 65. The Shaw’s fires spread through the dock, and four of the five bombs striking the floating drydock affected its water-tight integrity. The drydock sank, resting on the bottom at an angle of fifteen degrees.

Salvage found the watertight compartments of this dock were pierced by 155 fragments, all of which were patched by welding. Here then, was a ship with her whole bow blown off, enfolded in the sunken dock that had held her like a fish in a basket. The mangled bow was cut away, and the intact part of the vessel was towed clear of the drydock on December 19th. She was hauled out on a marine railway, preliminary repairs were done and measurements for a short false bow were taken. This was manufactured in the Yard, and installed when subsequently she was floated on the same dock that had in the meantime been repaired and refloated. She was the first vessel to be docked thereon. She went to the mainland under her own power, where a new bow was waiting her at Mare Island. She is now in full service as a first line destroyer, and I saw her lead a convoy into Pearl Harbor!

"The Report of Salvage at Pearl Harbor' by the Salvage Officer, Captain, USN, is a thrilling historic document that the Navy can well be proud of. Its clear writing tells eloquently one of the greatest triumphs of Yankee ingenuity.

Never ceasing her work on her own salvage, expanding to twice the size that she was when attacked, repairing the ships wounded in the southern Pacific, Pearl Harbor was the base for Midway. The carrier Yorktown came in from the Coral Sea with a Jap bomb in her and damaged planes. She was repaired and was able to plow up to Midway when the Islands were attacked.

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