Your feet rest above the sunken hull of the USS Arizona, entombed here since December 7, 1941. When a Japanese bomb pierced her forward deck and ignited her powder magazine, the explosion was so catastrophic that the battleship sank in just nine minutes. Of the 1,512 crew members aboard, 1,177 never made it off the ship.
They remain entombed here beneath your feet, in water barely forty feet deep. Look down through the viewing slots and you may see the rusted deck below the surface. What you almost certainly will see is oil — small iridescent droplets rising slowly from the wreck.
The Arizona still holds approximately half a million gallons of fuel oil in her tanks, and she releases a few quarts each day. Hawaiians call these drops 'the black tears of the Arizona.' The white memorial structure, completed in 1962 and designed by Alfred Preis — himself an Austrian immigrant who was interned as an enemy alien after Pearl Harbor — spans the sunken hull without touching it. The names of all 1,177 crew members are inscribed on the marble wall at the far end.
This is not merely a monument. It is a grave.