More than 80 years after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
USS Utah still sits in the shallows off the west side of Ford Island.
Most of the hull stays underwater, but part of the structure still breaks the surface.
It’s one of two American battleships sunk in the attack of December 7th, 1941, whose wreck still lies at Pearl Harbor.
But what makes Utah’s story unusual isn’t just that the ship was never fully salvaged.
The Navy actually tried.
They brought winches, massive pulling frames, and cable [music] out to the site.
Divers worked around the capsized hull.
Then the machine started pulling and a battleship weighing more than 20,000 tons actually moved.
Still, Utah never came back up.
It was only pulled part of the [music] way out of its capsized position, rolled partway toward upright.
And by March 1944, [music] the hull still sat healed over 37° 45 minutes to port.
And the moment they’d [music] reached that point, the Navy decided to stop.
12 years later, the Navy looked at salvaging the ship again.
Utah still never got raised.
Why would a battleship that had already been moved successfully, in part, keep sitting at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, even after the reasons for needing that stretch of harbor had changed.
When USS Utah entered service in 1911, it was one of the Navy’s modern battleships.
It displaced more than 21,000 tons, carried 10 12-in guns, and was built in an era when a [music] fleet’s strength still got measured mostly by its big gun battleships.
In its early years, Utah served with the Atlantic fleet, took part in American operations in Mexico, and did duty in the First World War.
But naval technology kept moving.
Newer battleships came along and Utah gradually fell behind in the combat role it had been designed for.
In 1931, the Navy didn’t send Utah to the Breakers.
Instead, its main guns were stripped out and the ship was converted into a radiocontrolled target vessel.
It wasn’t used to pound enemy battleships anymore.
It became the target American ships and aircraft [music] trained their attacks on.
Utah went on serving in anti-aircraft gunnery [music] training.
Heavy timber planking was laid across its deck to absorb the impact of practice bombs.
By December 1941, Utah was mored at Berth Fox 11 on the west side of Ford Island across from the famous Battleship [music] Row.
And the very changes that had kept Utah useful in its training role were about to become part of the tragedy that would [music] play out on its deck.
On the morning of December 7th, 1941, Japanese aircraft began their attack on Pearl Harbor.
Utah wasn’t among the battleships mored on the east side of Ford Island, but torpedo planes hit it anyway.
Two torpedoes slammed into the port side.
Water poured into the hull and Utah started listing fast.
Sailors were ordered to the starboard side to get ready to abandon the capsizing ship.
But the move got more dangerous when the heavy timbers on deck, the same ones laid down to protect the ship during bombing drills, broke loose and came crashing down.
Some men were hurt or blocked from the escape routes.
What had been installed for training now became an obstacle in a real attack.
Below decks, Chief Water Tender Peter Tomich stayed at his post in the boiler spaces, making sure the equipment was under control and buying the others time to get out.
He didn’t survive, and he was later awarded the Medal of Honor.
Elsewhere on the ship, fireman Secondass John B.
Vason kept the electrical system running just long enough for sailors to see their way out.
As the voltage dropped, he cut the circuits one by one.
Eventually, the lights went out for good.
By the time Vas tried to get out himself, the ship had rolled too far.
At around 8:12 in the morning, Utah capsized completely.
Vas was trapped [music] in a compartment of the now upside down hull.
He found a flashlight and a wrench, climbed toward what was now the bottom, and when he couldn’t find a way out, he started hammering the steel with the wrench.
People outside heard the knocking.
A rescue party with help from sailors off USS Raleigh brought cutting equipment over.
They cut a hole through the hull and pulled Vas out.
He survived, but 58 members of Utah’s crew didn’t make it.
Utah settled on the harbor floor, bottom up.
For the men who’ just gotten out, the attack was over.
Now the Navy had to decide what to do with a massive battleship blocking part of the harbor while the war in the Pacific had barely begun.
After December 7th, Pearl Harbor became the site of one of the Navy’s largest rescue and salvage operations.
Ships that could be repaired [music] got priority to return to service.
Weapons, ammunition, and usable [music] equipment were recovered for the war effort.
Utah wasn’t at the top of that list.
The ship hadn’t been fit to return to a battleship [music] role even before it went down.
Still, the Navy didn’t abandon the wreck.
In early 1942, dive teams began inspecting Utah’s hull [music] and cutting their way into the compartments inside.
They worked to recover whatever weapons, ammunition, and equipment could still be used.
The job was [music] far more dangerous than anything visible from the surface.
Oil and debris clouded the harbor water so badly that dive lights barely helped.
Divers had to memorize the ship’s layout, feel their way through pitch [music] dark compartments and watch for jagged steel that could slice through an air hose.
Some compartments had pockets of toxic hydrogen sulfide gas.
Even spaces that had been pumped dry, still required breathing [music] protection.
By the end of February 1942, the ammunition recovery [music] work was called off.
The conditions had only gotten worse, and the risk to the men doing it too high.
The early effort had let the Navy pull [music] out some valuable gear.
But it also showed just how complicated it would be to write [music] an entire capsized hull.
One option on the table was pumping compressed air into Utah’s hull, generating enough buoyancy to tow it to a dry dock and break it up there.
But the hull was already damaged and it was sitting upside down.
Holding enough air inside to move it safely across the harbor wasn’t considered workable.
The Navy needed another way to deal with Utah.
And just across Fort Island, they already had a campaign that could supply one.
USS Oklahoma had also been torpedoed and capsized in the attack.
Like Utah, it sat on the harbor floor with part of the hull showing above the surface.
The Navy decided to write Oklahoma using a parbuckling method, rigging structural frames onto the hull, running them to cable and a bank of large winches on shore, then pulling the hull to rotate it gradually upright.
Oklahoma carried 21 electric winches in that operation.
The work went step by step, but the ship was eventually writed and refloated by November 1943.
It turned out the Navy hadn’t mounted that massive operation because they thought Oklahoma would return to combat.
The damage was too severe.
The main point was to free up a vital mooring spot for the fleet and recover whatever equipment still had value.
The difference between the two [music] ships came down to exactly that, the spot each one occupied.
Oklahoma sat in a birth.
The fleet needed back.
Utah sat in a less critical stretch of the harbor.
If Utah could just be moved partway, the Navy could solve the problem without ever refloating the whole hull.
After their success with Oklahoma, the engineers turned to Utah.
They didn’t need to bring the old battleship back to the surface.
At first, they just needed to pull it far enough clear of the waterway the Navy needed.
But Utah didn’t respond to the rigging the way Oklahoma had.
Preparation around Utah ran through all of 1943.
Pulling frames went up on the cap-sized hull, cable was rigged, and a bank of electric winches got set up to generate the rotating force.
Before the big pulls even started, though, the operation showed just how dangerous the [music] work inside the wreck could be.
On June 22nd, 1943, diver Tom Kerry was deep inside Utah when he reported that the valve controlling his breathing air supply had jammed shut.
Rescue attempts followed, but it took an hour and 40 minutes to bring his body back to the surface.
Carrie died working on a ship the Navy would in the end never fully salvage.
By November 1943, the pulling frames were in place.
When the rotating pulls began in February 1944, force from the winches ran through the cables into Utah’s cap-sized hull.
The ship started to move.
A block of steel weighing more than 20,000 tons, which had sat at the bottom of Pearl Harbor for over 2 years, was being rotated back upright.
It was a real result.
But Utah didn’t rotate cleanly across the harbor [music] floor the way the engineers wanted.
As the winches kept pulling, the hull sank deeper into the soft mud below.
Part of that pulling force [music] wasn’t just turning Utah.
It was pressing the ship further down into the harbored.
The poles kept going, but writing Utah completely would take more engineering and more resources than they had.
On March 13th, 1944, Utah was logged still healed 37° 45 minutes to port.
It never got refated.
Most of the hull stayed underwater.
Even so, its position and orientation had changed enough to solve the immediate problem of using that stretch of harbor.
2 days later, on March [music] 15th, diving operations for the Utah salvage effort came to an end.
[music] The Navy had proven they could move Utah.
At the same time, what had happened to the hull in that mud showed just how high the price of finishing the job could run.
Now, the question wasn’t whether they could pull it anymore.
It was whether pulling it further was worth it.
On April 1st, 1944, just [music] over 2 weeks after the Utah operation wrapped up, Navy Captain Bernard E.
Monso briefed the Navy Department on the Pearl Harbor salvage work.
When he got to Utah, he reported that the ship had just been partly writed and would for now stay where it was.
The reasoning was practical.
Utah no longer had any military value in a combat role, and its current position wasn’t in the way enough to justify further salvage.
The operation hadn’t been finished, but the work had achieved what it needed to.
Utah still sat underwater.
Still, the Navy had moved it clear of the area that needed freeing up.
Meanwhile, the war went on.
Divers time, equipment, and technical manpower all had value to a fleet still fighting across the Pacific.
The cables stopped pulling.
The salvage gear left the site.
Utah settled into its new position, farther from the stretch of water the Navy actually needed.
Given the circumstances of 1944, [music] it was a reasonable call.
But that decision wouldn’t be the last time the ship’s fate landed back on [music] the scale.
After the war, what Pearl Harbor needed would change, and once again, Utah [music] would be sitting right where the Navy wanted to use the space.
Older battleships kept leaving the fleet, replaced by newer generations of ships with different mooring, maintenance, [music] and supply needs.
By 1956, the Utah question was back on the scale.
Commander, 14th Naval District, noticed [music] that the new Essex class carriers didn’t have enough suitable space nearby to handle the transfer of ammunition, special weapons, [music] and guided missile components.
If Utah got cleared out of the area, the Navy could use that space for the [music] new carrier’s operations instead of building another mooring site from scratch.
This time, Utah wasn’t being weighed as a ship that could be recovered.
It was the space the wreck was taking up, [music] not the ship itself, that the Navy actually needed.
The proposal found support in parts of the Pacific Fleet, but conditions in 1956 weren’t what they’d been in 1944.
The equipment once used to pull Utah had been sold off or scrapped.
The divers it would take weren’t readily available anymore.
A new operation could run anywhere from a year and a half to 2 years at an estimated cost of around $4 million in the money [music] of the time.
Meanwhile, the steel that could be recovered was worth far less than what the project would cost.
And there was one problem money couldn’t solve.
Utah was [music] tied to the resting place of the sailors who died there in the attack.
The chief of naval operations didn’t back [music] further salvage.
The record shows there wasn’t an urgent enough need to justify the project.
The matter of the sailor’s [music] resting place also came up as a consideration that may have carried weight, though nothing confirms it was the only reason.
In 1944, [music] Utah had been left in place because continuing the salvage no longer carried enough value for a war still being fought.
In 1956, a new need had come up, but the cost and the remaining obstacles still outweighed what the Navy stood to gain.
For the second time, Utah stayed, and in the years that followed, the ship began carrying a kind of meaning no harbor use plan could ever fully price out.
The first markers at Utah went up around 1950.
Two plaques were placed at the rec site, one on shore, one on Utah’s own structure.
They commemorate the ship and the men lost in the attack.
But Utah never became the famous memorial site Arizona did.
On the east side of the island, where battleship Row once stood, USS Arizona grew into one of the most recognized symbols of Pearl Harbor.
Utah stayed on the west side at a spot the public has a harder time reaching.
In 1972, a larger memorial was dedicated near the wreck.
From there, visitors can look out at the part of Utah’s hull, still breaking the surface, sitting in the position the 1944 salvage operation left it in.
Even today, Ford Island remains part of an active military base.
Visitors without base access have to book a guided tour [music] to reach the Utah Memorial.
Utah exists then, in a very different way than Arizona does.
It can still [music] be seen.
It’s still remembered.
Even so, most people who visit Pearl Harbor never stand next to the wreck.
For the sailors who served on Utah, the place carries a deeper meaning.
Some of them survived the ship’s capsizing in 1941.
Decades later, they chose to come back there one last time.
In 2014, the ashes of sailor Cecil Calavan were interred with the wreck.
In 2017, Lieutenant Commander Clark J.
Simmons and aviation machinists mate Harry Hosat were interred at Utah as well.
The National Park Service reserves this right for men who survived the ship’s sinking and had served aboard Utah.
After they died, they chose to go back to where their old shipmates still lay.
Meanwhile, identifying the men who were killed still isn’t finished.
[music] Four victims were recovered and identified right after the attack.
But during the 1944 salvage operation, a group of unidentified remains [music] was also brought out of the wreck.
Later research determined that group held the remains of 14 [music] men.
The techniques and records of the time weren’t enough to identify them individually.
[music] In 2022, the DPAA disinterred the unidentified remains connected to Utah for analysis using modern methods.
On May 20th, 2026, Fireman First Class Joseph U.
Connor, who died at just 26, was identified.
The DPAA announced the finding that July, nearly 85 years after the attack, one of the men once listed among the missing, finally got his name back.
Utah remains an active site of study.
[music] The wreck continues to be surveyed and documented using modern methods while the work of tracing the crew’s fate goes on.
The NPS has also used underwater survey data and three-dimensional modeling [music] to let the public explore the wreck without ever having to move it.
What we understand [music] about the men who served on the ship, even so, keeps changing.
And that makes the question of whether to [music] raise Utah today a very different question from the one the Navy faced back in 1944.
USS [music] Utah still sits beneath Pearl Harbor today.
Even though the Navy actually tried to move it, they did succeed.
Partly fully writing and refloating the ship was always a complicated engineering job, but it was never impossible.
The real issue is that what’s feasible is always tied to cost and purpose.
And that’s where the real answer starts.
In 1944, the Navy moved the hull far enough to solve the immediate need and stopped.
In 1956, they looked at salvage again, but still couldn’t find a reason urgent enough to justify the full cost and consequences of the project.
In the decades since, Utah has become a memorial, a resting place tied to its sailors, and a source of historical evidence.
Today, the hull still sits healed over in the water off the west side of Fort Island.
The marks of the attack are still there.
So are the marks of the salvage operation itself.
Utah was built to serve at sea.
Then it was turned into a target ship.
Finally, the Navy tried to move it off the spot where it had gone down.
They got the ship moving, but they never brought it up out of Pearl Harbor.
And more than 80 years on, the decision to leave Utah where it lies has become part of the ship’s own history, right along with the men who were lost on it.
