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first torpedo struck the port side, “staggering the ship.” A geyser of water shot up the side and came down on him. Picking himself up, Anderson reached the alarm gongand pulled it.
Utah
continued to list to port as the second torpedo detonated. Captain James Steele was ashore, and Lieutenant Commander Solomon S. Isquith was in command. As
Utah
started to go down, Isquith gave the order to abandon ship over the starboard side, so that the capsizing hulk would not roll over on top of them. Eleven minutes after the first torpedo hit,
Utah
sank.
    Utah’s
crew had more chances to escape than the men on
Arizona
, but it was often a harrowing, near thing. Seaman 2nd Class James Oberto started to climb through a hatch as “an alarming amount of seawater came cascading in the hatch opening just above our heads. We started to climb in single file to the second deck. Compounding our situation were the tons of water pouring in on use from the open portholes on the port side. We were standing in water nearly to our knees.” Oberto made it to the deck, as did Radioman 3rd Class Clarence W Durham. But as Durham climbed out, he looked back and saw that the steel “battle bar” grates had broken free and blocked off the escape route of some of the engine room crew. “I will never forget the faces of those men trapped in the Engine Room. I knew there was no way I could lift those steel grates and I also knew at that point that my chances were very slim of getting out of there myself.” Durham made it out as
Utah
rolled. He slid down the “rough barnacle-encrusted steel hull,” ripping himself open.
    One of the trapped men, Fireman 2nd Class John Vaessen, got through a battle grate just before it slammed shut, trapping his shipmate Joe Barta. As the ship capsized, Vaessen said, “Batteries began exploding. I was hit with deck plates, fire extinguishers, etc.” Climbing up into the bilge, once at the bottom of the hull and now exposed to the air, he “could hear the superstructure break and the water would rush closer.” Taking a wrench, he beat against the hull to call for help. “I got an answer then silence, then rat-a-tat-tat. I thought that was a pneumatic tool. It was strafing.” Japanese planes, firing at men in the water and across the hull of the overturned battleship, were claiming more lives. Vaessen’s rescuers did not give up and used a blowtorch to cut open the hull and pulled him out of the steel tomb. But fifty-eight of hisshipmates did not make it, including Chief Water Tender Peter Tomich, who stayed at his post to shut down the boilers and prevent an explosion. Tomich’s sacrifice so that others might live was recognized by the posthumous award of the Medal of Honor. He still lies inside
Utah
with most of the ship’s dead.
    I think about those men inside the hulk as we motor towards the ship. After the battle, salvage crews tried to right the hull and refloat
Utah
, but she could not be freed. Abandoned, the ship rests on her port side, festooned with salvage cables; some of the starboard air castle and some of the forward superstructure rise out of the water. We approach the exposed rusting decks and roll out of our boat into the water. Larry Murphy leads me past open hatches to the armored top of the No. 2 turret. Although the battleship’s original guns had been removed when she was converted into a target ship in 1931, the turrets remained. In 1940, the Navy installed new 5-inch/25 caliber antiaircraft guns atop the turrets, part of a new battery that
Utah
was to test. Dan and Larry point them out to me as a reminder from our predive briefing that, ironically,
Utah
, with her new guns, was perhaps one of the best equipped ships at Pearl Harbor that morning to fight back, had she not been mistakenly hit and sunk so early in the attack.
    The remainder of this summer at Pearl Harbor is spent searching, without success, for crashed Japanese aircraft and the deeply submerged remains of the Japanese midget