For the anniversary of the Peal Harbor attack, Dave made an appearance on the Florida Round Table show with Bill Mick to talk about the USS Utah, a Florida Class Battleship, lost in the attack…

On the morning of December 7, 1941, lying at berth F-11 on the west side of Ford Island, the USS Utah BB-31, a Florida Class battleship that had been disarmed and was now used as a training ship, awoke to the sound of the attack. In the first moments of the attack, she was somehow mistaken for either an Aircraft Carrier or a fully operational Battleship. In the opening moments of the attack, six torpedoes were fired at her, with two striking the ship.

At the end of the day, sixty-four officers and men were entombed on the wreck.

Unlike her other sisters in the harbor, Utah was all but forgotten. Her location on the far side of a very secure Naval Base, without access to a memorial built over her relegated her to an afterthought of the attack.

Today, her wreck rests quietly on the shore of Ford Island, with a small a memorial to the six officers and fifty-eight men who were lost with the ship in the first moments of the Pacific War, and who remain, eternally on duty…