Arizona Sank At Pearl Harbor. Three Years Later Her Guns Fired On Iwo Jima

In a plaza in downtown Phoenix, a few hundred yards from the Arizona State Capitol, two naval guns lie side by side. One came from the battleship Missouri, the ship on whose deck Japan signed the surrender in Tokyo Bay. The other is a fourteen-inch gun with a longer and stranger history. It was made for the battleship Arizona. It was supposed to have died with her. Instead it went back to war, aboard a different ship, and fired on Iwo Jima and Okinawa in the last year of the Pacific War. The two guns were placed together to mark the start and the end of America's war with Japan. Only one of them was meant to be the start.

Arizona never fired her main battery at an enemy. On the morning of December seventh, nineteen forty-one, a single armor-piercing bomb ended her in about seven seconds, and one thousand one hundred seventy-seven of her officers and men died with her. By every reasonable account, her fourteen-inch guns were finished that morning too. They were scrap, or a memorial, or both.

Three years and two months later, on the sixteenth of February, nineteen forty-five, those guns were firing on Iwo Jima from the forward turret of the battleship Nevada. The ship carrying them was itself a wreck from the same morning, beached and flooded at Pearl Harbor and written off by the Japanese pilots who had bombed her into the mud.

How does a gun from a ship that sank in seven seconds end up in combat on the other side of the Pacific? The answer runs through a salvage yard, a gun factory and a relining process most people never hear about. It starts with the steel.

The guns were born in nineteen fifteen, the year Arizona was launched at the New York Navy Yard. She was a Pennsylvania-class battleship, commissioned on the seventeenth of October, nineteen sixteen, carrying twelve fourteen-inch forty-five-caliber guns in four triple turrets, numbered one to four from bow to stern. Each gun was a built-up steel tube fifty-three feet long, assembled from an inner tube, a jacket and a series of hoops shrunk on while hot, so that the cooling metal squeezed the barrel tight enough to hold the pressure of four silk bags of smokeless powder. When the design entered service in nineteen fourteen, it threw a fourteen-hundred-pound armor-piercing shell out to twenty-three thousand yards. That was a world-class gun in nineteen sixteen. By the nineteen thirties it was an old one.

The Navy did not throw it away. Between nineteen twenty-nine and nineteen thirty-one, Arizona went through a full modernization at Norfolk, and her turrets were rebuilt so the guns could elevate to thirty degrees instead of fifteen. Across the fleet, the original Mark one guns were reworked for heavier charges and higher velocity and redesignated Mark eight. They could now fire a fifteen-hundred-pound armor-piercing shell, and the extra elevation pushed their reach past thirty-four thousand yards, more than seventeen nautical miles. The gun had not changed shape. It had been taught to throw a heavier shell half again as far.

That week in December nineteen forty-one, the fourteen-inch battleships at Pearl Harbor were in the middle of exactly that change. They were swapping their standard shells for the new, heavier projectiles, which carried a bigger bursting charge. Aboard Nevada, moored just astern of Arizona, the crew had emptied the old shells and powder out of the magazines and loaded the new projectiles. The new powder charges were due to come aboard on Sunday.

Sunday was December seventh.

At about eight minutes past eight, a Japanese bomb struck near Arizona's number two turret, the second turret from the bow. It went through the deck near the forward magazines. Roughly seven seconds later those magazines detonated. The explosion tore the forward part of the ship apart, threw men and debris across the harbor and killed the battleship's captain, Franklin Van Valkenburgh, and Rear Admiral Isaac Kidd on her bridge. Arizona settled to the bottom in about forty feet of water, burning for days. She was so badly damaged that the Navy concluded she could not be returned to service even if she were raised.

Astern of her, Nevada did something no other battleship on Battleship Row managed that morning. She was not moored alongside another ship, and her officer of the deck, Ensign Joe Taussig, had lit off a second boiler early. A torpedo hit her at ten minutes past eight. Her damage control parties counterflooded to correct the list, and at eight forty she got underway, the only battleship to move. Japanese dive bombers in the second wave went after her, hoping to sink her in the channel and bottle up the harbor. They hit her with at least five bombs. Gasoline fires broke out forward around her number one turret, and her magazines were spared only because the old powder had been taken out days before. Ordered not to sink in the deep water of the channel, she was run aground. Sixty of her men were killed.

So two ships came out of that morning. One was gone for good. The other was aground and flooded, but she could be saved. Neither, it seemed, would have anything more to do with the other.

Here the record splits, and it is worth hearing both versions, because each one changes what those guns meant.

The first version comes from Christopher Wright's study of the loss of Arizona, published in Warship International. The salvage crews took her surviving superstructure off in nineteen forty-two, and over the next year and a half they recovered her main armament. Her two aft turrets were lifted out and sent to the Army, which planned to mount them ashore on Oahu as coastal batteries named Battery Arizona and Battery Pennsylvania. The forward turrets stayed in the wreck. But according to Wright, the three guns of turret number two, the turret nearest the bomb that sank her, were pulled from the wreck, straightened and relined.

The second version is written on the gun in Phoenix. Its plaque says the gun was not aboard Arizona on December seventh at all. It was ashore, part of a set of Arizona's barrels sent away for relining, and it was still in the shop when the ship it belonged to blew up.

The two accounts disagree on where the steel was that morning. They agree on where it went next. In the fall of nineteen forty-four, three fourteen-inch guns that had been made for Arizona were fitted into the number one turret of Nevada, the forward turret that had burned at Pearl Harbor.

To understand why a gun can be lifted out of one ship, reworked, and dropped into another, you have to understand what wears out on a big naval gun, and what does not.

A fourteen-inch gun does not fail all at once. Every time it fires, several hundred pounds of powder burn in the chamber and drive the shell down the bore, and the heat and gas erode the rifling, the spiral grooves that spin the shell. The bore wears fastest just ahead of the chamber. As the rifling wears, muzzle velocity drops, the shell loses its grip, and the fall of shot spreads out. After a few hundred full charges, the gun is no longer accurate enough to trust.

The answer was the liner. The working surface of the barrel was a replaceable inner tube. When the rifling wore out, the gun went back to a gun factory, the old liner was bored or pressed out, and a new one was fitted inside the jacket and hoops. The massive outer structure, most of the gun's sixty-two tons, stayed the same. The part that touched the powder and the shell was new. A relined gun was, for practical purposes, a new gun in an old body.

For the guns that went into Nevada, relining was also an upgrade. Nevada's own account says they were relined to Mark twelve specifications. The Mark twelve was the version of the fourteen-inch forty-five that introduced chromium plating in the bore, a hard layer of chrome on the inner surface that slowed erosion and stretched the barrel's life. So the guns that came out of the shop were not just repaired Arizona guns. They were the most durable version of the weapon the Navy had.

Nevada herself had been rebuilt even more completely. She was refloated in February nineteen forty-two and sent to Puget Sound, where her old five-inch guns were replaced with sixteen five-inch thirty-eight dual-purpose guns in twin mounts, and her anti-aircraft battery grew to dozens of forty-millimeter and twenty-millimeter guns. She fought at Attu in the Aleutians in May nineteen forty-three. She escorted Atlantic convoys. She was Rear Admiral Morton Deyo's flagship off Utah Beach on D-Day, and she fired on the German batteries at Cherbourg. In August nineteen forty-four, off southern France, she spent six and a half hours dueling the fortress called Big Willie at Toulon, a battery of French battleship guns set into the rock of Saint-Mandrier, and fired three hundred fifty-four salvos at it in a single day.

That much firing wears a gun out. After southern France, Nevada went to New York to have her barrels relined. That is when Arizona's three guns went into her number one turret.

It was a fitting place for them. Nevada had been the ship that tried to fight her way out of the harbor while Arizona burned. Now her forward turret carried the guns of the ship she had left behind.

Nevada sailed for the Pacific under Captain Homer Grosskopf. She joined the fire support ships of Task Force fifty-four for Operation Detachment, the invasion of Iwo Jima, and arrived off the island on the sixteenth of February, nineteen forty-five, three days before the Marines were due to land.

Iwo Jima was eight square miles of volcanic ash and rock, and the Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, had spent months turning it into a fortress underground. His troops lived and fought in tunnels, caves and concrete blockhouses, many of them covered in ash so they were almost invisible from the sea. Months of air raids had barely touched them. The naval bombardment had to find and destroy positions it could not easily see, on an island where the defenders had no intention of showing themselves until the landing craft were on the beach.

On the morning of the sixteenth, Nevada closed the island with the battleships Idaho and Tennessee and opened fire on the cliffs of Mount Suribachi, the volcano at the island's southern tip. Her assignment for the landing was to support the Fifth Marine Division on the western beaches, below Suribachi, the ground the Japanese guns on the mountain looked straight down on.

This is where the work of the forward turret mattered. A five-inch shell weighs about fifty-five pounds. A fourteen-inch high-capacity shell weighs over eleven hundred. On D-Day at Iwo Jima, the nineteenth of February, Nevada's spotters watched her secondary battery fire on a concrete blockhouse and saw the five-inch rounds fail to break it. The ship shifted the target to her main battery. Against concrete, the difference between those two shells is the difference between scarring a wall and taking it apart.

For the next three weeks, Nevada fired on call for the Marines ashore. She moved in as close as six hundred yards from the beach to put her guns where the troops needed them, an extraordinary distance for a battleship. She stayed off Iwo Jima until the seventh of March. Every time her number one turret fired, three barrels made for a ship that had never fired a shot in anger were firing on the island the Marines were dying to take.

Iwo Jima was declared secure on the twenty-sixth of March. By then Nevada was already off Okinawa.

She joined Task Force fifty-four again for the bombardment of Okinawa, which began at dawn on the twenty-fourth of March, a week before the landings. The old battleships shelled airfields, shore defenses, supply dumps and troop concentrations. At night they pulled back offshore.

At dawn on the twenty-seventh of March, seven kamikaze aircraft attacked the force before its air cover arrived. One of them, an Aichi Val dive bomber, was hit again and again by anti-aircraft fire and kept coming. It crashed onto Nevada's main deck beside turret number three, the aft twin turret. Eleven men were killed. Both fourteen-inch guns in that turret were knocked out, along with three twenty-millimeter mounts.

The kamikaze had hit the right ship and the wrong end of it. Turret one, with Arizona's guns, was untouched.

Nevada stayed. On the fifth of April a Japanese shore battery hit her and killed two more men. She remained off Okinawa until the end of June, then joined the Third Fleet in July and early August, coming within range of the Japanese home islands in the last weeks of the war.

So what did those three guns actually achieve? They did not win Iwo Jima or Okinawa on their own. No three guns could. What they did was put fourteen-inch shells on targets that lighter guns could not break, for weeks at a time, at ranges as short as six hundred yards, in two of the hardest amphibious battles the Marines ever fought. Kuribayashi's defenses were built to survive bombing and destroyer fire. They were not built to survive a fifteen-hundred-pound armor-piercing shell or an eleven-hundred-pound high-capacity round landing on the same blockhouse until it stopped firing.

And they did it because of a decision made long before the war. The United States Navy had built its battleship guns to be repaired rather than replaced. The jacket and hoops were made to last decades. The liner was made to be thrown away. A navy that builds its heaviest weapons that way can take a gun from a sunken ship, or from a shop rack where it sat while its ship was destroyed, and put it back in the line within months. The Japanese Navy lost battleships it could never replace. The American Navy lost Arizona and still sent her guns to Iwo Jima.

Nevada survived the war, but not the peace. In nineteen forty-six she was painted reddish orange and anchored as the aiming point for the first atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll, Operation Crossroads. The bomb missed her by about seven hundred yards. She survived that, and the underwater shot that followed, too radioactive to keep. On the thirty-first of July, nineteen forty-eight, sixty-five miles southwest of Pearl Harbor, the battleship Iowa and two other ships used her for gunnery practice. They could not sink her. An aerial torpedo finally did. In twenty twenty, an expedition found her upside down in fifteen thousand four hundred feet of water, the number thirty-six still visible on her stern, her turrets lying in the debris field around her.

Arizona's turrets on Oahu never saw an enemy. Battery Arizona was never finished. Battery Pennsylvania fired for the first and only time on the day Japan surrendered, in a training shoot.

The gun in Phoenix outlived all of them.

In a plaza in downtown Phoenix, a few hundred yards from the Arizona State Capitol, two naval guns lie side by side. One came from the ship where the war ended. The other came from the ship where it began, and its plaque says it was not aboard her when she died. Whichever account is right, the gun did not stay part of a grave. It went to war under another ship's name, fired on Mount Suribachi and on Okinawa, and came home. Arizona never fired her main battery at the enemy. Her guns did.