We went over to the U.S.S. Arizona and started diving. Although there were a number of other civilian and Navy divers working on the Arizona, I was the only civilian diver to work down on the inside. My first job was to bring up the silver service¹⁾ from the officer’s dining room. The silverware was later auctioned off in the States as a promotion to sell war bonds.

An officer had been over and told me they wanted all the silverware brought up and gave me a list of the pieces in the set. I asked him, "Where in the hell do I find it?"

He said, "I don’t know. It’s your job!" I didn’t have any idea of how to find the officer’s quarters in that big ship. I had never been on a ship until we sailed on the Henderson. I talked it over with my tender and he managed to obtain a copy of the blue print for the Arizona and with that we were able to locate the officer’s mess.

The table had been set for breakfast, and as you can imagine, after the explosion, the silver was scattered all over the floor. I probably would never have found all of it if I had gone to a diving school. The one thing you don’t do is get down on your knees in one of those suits unless you are a really good diver and know how to operate the air. If you get upside down with a ceiling overhead, you can’t get out. The helmet fills with water and you drown. Anyway, not knowing any better at the time, I just crawled around on my hands and knees. Once in awhile, I would feel my feet start to float up and I would very quickly release my air. I did find all of the silver except for one platter. You would think it would only take a couple of hours to pick up half a sack of silver, but I think it took about ten days. Everything you did was just days. Of course sometimes it would take an hour or two to get down to the place you were to work.

Keep in mind that there was no light - just pitch black. Lights were of little use. Not only did the additional line cause extra problems by getting hung up, but also the floating oil, sediment, and other debris in the water, caused the light to reflect back into the face plate. There was a six to eight-inch layer of oil on the surface of the water. The minute you went through the oil layer, it coated the face plate. When you came up you could tell you were out of the water, but you couldn’t see anything. I had two sets of Mark V diving gear. When I came up the dress and helmet would be just covered with a half inch layer of all this oil and gooey tar like substance. There was a little Filipino boy on our crew and his job was to clean the dive gear. I wore a pair of bib overalls over the dress which was made of heavy canvas and had two big pockets. Of course, I didn’t come up too often, as it was too difficult to get in and out. A lot of days I never came up at all, not even for lunch. I would put on a pair of gloves until I dropped under the layer of oil, then take them off. This would leave my hands free to feel my way around without having them coated with oil. It was surprising how much you could do by just feeling. It was just a blind man’s job to work down there.

I would study the blue prints of the ship and plan a route. I had to be able to see this in my mind. My tender would go over it with me and help me keep my bearings and recognize the compartment I was in. Sometimes you couldn’t get through as the bulkhead doors would not open or wreckage would block the way. Then you had to find a different route. You might be down only 25 feet in depth but you would have 150 feet of air hose out because of the wreckage and different obstacles in your path. It was a slow-moving process to get out as well. Sometimes taking two hours, as you would have to pull and roll all that hose as you went. The air hose and the life line were taped together at about three foot intervals and were constantly getting hung up on something. And of course, you couldn’t go until the air hose went. You would have to go back until you found where it was fouled, and start again.

Bodies were a priority. When I found one, I was to bring it up immediately. At first we took out a lot of bodies, but after a time the bodies had deteriorated so and became so water logged it was decided to leave them on the Arizona. Once in a while a piece of a body would be brought up, or a skull. That was an awful thing. Sometimes they would follow along in the stream made by the exhaust on the helmet. On one occasion, I could feel something, bump, bump, bump, at the back of my hat. I felt around, but couldn’t find anything. A few minutes later - bump, bump, bump. As I went up through the hatch a skull popped up to the surface right beside the dive barge and my tender was able to scoop it out of the water. It apparently had been pulled along by the air exhaust and had followed me out.

My steady job was on the Arizona. Every day, twelve hours a day. The first six months or so we worked seven days a week. At times, I would be called out on a dive job somewhere when no one else was available or someone needed help. For instance, one day I was called over to one of the drydocks to recover a body. One of the men had been sitting on the bank eating lunch when the bank caved in. He went in the water and never came up.

One of the big items I took out was the towing cable. It was a two or two-and-a-half inch steel cable that was right down in the very bottom of the stern. I think there was a mile of cable on that great big monstrous reel. There was a hole through each deck to pull it up, but stuff was so scattered the first thing I did was to take a cutting torch and make new holes in some of the decks to run a line down and hook onto it. Before I went down, one of the guys had said, "You know the gears will be froze tight and you will have to find the release mechanism before the wheel will even start to turn after we hook onto it."

On the first trip down I didn’t know what to expect. I felt around and found that it had a steam driven engine and the release was just a dog gear. I took a wrecking bar down with me the next day, but it was just in there "bang, bang" solid and there was no way I could get it loose. I had to take a cutting torch all the way down into the keel; I suppose 100 to 150 feet of hose. The torch had to be lit before going down and the minute it touched anything, it would go out. It was the same torch used topside except it had an additional pipe around the stem for air. You would open the air first then light the torch so it would be burning in a bubble of air. It was quite tricky. If you touched the torch straight onto the metal it would go out and of course, there was no way to light it underwater, so you would then have to go back up and relight the thing. It took about two days before I finally managed to get all the way down with the torch and cut the "dog" so it would release the gear. I had already run a line down, so I hooked it up and told them to take a left. Sure enough the wheel started moving. A long trough filled with some kind of oil was set up over on Ford Island and the cable was pulled through the oil to prevent it from rusting and they were able to salvage all of it.

It was quite some time after I started working on the Arizona that I found the missing platter. I was in one of the compartments, just feeling my way along, when I felt this thing. I knew right then it was the other silver platter. I shoved it into the bib of my coveralls until I got into one of the compartments I often used when entering the ship. There were pipes running along one side, so I shoved it up in them until I could decide what to do. I knew if I brought it up some officer would take it and that would be the end of that. I really didn’t think I would ever get it off the ship. We were checked each night when we left work. The sentries even made us open our lunch boxes before we walked out the gate.

I had it there in the pipes for quite some time when we started training several Seabees. They drove in and out of the yard in a pickup every day, but no one ever checked the truck when they left. We became good friends while working together, so I asked them if they would do me a favor. They said, "Sure, what do you need?" So I told them about the platter and asked if they would take it out in their truck. I invited them over for a little lunch that evening and they brought the platter over. So that is how I got it out of the Navy yard.²⁾

The salvage work was all classified so no one was allowed to bring in a camera. The only pictures taken were photos taken by the Navy. However, one of the Seabees did smuggle in a camera one day. The only picture I have during this time is the one he took of me dressed in my dive gear while working on the Arizona.

I did have several close calls. A lesson I learned early on was that there are some dangerous situations that can develop very rapidly. After the bombing, they needed more dock space for other ships coming into Pearl Harbor. Pilings were driven down alongside the Arizona to tie up other ships while the salvage work was being done. I was on the outside of the ship walking along on the torpedo blister. This blister was about two feet wide. My foot slipped down between the ship and one of the pilings and it just grabbed onto me. I pulled and pulled, but my foot wouldn’t budge. Finally I just blew my suit plum up with air so I would have more buoyancy, hoping I could pull loose. Well, you might know, about that time the ship shifted a little and my foot came loose. Up I went!

I just went sailing up. I must have shot up out of the water two or three feet. I lay out on top of the water with my arms straight out. I was just lucky that I had a good tender. He saw what happened and told the little Filipino boy from our dive crew to swim out and let some of the air out of my suit. Once he did that, my feet dropped back down and I could move my arms again. Without his help my suit would have blown up and I would have drowned. It did open up one ear and I bled out of that ear for several days because of the rapid change in pressure. They sent me over to the submarine base and had me decompress. And - I went back to diving.

Most of the time we were only diving from 25 to 50 feet deep. My deepest dive occurred when I was sent out to recover some channel buoys that had been sunk to prevent the Japanese subs from locating the island channels. The lead diver came over with a lieutenant and said they were sending me out on a lighthouse tender to recover the buoys. Our first stop was to be Kauai and they thought it would take about 30 days to recover all of them. On the way over we were hit with an awful storm. God, it was rough. We got into port at Kauai, but it was so rough we weren’t able to dive. It was about two or three days before we were able to get out again.

The buoy was down about 180 feet and that was the worst scare I had while diving. I never went down the ladder but always just jumped in the water. For some reason that day I went down the ladder instead. I got my helmet down to where I could see and there was this white coral bottom. It was just like being on top of a 300 foot skyscraper! I just hung there on that ladder. Pretty soon my tender says, "What’s the matter Les?"

I answered, "Oh nothing, I’m just looking at the scenery!"

I was scared to death. I finally got the air pretty well saturated in my suit and let loose, and went right on down. We brought the buoy up, but the lighthouse tender received word that one of the lighthouses on the beach had been damaged from the storm so they called our trip off. They planned to try it again at a later time, but never did. The buoy we brought up was in such bad shape it was decided they weren’t worth retrieving.

I was working in a gun turret when I had my closest call. We had been pumping the ship out constantly, putting on patches and had actually started to bring it up. We had an electric welder but you couldn’t really weld, but just had to tack along until the patch held and wasn’t leaking too badly. Then we would stuff this material called "oakum" into the cracks to stop the leaks. I looked across the harbor that morning and I could see that it had sunk again. I thought, "Oh, no. One of the patches must have come loose."

I knew there was a big one down in the one of the gun turrets that had been leaking badly. I had been stuffing this oakum around it whenever I had a chance. When I got over to the ship I started checking to find where the break had developed. I went down in the gun turret, just following around the sides, and that damn sheet was hanging down and just split my sleeve wide open. It wasn’t two seconds until my suit flooded with the water right up to my lips. I thought, "Oh man, now what do I do?"

I managed to keep my head and not panic. The water shorted out the communications in my hat and as I went to give my life line a pull to signal the tender, I found my lines were fouled. I wasn’t down very deep, maybe only 25 feet. Just down the ladder into the turret and about 12 feet on the other side. I knew whatever it was that my lines were snagged on was probably down on the floor. If I bent down the helmet would fill with water and I would drown. I could feel my lips starting to swell and burn, and I had swallowed some water. The water was so contaminated with bacteria and chemicals, that if it got in your mouth or on your lips they would start swelling. I knew my only chance was to cross the turret and hope I didn’t fall. You were always falling because of all the wreckage and junk on the floors. I knew that if I went down it was all over. That I would just drown and that would be it.

I took quite awhile, probably 45 minutes to an hour, to make it across and find where my line was fouled. The turret had been pumped out at one time and a crew had been cleaning up the debris. They had a bucket up above with a little crane and had put a ladder down the one side of the turret. My hose had come up underneath the ladder and hooked on the leg. At first I tried to take my foot and push it down but couldn’t get it loose. I finally decided to hang onto the ladder and just get myself down, unhook it and pull myself back up as quickly as I could. I got it loose and gave my line four fast pulls. My tender was sitting right there and started hauling. They got me up until I was out of the water, but I was so weak by that time, I wasn’t able to climb the ladder. Someone came down, and put a hook on my belt and they pulled me on up. I was sicker than a dog from swallowing that bad water. I went over to the Navy hospital where they gave me an injection of something and wanted to keep me overnight. After some argument from the doctor though, I was back at work the next day. I had always been told that when something like that happened if you didn’t go right back, you never would.

I had many diving duties on the Arizona including finding cracks, popped rivets and plugging the holes (finding them by feeling the rush of the water). Taking the guns off and salvaging all the small light items from the ship. The forward section was a total loss, so I burned it in sections so the crane could bring it up. Often, we would have to call the crane in four or five times before they were actually able to bring the wreckage up. You were working in the dark all the time and you never knew for sure if you had it cut loose or not. So you would send for the crane and if they couldn’t get a lift, then you would have to go back and try to find the place you had missed.

I also brought up the ship’s vault³ which was said to contain over 200 thousand dollars in cash and jewelry from the ship’s store. This was a huge walk-in vault from about the mid section of the ship where most of the damage from the explosion had occurred. It fact, it was right above one of the powder magazines that had blown up. The Navy divers had looked for the safe for about six months, but had not been able to locate it. It was believed that the safe had been blown over the side and lost down in the silt. I had been cutting loose the wreckage on the bow section, when I happened to find something you could hook a cable onto to lift it. After moving some of the debris from the top, I could feel one of these on all four corners. I don’t know what made me think it was the safe. Only the top was accessible as it appeared to have sunk down through the deck. I cut away some of the scrap around the sides and found the combination. I went up and told the salvage officer, Lt. Nordquist. At first he said, "No way. That thing went overboard. The Navy divers spent six months looking for that thing."

I told him, "I don’t care, it’s down there! You get that 55 ton crane over here and we will left it out." The next day Lt. Nordquist dressed-in and went down to check out my find and agreed that he too believed it was the safe.

They called the big crane over and rigged me up with four cables which I took down and hooked onto the safe. They pulled her right out of there as pretty as could be. It was loaded onto the Maryann, a self-propelled crane barge, and away they went 90 mph. And, that was the last I saw it. Usually whenever we recovered anything big, the photographers would be over to take pictures and it would be in this little newspaper we had. There was never a thing about the safe and no one ever found out what became of it. Not even Lt. Nordquist as far as I know.

We worked long, hard days. Sometimes being down all day long. The Navy divers were limited to just four hours down, but there was no limit on the number of hours we would be down. Even though I was young and in top physical condition, it started to take its toll. Once a month I was sent to the submarine base for decompression and was also given a physical. I started to notice that when I laid down at night, I could hear my heart beat so loud I would have trouble going to sleep. I could also feel it in my fingers and pounding against my ribs. The Navy doctor checked me over and said my heart was quite enlarged. I was told to take some time off and rest up a bit. I took off a few days and did feel better so went back to work. It wasn’t long though until I was back at the doctor’s office. I was given a thirty day medical leave and sent back to the States. The first time I had been home in two years.

When my leave was up, I caught a transport ship out of San Diego back to Pearl Harbor and went back to work. It wasn’t long though until the Navy doctors gave me a medical discharge and sent me back to the States for good. My heart had become so enlarged and was fibrillating so badly, they didn’t know if I would ever be able to do very much again.

I began seeing a doctor in our little town of McMinneville, Oregon. His office was in one of the old buildings, up on the second floor. It had a long stairway with a landing half way up with a bench to rest. I would sit there until I could make it on up to his office. He checked me over and I told him what I had been doing. He said he didn’t know if he could help me or not, but he had a new drug he would like me to try - digitalis. His supplier had given him enough to treat one patient and if I was willing to try it, he wouldn’t charge for it. There was enough for about two weeks.

After a week I went back for a check up and I was able to walk right up that stairway. He said, "My God, you aren’t the same guy that was in here a week ago." He couldn’t believe it. He listened to my heart and called in another doctor from down the hall. He had also checked me over on the first visit. They just stood there and looked at each other. He told me to take it for the second week and then to come back as he was going to contact the supplier.

I went back a week later and, "Hell, I could have run a race!" It just pulled me right out of it. They put me on something else for a time and the supplier did send him another batch of the digitalis to keep in reserve in case I should start having problems again. They didn’t know how it would affect me over a long period of time so didn’t want me to take it unless it was necessary.

My old boss found out I was back in town. He came right over and wanted me to come back to work. He really needed someone to take over making the powdered milk, which was going to the armed forces. I wasn’t supposed to work for at least two months. He told me I could just be my own boss and do anything I wanted. I could sit down or lay down or go home if I needed to. Just anything I wanted as long as I could keep the operation running. "Well," I said, "you gave me a job when I was starving so I’ll do it." So I went back to my old job.

I never went back to diving. I could have gone to work for Pacific Bridge in Portland. I had worked for them in Pearl Harbor when they were short handed and needed help. In fact, I could have worked for them at that time at five times the money I was making, but I was frozen on my job with Civil Service. My buddy and I even tried to enlist while we were in Hawaii, but couldn’t get a release from our jobs, not even to go into the service. When we arrived in Pearl Harbor, I was making $1.45 an hour. The Civil Service had no pay scale for divers. After becoming a diver, though, I was raised to the same level as a shop lead man - $2.86. And that is what my pay scale remained until I was sent home.

In my mind, I had no training for any aspect of this job, but with help beyond my powers, I was able to do anything put before me.

Remember Pearl Harbor
One thing should always be remembered - Freedom is not free. On this "Day of Infamy" there were 2388 service men killed - 1172 of the dead were from the U.S.S. Arizona. Wounded - 1178. Twelve ships sunk or beached, nine damaged; 164 planes lost, 159 damaged. Countless lives were changed forever in those few hours on December 7, 1941. The events of that day never to be forgotten by those who survived.

As in all wars there were no real winners. One side won, one side lost, but the cost in lives taken or incontrovertibly altered precluded there being a real winner. As in all wars the impetus to invention and technological advance was extreme. It transformed the world as it was, to the world as we know it.

Lester Ritchie - Pearl Harbor Survivor
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