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“People were seeing for the first time,” says Martinez, “their sailors badly wounded and dying.” “This place probably shook.”Īs the women and children huddled for safety, wounded sailors who had made their way to shore from Battleship Row were brought into the Dungeon for medical care. “The sound was just horrific,” says Martinez. Just a thousand feet away, the USS Arizona blew up shortly after 8 a.m. Beneath that home is a cavernous, concrete bunker that during World War I was a gun battery, later deactivated. It lies beneath the home of an admiral on the northeastern tip of the island. There was a sanctuary here when the bombs fell. 7, 1941, when Navy officers and their families awoke here on that Sunday morning just before the Japanese attacked. It’s a time capsule carrying visitors back to a peaceful moment on Dec. service members visit the monument in dress uniforms to pay homage.įORD ISLAND - The lush, green Nob Hill neighborhood on this island’s northeastern end is filled with graceful, Craftsman-style single-family homes dating to the 1930s, with swaying palm, mango and acacia trees scattered about. Rippel, who authored a history of the base titled Marine Corps Base Hawaii on the Mokapu Peninsula, says Japanese military personnel who today train here jointly with U.S. A mound of rocks and a plaque fix the spot where a Japanese Zero fighter plane crashed after sailors shot it down. One of the most unusual war markers from the attack is just up the hill from the seaplane hangars. 30-caliber machine gun out in the open on the ramp and started blasting away at enemy aircraft. MARINE CORPS BASE HAWAII - Somewhere across the broad, windswept seaplane ramp off Kaneohe Bay, Navy Chief Petty Officer John Finn fought out in the open until he was almost shot to pieces from shrapnel, suffering more than 20 wounds.Īs Japanese fighters and bombers pummeled what was then Naval Air Station, Kaneohe Bay - 30 miles northeast of Pearl Harbor along Oahu’s Windward Coast - Finn set up a. “The reason I love the ship so much is that nobody else seems to.” “It’s frustrating to me,” says Taylor, who has led small groups to see the sunken ship when he volunteered for the Navy public affairs office. But that is still at least a few years away. The National Park Service manages the site and hopes someday to bring tourists to visit. The Navy worked for years trying to salvage the vessel before giving up. Sixty-two sailors were killed in the attack, most of them trapped when the ship rolled over. It had been stripped of its big guns and had a crew of only 525. Commissioned in 1911, it was converted to a target vessel in 1931 for planes doing practice bomb runs. The Utah was not a lucrative target for the Japanese in 1941. Tomich posthumously was awarded the Medal of Honor in 2006. If he hadn’t secured the boilers, they would have exploded.” “He ordered everybody else to leave,” says Taylor, 77, who has become an unofficial historian of this hidden memorial.
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Tomich, 48, purposely stayed below decks after the explosion. “He was down in the engineering spaces,” Taylor says of the Utah’s chief watertender, Peter Tomich, whose body was entombed in the wreck, along with those of dozens of other sailors.Īll were trapped when the ship capsized minutes after being struck by a Japanese torpedo. You are contributing to debate and discussion, and helping to make this website a more open place.Taylor, who once worked at Naval Brig nearby and brought prisoners here to raise and lower a nearby flag and learn discipline, knows every detail of the sunken ship and tells its stories. Thank you for following these guidelines and contributing your thoughts.