Robert Trumbull

By Robert Trumbull

Here, just over 64 years late, are edited excerpts from a dispatch sent to The New York Times by Robert Trumbull, the paper's correspondent at Pearl Harbor. It details a triumphant but mostly forgotten story of World War II: the salvage effort that rebuilt the Pacific Fleet after the Japanese attack.A city of seamen, engineers, divers, carpenters, welders, pipe fitters and other industrial workers arose overnight at the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard. Its slogan was "We keep them fit to fight," and within two years the yard raised all the damaged ships except the Arizona and the Utah.One year after the attack, with the harbor still choked with wreckage, Trumbull wrote a 15,000-word, three-part series about the round-the-clock operation. But wartime censorship killed the articles. Like the civilian rescue workers and hardhats at ground zero, the shipyard workers dispersed, unheralded, when the job was done. Trumbull died in 1992. The full text of this article and more photographs are at nytimes.com/opinion.PEARL HARBOR, Dec. 13 (Passed by naval censor) Two of the great stories of world naval history concern Pearl Harbor. First is the stunning blow dealt the United States Pacific Fleet in the Japanese sneak attack here Dec. 7, 1941. The second, which may well be the more significant story when the world returns to the ways of peace, deals with the miracle of reclamation and repair accomplished here to undo the incredibly complex destruction wrought by the Japanese bombers.Undoing of the Pearl Harbor damage is a story that continues today; as this is written its climax is still in the future. Its first full telling in this series of articles reveals the greatness of American industrial ingenuity, which has reached at Pearl Harbor a historic flowering.To understand adequately the staggering problem that faced the naval engineers Dec. 7, 1941, one must go back and survey Pearl Harbor as it lay in the silence of death and ruin after the attack.Rear Adm. William R. Furlong, a gray, stocky Pennsylvanian, was commander of the Pacific Fleet mine force on Dec. 7, 1941. He rose early, as is his custom, that Sunday morning. He was on the deck of his flagship, the ungainly Oglala.Admiral Furlong's amazed blue eyes saw the first Japanese bomb dropped in the Pearl Harbor phase of the attack strike a seaplane ramp on Ford Island. He saw the second bomb hit a Ford Island hangar, setting it afire. This plane, having done its share in nullifying the fleet's air power, circled, turned and flew back by the Oglala at eye level to the admiral. "I could have hit the plane with a potato," Admiral Furlong said.Thus Admiral Furlong saw the terrible damage done. Shortly, as commandant of the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard, he was assigned to get it undone. He had the entire Pearl Harbor establishment at his call for a job that was heroic in its broad proportions, and which in detail was often seemingly impossible, frequently discouraging and always physically arduous, filthy, stinking and dangerous.Nowhere in the world, according to Navy officers here, have Navy and civilian workers toiled together in such close coordination and harmony on a monumental task. Their joint achievement has never been equaled, either as a feat in mechanics or as an example of cooperation between military and nonmilitary men.When the subject of the West Virginia is mentioned to the men who worked on its salvage, they seldom say anything. They just whistle.The West Virginia's 32,600-ton mass lay deep in the water when the Japanese flew away. It listed far to port, its starboard bilge hooked into the adjacent battleship Tennessee.Seven torpedoes had hit its port side, blowing out a series of gashes above and below the armor belt 120 feet long and so wide from lip to lip that two tall men could stand, one on the other's shoulders, in the vent.The boat deck was a shattered mass. Bombs laid open four decks that way an earthquake might tear away the wall of a four-story building, leaving the rooms indecently exposed. Up on the bridge, Capt. Mervyn S. Bennion had lain grievously wounded, refusing to be moved, and there he died. Posthumously he was awarded his country's highest honor, the Congressional Medal.Japan's dive bombers did their work well on the West Virginia. The heavy bomb abaft the bridge that had damaged all the upper works had pushed one deck clear down upon another, and a five-inch gun in a rended casemate fell a full deck below, as if sprung from a trapdoor.The heavy armor belt showed the marks of six torpedoes. Another tore into its vitals under the stern, breaking the rudder.Inside, the West Virginia looked as if she had been crumpled like paper in a giant hand. When the engineers went to work on the West Virginia, almost the only point in its favor was that the ship was not capsized. The great slash in its port side was too large for any patch. Delicate matching of the timber frames to the lines of its hull was out of the question, for the sides of the ship had writhed in their agony, and it no longer fitted its blueprints.The engineers decided to use cofferdams, watertight chambers that could be built and attached to the ship. So huge cofferdams were built, their wooden sections braced with steel. They were lowered, bolted to the hull as on other ships, and meeting so as to form one tremendous outwall.Now for the troublesome problem of sealing at the bottom, where a snug fitting of the wood was impracticable: Hundreds of tons of tremie concrete were poured from hoppers into funnels high above the water. This quick-setting cement, which hardens under water, oozed through thick pipes and formed about the West Virginia's uneven crevasses far below. It hardened and made the cofferdam part of the ship watertight.As the pumps strained to suck out the fouled sea inside, the West Virginia rose, inch by inch. Each new day disclosed a new surface ring of oil and black muck from the harbor bottom marking on the cofferdam the laborious progress of the ship's flotation.During this time, the workers lived close ashore in rude huts built for them so they could stay near the job. They came to work on foot, over a bridge laid on floats. These were sailors all. The "yard workmen," civilians, had their customary quarters elsewhere, and were taken to and from the ship by boat.On the keel blocks, the West Virginia had to take rough treatment to remove the concrete. The only workable way was to blast it out with small sticks of dynamite. This done, the job before Admiral Furlong's big and hard-bitten organization could be stated simply, but the implications were staggering. They just had to rebuild a large portion of the ship. The compartments below decks were half-filled with rubblerotting stuff that exuded an overpowering stench. Discoveries odd and gruesome were frequent as the men set about righting and cleansing the charnel. This work was arduous and discouraging, but the work crews, supervised by the West Virginia's own officers and men who treated the maimed battleship as a mother would tend a sick child, carried on.There were instances of heroism in the salvage that deserve to go permanently into the annals of Dec. 7. One day an unexploded 1,750-pound bomb was discovered, held in a section of steel that it had penetrated. An officer risked his life to unscrew the live fuses.Summing up the West Virginia job, Admiral Furlong said: "We built her new from the inside out. We went right to the bottom, like a dentist drilling out a rotten tooth."