"They were in this oil that was on fire. They were trying to swim out of it. They’d come up and try to get their breath. Their eyes, the white of their eyes, were just as red as they could be…the skin on their face was just falling off."
Charles Christensen, USS Argonne survivor

Seven American warships were docked at Ford Island in the middle of Pearl Harbor in what was known as Battleship Row. The men on board were sleeping or having breakfast, totally unaware that Japanese planes were hurtling towards them.

The battleship BB-39 USS Arizona, class Pennsylvania, was built in 1916 and weighed

31,400 tonnes. At 608 feet long and 97.1 feet wide, she needed a crew of 1,516.

As she rested on her mooring, a 1,760-pound bomb stabbed through her forward magazines [guns] igniting more than a million pounds of gunpowder. A sailor aboard the neighbouring USS Nevada watched the battleship jump "at least 15 or 20 feet upward in the water and sort of break in two".

The ship literally became an inferno. The whole of the bow section collapsed with the ship sinking in less than nine minutes. The sailors lucky enough to survive the initial blast jumped ship, only to be met with a sea of burning oil they had to swim through to safety. Many did not make it or were horribly burned.

Today, veterans of the battle, can not control their emotions as they explain there was nothing they could do for their shipmates. A total of 1,177 men died – over half of the final death toll.

Today, sixty years after the attack, the USS Arizona lies in 40 feet of water, bridged by a memorial to the men who died when the great battleship exploded. The bodies of the men who lost their lives when the bomb struck have never been removed and the ship is now both their tomb and a permanent reminder of all who died at Pearl Harbor. Now 1.5 million visitors, many of them Japanese, come to pay their respects each year. The memorial is cared for by the National Park Service.