The Florida Roundtable - The Big U

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.

Less than fifteen minutes after the attack began, Utah rolled over and settled to the bottom of the harbor.

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…

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