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If a man does his best, what else is there? -- General George Patton Jr |
Pearl Harbor Raid, 7 December 1941, USS Arizona during the Pearl Harbor Attack(295 total words in this text)(2372 Reads) 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. Blazing furiously, Arizona quickly settled to the bottom of Pearl Harbor, a total loss. She burned for more than two days and was subsequently the subject of only partial salvage. Over 1100 of her crew were killed, including Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd, Commander Battleship Division One, and the ship's Commanding Officer, Captain Franklin Van Valkenburgh. Their sacrifice, and that of the other men lost at Pearl Harbor, is now permanently memorialized by the USS Arizona Memorial, erected over her sunken hull in the berth it has occupied since shortly after 8 AM on 7 December 1941. |
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This Day in History
1775:
The American Revolution begins as fighting breaks out at Lexington, Massachusetts.
1861: Residents of Baltimore, Maryland, attack a Union regiment while the group makes its way to Washington. 1861: President Lincoln orders a blockade of Confederate ports. 1927: In China, Hankow communists declare war on Chiang Kai-shek. 1938: General Francisco Franco declares victory in the Spanish Civil War. 1943: Waffen SS attack Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto putting down the uprising. 1951: I and IX Corps reached the Utah Line, south of the Iron Triangle. 1951: General MacArthur denounced the Truman Administration before a joint session of Congress for refusing to lift restrictions on the scope of the war. 1952: The U.N. delegation informed the communists that only 70,000 of 132,000 of the prisoners of war held by the United Nations Command were willing to return home. |