In 2016, a camera went where no diver is allowed to explore.
Inside the USS Arizona, 40 feet beneath Pearl Harbor.
Watching the live feed was 94year-old Donald Stratton, who had escaped that ship at 19, crossing a rope above burning oil.
On the screen, his ship came back to him.
A telephone still on its hook, a sink still mounted to the deck.
Rooms left exactly as the crew had left them on the 7th of December, 1941.
More than 900 of those men are still aboard, and behind one sealed port hole, the camera found something that should not still exist.
The first pictures came up green, then black.
Within seconds of slipping through an opening in the hull, the drone’s lights were moving along a corridor of the USS Arizona, its floor buried in silt and its ceiling glistening.
The pilot eased forward.
Nothing on the screen moved quickly because nothing inside the Arizona can be approached quickly.
The glisten on the overhead was oil.
Decades of it risen inside sealed compartments and pressed flat against the steel like a coat of black lacquer.
Then the first object appeared, a sink still mounted, its basin sitting so low in the silt that it looked as though it grew straight out of the deck.
The drone belonged to Deep Treker, a Canadian company that builds compact underwater drones, and it was being flown by the firm’s president, Sam McDonald.
Brett Seymour, deputy chief of the National Park Services Submerged Resources Center, sat alongside, calling out directions and commentary.
Beside them, watching the live feed with his family, sat Donald Stratton.
The drone pushed on a ragged hole where a bomb had punched through steel.
And on a bulkhead, a telephone, its handset still resting in the cradle where someone had hung it up.
Every one of those objects had been used by a young man on an ordinary peacetime morning.
Someone had washed at that sink.
Someone had picked up that receiver, spoken to another part of the ship, and set it back down.
Then the alarm sounded, the compartment emptied, and nobody ever came back to it.
Before the camera goes any deeper, subscribe now because behind one sealed port hole inside this ship sits a discovery that changes what the Arizona actually is.
Stratton knew this ship.
Speaking to Fox News later that year, he captured what struck him in one short line.
The phone was there on the desk and the light bulb was in the socket.
Ordinary fittings exactly where the crew had left them.
75 years after the morning that killed most of the men who used them.
For a man who had carried the ship in his memory for 3/4 of a century, the footage was not history.
It was home seen again through water and silt.
The corridors he had walked, the fittings he had touched, and the spaces where his friends had lived were all still there, quieter and darker, but recognizably the same ship.
Macdonald later wrote that sharing the moment Stratton saw his ship for the first time since 1941 was one of the most emotional experiences of her life.
Deep Treker put the footage online with Stratton’s memories woven through it.
It was the first time anyone had toured the interior of the Arizona with a member of her own crew acting as guide.
Yet the man guiding that camera was only alive to see it because of a decision made in seconds on the deck of another ship by a sailor who disobeyed a direct order.
On the morning of the 7th of December 1941, the Arizona was mured on battleship row along the eastern side of Fort Island.
She belonged to the first World War generation of American battleships launched in 1915 and modernized in the early 1930s.
68 ft long with 12 14-in guns arranged in four turrets.
Roughly 1,500 men were assigned to her.
It was a Sunday.
Many of the crew were still waking up, eating breakfast or getting ready for colors.
The morning flag ceremony due at 8:00 sharp.
On deck, the ship’s band was assembling to play the national anthem as the flag went up.
Nobody aboard had any reason to think the day would differ from the one before it.
Stratton had joined the Navy in 1940.
Straight out of high school in Redcloud, Nebraska, and the Arizona was his first ship.
Years later, in his memoir, All the Gallant Men, he would sum up the chance that put him aboard her that weekend with a phrase he repeated often.
Everybody had to be someplace.
Japanese aircraft arrived over the harbor shortly before 8.
Stratton, a seaman first class, ran to his battle station in the port gun director, a platform high in the forward superructure used to aim the ship’s anti-aircraft guns.
From there, he watched the attack spread across the anchorage.
Torpedoes running toward the battleships, smoke climbing from Ford Island.
Several bombs struck the Arizona.
One of them, an armor-piercing round dropped from high altitude, penetrated the forward deck near the second turret and went deep into the ship.
Seconds later, the forward magazines detonated.
A magazine is where a battleship stores the powder for her main guns, and the Arizona’s held hundreds of tons.
The blast tore the forward section apart from within.
It heaved the ship upward in the water, collapsed the formast and bridge forward toward the bow, and sent a fireball rolling over the superructure where Stratton stood.
For a few seconds, the platform was surrounded by nothing but fire and noise.
Below the men on it, the forward half of their ship was already gone.
He was burned over roughly 70% of his body.
The ship settled into the harbor mud in about 9 minutes and burned for more than 2 days.
Six men were trapped on the gun director platform.
Among them, Stratton and a fellow sailor named Lauren Bruner with fire below them and no way down.
Morted alongside was the repair ship vessel, and on her deck stood a boat swain’s mate named Joe George.
George had been ordered to cut his ship free of the burning.
He threw a heaving line across to the trapped men instead.
They hauled over a heavier line, made it fast, and went hand overhand toward the vestal across a gap Stratton later estimated at 70 to 80 ft above burning oil with the skin coming away from their hands.
The line sagged toward the flames as their weight came onto it, and every man on it knew that letting go meant dropping into burning water.
All six made it across.
One died in hospital that evening.
The vessel had herself been hit by bombs that morning and soon afterwards her crew cut her loose and ran her ground to stop her sinking.
The six had reached her with very little time to spare.
George was reportedly reprimanded for ignoring the order.
It took until December 2017, more than two decades after his death, for the Navy to award him the Bronze Star, an honor Stratton had campaigned for in his final years.
Stratton himself spent close to a year in hospitals, then reinlisted in 1944 and went back to the Pacific, serving off New Guinea, the Philippines, and Okinawa.
The scale of the loss aboard the Arizona remains hard to absorb.
1,177 sailors and marines died.
The greatest loss of life on any American warship in history, and close to half of all Americans killed at Pearl Harbor that day.
Only 335 of her crew survived.
23 sets of brothers died aboard her.
So did a father and son Thomas and William Free, and so did the entire ship’s band.
All 21 members of Navy band unit 22, who had played in a Battle of the Bands contest at the base the previous evening.
At General Quarters, a band’s men’s station was passing ammunition far below decks close to the forward magazines.
The band had been a source of pride aboard the ship.
A group of young musicians who had come up through Navy music training together and joined the ship as a unit.
Barely 12 hours after their last performance, not one of them was left alive to play again.
Most of those men never left the ship.
More than 900 remain inside the hall today.
Many of them in the forward section where the explosion collapsed bulkheads and sealed passageways shut.
Within 2 years, the Navy would cut away everything of the Arizona that still rose above the water and then walk away from the rest.
40 years of silence through 1942 and 1943.
Salvage crews cut away the masts and the superructure that broke the surface.
The two aft turrets were removed and their guns were later imp placed as coastal batteries on Oahu.
The forward section was too badly wrecked to be worth the effort.
By the end of 1943, the salvage was over, and what remained was a hull and a main deck sitting upright in the mud.
Everything above the water line gone, everything below it sealed.
In 1962, a memorial was dedicated above her.
A long white span designed by the architect Alfred Prace, who had himself been detained as an enemy alien after the attack.
It sags in the middle and rises at each end, a shape he described as initial defeat, followed by ultimate victory.
And the sag places its open center directly over the heart of the ship.
The flag above it flies from a pole fixed to the stump of the Arizona’s severed main mast.
Millions of visitors have stood on it since, and many never realize that it straddles the wreck rather than marking a spot nearby.
The hull lies across its footprint in about 40 ft of water, close enough to the surface that the base of a gun turret is visible on a calm day.
Across the water sits the battleship Missouri, on whose deck Japan formally surrendered in 1945.
The ship where the war began for the United States, and the ship where it ended, lie within sight of one another.
Yet for 20 years after the memorial opened, the wreck beneath it was, as a physical object almost unknown.
Its visitors were standing above a ship that, in practical terms, nobody had seen since the salvage crews left.
Nobody had measured it.
Nobody had drawn its current state.
In 1983, the National Park Service sent divers from its submerged cultural resources unit led by archaeologist Daniel Lenahan to change that.
Every measurement had to be taken without disturbing anything in water that often hit a divers’s own hands above compartments where men still lay.
What was planned as a quick inspection became a 10-day survey that produced thousands of measurements and the first real map of what lay below.
The divers found three of the ship’s 14-in guns still in place on the wreck.
Found unexloded ordinance on the deck, and they found conditions that made the work brutally slow.
Pearl Harbor is a working harbor, churned by vessel traffic and by streams carrying silt.
Visibility on the wreck can drop to a few feet, and one careless fin stroke can turn the water opaque.
Divers learned to build the ship in their heads, piece by piece, because they could only ever see a small patch of her at once.
A 68 ft battleship was mapped a few square feet at a time.
Then, working along the hull, they found something on the wreck that was not standing still at all.
Oil was rising out of the ship from somewhere deep inside, and it had been rising for more than four decades.
The black tears, visitors on the memorial see it before they understand it.
A single dark drop breaks the surface beneath the open floor, spreads into an iridescent ring the size of a dinner plate, and drifts away as a thin rainbow sheen.
Then another in the same place, then another.
The drops rise from several points along the hull year after year.
And for as long as the memorial has existed, people have called them the black tears of the Arizona.
On a still morning, the sheen spread slowly enough to follow by eye.
A thin slick sliding past the white pilings and out toward the open harbor.
When the ship was attacked, her tanks held well over a million gallons of fuel oil, thick bunker sea, close to tar at harbor temperatures.
A great deal burned in the fire.
More escaped over the decades, but the working figure used by the park service is that around 500,000 gallons are still aboard, held in tanks on the lower decks.
Scott Palowski, chief of cultural resources at the memorial, told the Honolulu Star Advertiser that somewhere between 1 and 4 L seep out every day.
The image is sentimental.
The chemistry behind it is not.
Each drop represents steel that has failed somewhere inside the ship.
And the slow leak raises an obvious question about what happens if the tank walls give way more broadly.
Half a million gallons of heavy fuel oil released into an enclosed harbor beside a major city and an active naval base would be an environmental disaster laid on top of a war grave.
Any cleanup would mean working directly over the remains of nearly a thousand men.
That is why the park service began treating the Arizona less like a monument and more like a patient.
Through the 1990s and 2000s, its specialists took small samples from the hull to measure how quickly the steel was thinning.
Seymour has described how the park service shared the ship’s plans, corrosion analyses, and hull thickness measurements with the National Institute of Standards and Technology so that engineers could model how the wreck would behave as it weakened.
The aim was to forecast which parts of the structure would fail first and in what order long before they did.
Seymour has said that nobody disputes the half million gallon figure.
What nobody can say with confidence is how much longer the containment holds.
The outside of the hall sits in warm oxygen richch harbor water that attacks steel without pause.
The tanks sit on the lower decks deep in the ship where every drop on the surface begins its climb.
Somebody had to see down there.
And the people whose word would decide whether that was allowed, were not engineers at all, but the old men who had once lived aboard her.
The rule that cannot be broken, no diver enters the Arizona to explore.
Not the park service’s own archaeologists, not Navy personnel, not anyone.
Out of respect for the men intombed in the hull, nobody has gone into the interior to survey, salvage, or search since the salvage teams left.
Divers swim over the deck, study the exterior, look into openings, and turn back.
In all the decades since, the ship has been open to human hands for one purpose only, and it has nothing to do with research.
It left machines, and even machines required consent.
Seymour told World War II magazine that remotely operated vehicles were sent inside only after the park service had obtained permission from Arizona survivors.
The men who had escaped the ship were asked whether a camera could enter the place where their friends still lay, and the work went ahead because they said yes.
By then, the survivors were in their 80s and 90s, and their answer carried the weight of everyone they had left behind.
These were men who had lost friends, brothers, and bunkmates in those compartments.
A camera entering the hull without their blessing would have been, for many of them, a kind of trespass.
With it, the robots became something closer to an act of remembrance carried out on their behalf.
The first foray were modest.
According to the manufacturer, a small video ray robot went down in 2004 as part of a study of the ship’s structural integrity.
And in 2009, a newer model became the first submersible to image the interior.
These were tethered vehicles trailing a cable back to the surface.
And the inside of the Arizona is a maze of door frames, collapsed bulkheads, piping, and debris.
Every turn added drag on the cable and risk to the machine.
Whole decks remained out of reach, including the lower levels where the oil tanks sit.
The machines could look into the ship, but they could not yet travel through her.
Even those limited glimpses produced a crucial finding.
The deeper the instruments went, the less dissolved oxygen there was.
In the water, in the sealed lower compartments, cut off from the circulating harbor by wreckage and oil, the water was close to stagnant, and steel corrods far more slowly without oxygen.
Seymour would later point to two factors working together.
Extremely low oxygen levels inside the ship and a protective shroud of marine life coating the outside.
The same collapse that trapped the crew had been preserving the interior of their ship.
The tomb was acting as a time capsule.
If the readings were right, the lower decks of the Arizona could hold rooms almost untouched since the attack, and the machines sent in so far had barely reached them.
The 11th hour.
In 2016, the 75th anniversary year, the park service went back with something far more capable.
This was a separate expedition from the Deep Treker dive with a different machine and a different purpose.
Working with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, National Geographic, and a company called Marine Imaging Technologies, the Park Service commissioned a remotely operated vehicle built specifically for the Arizona.
The team named it the 11th hour, where the Deep Treker drone had given a survivor a live tour.
The 11th hour was a scientific instrument designed to penetrate deeper into the wreck than anything before it.
It carried 4K cameras supplied by the Advanced Imaging and Visualization Laboratory at Woods Hole.
Set up to record in the near darkness of the interior, it measured dissolved, oxygen, salinity, and pH as it traveled.
And it collected samples of oil, sediment, and the microbial life growing inside the ship, all bound for analysis at a Harvard University laboratory.
Over a 10-day expedition, National Park Service archaeologist Matt Hanks and his colleagues deployed it through hatchways and down into compartments that, according to the team, had not been seen since the ship sank.
Donald Stratton was there again.
The PBS documentary Pearl Harbor into the Arizona broadcast on the 23rd of November 2016 follows him as he watches the live feed from the 11th hour moving through his ship.
A view he had long assumed he would never have.
By then he was one of only five living survivors of the Arizona.
And he had spent decades describing a ship nobody else could see.
Now the screen in front of him filled with her room by room.
The staircase, the cabins, the planking he had once stood on.
He watched as he had watched the first dive close to the screen, following each hip turn of the robot as it found another doorway.
Every space it entered belonged to the ship he remembered.
The film sets those images against rare 8 mm home movies shot by Enson Carl Weeden aboard the Arizona before the attack.
Young men on deck, the ship in sunlight, ordinary days at sea.
The same spaces appear twice, once full of life and once full of silt.
Each new compartment arrived the same way.
A doorway framed in growth, a pause while the lights adjusted.
Then the slow emergence of shapes out of the merc.
Pipes ran along the overhead where they had always run.
Paint still clung to some surfaces.
There was no sound, and the silence of the footage made every object seem to wait.
For the people watching on the surface, the effect was less like exploring a wreck than like walking into a house whose owners had stepped out a moment ago.
The oxygen readings dropped steadily as the vehicle went lower.
Seymour told National Geographic that the remarkably low oxygen levels, combined with the shroud of marine life outside had preserved both the ship and its contents to a surprising degree.
The pictures bore that out.
The robot moved through the part of the ship the crew called Officer’s Country.
It found a staircase leading down toward the captains and admirals cabins.
In one cabinet found a locker where sailors hung their clothes and in a closet a suit still hanging on its rail.
In the admiral’s quarters, a desk sat half buried in sediment.
Elsewhere, according to park service accounts, the floor lay under about 2 ft of silt.
In the officer’s wardroom, white soap dishes remained in place beside the sinks.
The cameras also caught a stretch of the ship’s teak deck, the same planking Stratton had stood on that morning.
PBS also released an image of a preserved telephone from inside the hull.
Seymour has been careful about how these images are used.
He told the Star Advertiser that robot missions deeper into the ship exist strictly to assess its condition not to examine personal belongings.
Because the Arizona is a grave, nothing was lifted.
Every object was photographed and left exactly where it lay.
The samples went to the laboratory.
The rooms went back to the dark.
The year carried a weight beyond science.
On the 27th of December 2016, Japanese Prime Minister Shinszo Abbe stood on the memorial alongside President Barack Obama in what was widely reported as the first visit by a sitting Japanese Prime Minister to the memorial alongside an American president.
Above the water, two former enemies laid wreaths below it.
Months earlier, a robot had carried its lights through the rooms their nation’s war had left behind.
Somewhere along the side of that hole, the cameras had also passed a small round fitting that most viewers would never think to notice.
What lay behind it would prove to be the strangest thing aboard, the air behind the glass.
It was a port hole.
Its meaning begins in the first minutes of the attack.
At General quarters, a warship seals herself.
The alarm sounds through every compartment, and men who were shaving, eating, or still in their bunks drop what they are doing and run.
Hatches slam.
Watertight doors swing shut and at every port hole someone reaches for the dead light.
The heavy steel cover hinged above the glass swings it down over the window and spins the clamps called dogs until the cover sits hard against its seal.
It is basic damage control meant to keep the hole watertight and to stop light escaping at night.
A trained sailor can do it in seconds without thinking.
On the morning of the 7th of December 1941, somewhere aboard the Arizona, a sailor did exactly that.
His hands found the deadlight, brought it down, and turned the dogs one after another.
Then he moved on to the next task, the next station, the next order.
Minutes later, the forward magazines went up.
The ship went down, and whoever closed that cover may well have gone down with her somewhere in the dark nearby.
75 years later, a camera inside the hull found the port hole he had sealed.
On the monitor, it looked like almost nothing.
A round shape in the steel, a disc of dark glass, the heavy cover behind it seated exactly as it had been seated on the last morning anyone touched it.
The camera held on it.
A few seconds of work by one pair of hands, carried out in the first minutes of the attack, was still sitting there in front of the lens, exactly as he had left it, waiting for nobody.
Dead light was still down.
The dogs were still turned.
The photograph, credited to Seymour, was published by World War II magazine in 2016, and its caption described the interior cover as still closed, trapping air from before the attack.
Air.
According to that caption, the small sealed space between the glass and the deadlight had held its atmosphere against the pressure of 40 ft of harbor water for 3/4 of a century.
The Arizona burned for more than two days, sank, was stripped by salvage crews, surveyed by divers, studied by scientists, and visited by millions of people.
And through all of it, that small pocket stayed exactly where a sailor’s hands had locked it in.
Consider what that space contains.
The air of a Sunday morning in Hawaii, drawn into the ship through open hatches and ventilators before anyone knew what was coming.
Air the crew had been breathing at breakfast.
Air from a world in which the United States was not yet at war, sealed in place in the very minutes that world was ending.
Every other trace of that morning has been burned, flooded, salvaged, eroded, or carried off by the tide.
This one has simply waited.
In principle, someone could open it and release a breath of December 1941.
Nobody will.
The entire ethic of the site exists to make sure that nobody does.
This is what the camera revealed about Pearl Harbor.
Not a secret and not a mystery, but something stranger inside the Arizona.
The moment of general quarters is still physically present.
The telephone is still on its hook.
The suit is still hanging.
The dead light is still dogged shut.
Everywhere else, the 7th of December, 1941, is history.
Down there, it is a condition held in place by low oxygen, collapsed steel, and the deliberate restraint of everyone who has worked on the wreck since.
And for nearly 40 years, the only people allowed to pass through that restraint have been the men who once served aboard her.
The crew comes home.
Since 1982, surviving members of the Arizona’s crew have been able to make an extraordinary choice.
When they die, their ashes may be interred inside the ship.
It is the one occasion on which divers cross into the Arizona, and they do it for a single reason, to bring the crew home.
The ceremony is precise.
Families and fellow veterans gather on the memorial above.
A bugler plays taps and national park service and Navy divers carry the urn down through the green water.
They place it within the hull through an opening in the barbett of one of the gun turrets among the men the survivor once served beside.
And then they leave, rising slowly back toward the light while the ceremony above waits for them.
The urn goes down slowly, carried by hand through water that turns from green to gray as the divers descend along the hull.
At the opening, there is no audience and no music.
Only the silt, the low light, and the men who wait inside.
Over the decades, dozens chose it.
A ship that had held its dead since 1941 began.
One by one, receiving its living crew home.
Lauren Bruner, who had crossed Joe George’s line beside Stratton, was the last.
He was interred in the Arizona in December 2019.
Stratton made the opposite choice.
He had said for years that he wanted to be buried in his home state of Nebraska.
And when he died in Colorado Springs in February 2020, aged 97, flags at the memorial were lowered to half staff in his honor.
Lu Hunter, a quartermaster who had been on deck when the forward magazines exploded and who went on to fly patrol bombers in the Pacific, became the last surviving member of the crew.
He died in 2024 at the age of 102.
No one who served aboard the Arizona that morning is still alive.
That makes the 2016 footage impossible to repeat.
A man who climbed along a burning rope at 19 lived long enough to watch a camera move through his own ship at 94 and recognize what it showed him.
Future cameras may go further and see more than either robot did in 2016.
None of them will have a crewman beside the monitor naming what he sees.
Every future expedition will go in without a witness.
The ship can still be seen.
It can no longer be recognized.
None of this has been hidden.
The casualty lists, the 1983 survey, the oil estimate, and the interior footage are all public, and the footage aired nationally on PBS.
The only thing withheld is the interior itself, closed by agreement between the park service, the Navy, and the survivors.
A wreck in 40 ft of water, could be stripped by a salvage company in weeks.
Instead, it has been left almost untouched for nearly 85 years.
The restraint is the story.
Hard questions remain all the same.
The steel is thinning on the outside while the inside stays preserved, and no one can say when those two clocks will meet.
Pumping out the oil would mean cutting into a grave.
Leaving it means trusting tank walls that have been corroding since 1941.
The forward section, where the blast hit hardest, and where most of the men lie, has never been fully reached by any camera.
And no one knows how many other sealed spaces in that hole still hold the air of a December morning.
What is certain is the picture Donald Stratton saw.
40 feet below the white memorial.
A telephone hangs on its hook in the dark exactly as someone left it before the morning that ended everything for 1,177 men.
It is still there.
So are they.
If this story stayed with you, subscribe now because the next video goes down to another wreck that has been left sealed since the day she sank.
And what the cameras found there is just as hard to forget.
And in the comments, answer this.
Should the oil be removed from the Arizona to protect the harbor, even if it means cutting into a war grave?
Or should the ship be left untouched for as long as she lasts?
