Pearl Harbor: Into The Arizona Page #4

that remain entombed in the ship.

Now, 75 years later, the expedition team

has a chance to see inside

the ship like never before.

It appears their new ROV

is finally operating as expected.

- It works, it's just a

question of whether or not

it'll work flawlessly the

first time going in the wreck.

(divers talking over radio)

- So basically what we'll do is

we'll drop the ROV down

and we'll investigate

the second deck, and find access points

or stairwells or hatches that go down,

and drop the ROV down into the third deck.

Below the second deck,

onto the third deck,

we get into an area that we

don't really know what's there.

- [Narrator] The ROV enters the Arizona's

second deck at the stern of the ship.

- Go to the right, and down.

Nice.

Ah, that was awesome.

We're in.

- Ten feet, ten feet.

Give us ten feet of

tether please, ten feet.

- [Narrator] This area,

known as officer's country,

was not impacted by the blast.

- Can we go forward and left.

- [Narrator] Here, much of the

ship's structure has remained intact.

It's the world Ensign Weedan documented

with his home movies, just a

few months before the attack.

The crew carefully maneuvers

the ROV from the stern

of the ship towards the

cabins on the left side.

- [Brett] Give me ten more feet.

- [Man] Can we get ten

feet of tether, ten feet,

give us ten feet please.

- [Narrator] Entering

the ship's ladies' room,

for the guests of the ranking officers.

- [Brett] That is amazing, wow.

Let's go to the left, pilot

out and then make a hard turn.

Let's go through there.

- [Narrator] The admiral's cabin,

the splendor still visible.

- That is awesome.

- [Narrator] The ghostly

outline of a table.

- [Brett] That's very cool.

- What do we have going here?

- We're just flying over that table

that we see from that open porthole,

with the light fixture, and we're moving

towards the aft of the ship,

towards this cabinet back here.

- [Narrator] In August of 1941,

Ensign Weedan writes to his sister.

- [Carl Voiceover] Things

have been really great,

for we ate dinner with the Admiral,

and showed the girls the ship.

The girl I escorted is the cutest.

So Bernadine, everything

is turning out swell now.

Don't you worry, for I am on

one of the safest ships afloat.

- [ROV Operator] I need

another five feet of tether.

- Five more feet please,

give us five feet.

- [Narrator] With fresh,

oxygen-rich seawater

constantly flowing through, all but

the most durable traces of life onboard

have deteriorated on the second deck.

But deeper down in the ship,

conditions might be different.

- Really the push is to

get below the second deck,

because we think the

third deck holds the key

to the environment of Arizona,

information about the

microbiological environment,

about the dissolved oxygen.

We think the third deck

really holds the keys

to a lot of those questions.

- [Narrator] Searching for

a passage to the third deck,

the team steers the ROV forward,

closer to the blast area where

the wreckage is torn open,

in hope to find a way

down to the third deck.

- I'd like to see if we can

get forward a little bit

and start to look at where the

blast damage starts to occur.

- [Narrator] The blast zone

is a startling reminder

of the power of the explosion.

With the decks collapsed, it is difficult

to maneuver the ROV here.

- So let's see, let's see if it goes down,

and we can penetrate down below decks.

- Yeah, looks like there is an opening.

Looks like we could go look down there

and see if it's going to

open and not go too far.

- [Brett] Okay.

- If not, we'll back out.

- [Narrator] They can see the third deck,

but there is no safe passage to get there.

- If an ROV goes inside the Arizona

and gets hopelessly entangled,

then the ROV will stay there forever.

We'll never send divers in to go get it.

So there's that to consider in terms of

how far you explore, how

far you push the edge

of what you need to access.

- There we go, alright,

there we go, we're out.

That did it, alright, that's good.

- We are heading out, so as

soon as you see us, go ahead

and extract us, but we're

going to continue driving.

- [Narrator] After

investigating the wreckage

for more than three

hours, the team decides

to call it a day, and to

pull the ROV back out.

Tomorrow, they will look for

a better access point

down to the third deck.

It won't be easy.

- With your first few

dives in the Arizona,

you're actually kind of struggling

to figure out where you are.

It's a tangled disarray of

metal and iron and steel.

- [Narrator] Resting at

the bottom of the harbor,

the wreckage is still a behemoth,

608 feet long and 97 feet wide.

When launched in June of 1915, she was

the U.S. Navy's biggest battleship,

a so-called super dreadnought,

a class of its own.

Constructed over six decks, the Arizona

was a labyrinth of compartments,

crew quarters,

storage rooms,

boiler rooms,

powder magazines,

and dozens of fuel compartments.

With a displacement of over 35,000 tons,

she would be able to reach a top speed

of 20 knots, and have

a range of 8,500 miles.

- I didn't really know what to expect, but

nobody can imagine how big a

ship is out of water like that.

- [Narrator] With the war looming,

the battleship was overhauled

in the winter of 1940.

- They put it in dry dock,

and we went over the side

and scraped the side,

and scraped the bottom,

and painted it, and that was

just an experience, I tell you.

- [Narrator] With the new

day comes another attempt

to explore deeper inside the sunken giant.

- I mean, it's the USS Arizona.

It deserves everything that we can do

to try to understand what's

happening to what's there,

so that we can have it last

for future generations.

- [Narrator] The divers

have identified a hatch

on the second deck,

which the team believes

will lead them down to the third deck.

- If we move left, we

should run into the hatch.

- [Narrator] The hatch

appears to be unobstructed.

- [Brett] So let's go

ahead and take a look

and see what we see here.

- [Narrator] But steering the ROV down

to the lower deck is a challenge.

- It's dark, I mean, there's

no light inside the ship,

it's complete black, so the

only light that you have

is light that's on the ROV itself.

We're in, awesome.

- [Narrator] Here on the third deck,

the environment looks much different.

They begin their search for evidence

of the lives of those

who once served here.

- If we're navigating down a hallway,

and there's a door, that

becomes a judgment call.

Is it large enough for

the ROV to fit through?

And if it fits through, do we think

we can turn around the

ROV on the other side

of that door and fly it back out.

Oh, wow.

- [Narrator] A cabin nobody

has seen for 75 years.

- Is that like a footlocker there?

- [Brett] I don't know, it looks like

some kind of square, doesn't it?

- [Narrator] Completely undisturbed,

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