February 21st Visit to USS Arizona

I was in Hawaii last week, and as regular visitors might know, a visit to Arizona:

One of Arizona's anchors with the Memorial between a fluke and the stock.

Above: Memorial from the Visitors Center shoreline with the Ford Island control tower in the background. Below: Approaching the Memorial by boat; Battleship Missouri in the background.

We timed our visit perfectly to catch the nuclear aircraft carrier Stennis CVN-74 departing Pearl Harbor and rendering honors. I was the last off the boat, which left me in a good position to shoot this quickly from the entrance (even though they said to wait until we were in the memorial). A second after I shot this, you could hear "salute!" come from the Stennis' loud speakers. Thank you to the crew for a fine example of the continuing respect Arizona is given.

The wind was fresh, making it difficult to get good shots of Arizona's oil. Tide was headed out to sea.

Working from Stern forward; Barbette #3 with some of the ventilator shafts visible closer and under the surface.

Casemate 10's outline can faintly be seen here on the starboard side, just forward of the forecastle/main deck break at Frame 88. Biths and Chock outboard at deck edge:

The remains of turret #2 just break the surface, looking towards Battleship Missouri. Wind rippled, yet peaceful water that over 1,100 sailors rest eternally underneath.

Stennis had been partially turned around by the time we needed to line up on the rails and loomed large in the openings.

We visited Battleship Missouri the next day and a rainbow was visible from the bridge, connecting the Memorial to the Visitor's Center. A fitting Hawaiian Islands tribute.

Was Arizona Blue?

I'm involved in an upcoming Battleship Arizona project and was asked if Arizona was blue or not; I get asked this on a somewhat regular basis and thought it would be good to put down my current thoughts and feelings.

Put simply, there is no definitive answer at this point, and anyone wanting to render the ship in her final configuration is rolling the dice no matter what they choose.

Now for the explanation.

Up until 1941, the Navy had painted their battleships in the #5 Standard Navy Gray that had come into use just after the end of the First World War. Starting in the mid 1930s there was a slow experimentation process that started to update the camouflage, but the experiments weren't completed and new orders finalized until January of 1941. For battleships of the Pacific Fleet, Camouflage Measure 1, using 5-D Dark Gray and 5-L Light Gray was the new standard.

Possibly because camouflage had not changed in twenty years, the Navy did not do a very good job of managing the transition. Only two Navy Yards were responsible for manufacturing paint for the entire Atlantic and Pacific Fleets (Norfolk Navy Yard and Mare Island Navy Yard respectively), and they had problems with procuring the necessary materials and equipment to suddenly switch hundreds of ships and boats from one color to another. Photographic evidence of battleships in the Pacific fleet in Measure 1 doesn't show up until June of 1941, for example, and not all of the battleships are repainted at that time.

In the meantime, the Navy had grown dissatisfied with 5-D Dark Gray and started looking for a replacement. One of the problems with 5-D had been that of supply chain; there were issues with finding the optimally sized containers and having a paint that was different from others; the two other colors used in camouflage, 5-L Light Gray and 5-O Ocean Gray came from mixing different ratios of the same white base and tinting paste together, but 5-D needed it's own separate containers and supply chain. As such, the replacement was to be made using the same base and tint in order to simplify the supply chains.

The official replacement was 5-S Sea Blue, and at the end of July the Navy ordered the paint manufacturing Yards to stop manufacturing 5-D and continue with the white base and tinting paste, with the mixing proportions for 5-S Sea Blue listed. Since this is roughly four months before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the white base and tinting paste had been in circulation for a while, this should make it a fairly open-and-shut case, right?

Well, not exactly.

The battleships had originally painted in a 5-D that was based on a conversion paste from the pre-war #5 Standard Navy Gray, and even if they had painted their 5-L parts in 5-L from a the mixture, the quantities they carried on board were so limited as to be insignificant in terms of suddenly mixing and repainting an entire ship. The different ratios between 5-L and 5-S mean that nearly 18 times as much tinting paste was needed to make Sea Blue versus Light Gray (9 ounces versus 10 pints)

Additionally, the original order to transition to Sea Blue had been sent to the paint manufacturing yards and not the fleet in general; this means that the Yards had to flow the new directive out, something they did in a somewhat unclear way. We see here, for example, the order to Battleship Arizona to re-request paint to the new directives, but the directives as to how a battleship was painted didn't come from the yards, it came from the group commander.

In the case of the battleships, that would be "Commander Battleships, Battle Force," and we see a request, for example, from the Captain of Battleship Oklahoma to the Commander Battleships, Battle Force, as to what to do since the Yard is ordering them to use a paint they have no information about. Not that were are about two months away from the attack at this point; how long would it take the command to reply, and the ship to then fill out their requisition? How long would it take the Mare Island Navy Yard to fulfill it and ship it out?

We do know that the paint had been produced and that some ships had been painted in Sea Blue well in advance of the attack; Helena had been ordered into Sea Blue at the end of August and that by the middle of September the Bureau of Ships had ordered the yards to directly substitute 5-S for 5-D in any paint requisition.

Arizona was involved in a collision with Battleship Oklahoma on the night of October 22 and went into the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard for repair from the 27th of October until the 12th of November. This is a month after the order to substitute 5-S on all requisitions of paint and about three months after the manufacture of 5-D had ceased. A revised SHIPS-2 was finished in September, but was not released to the fleets until the middle of October, just before Arizona was involved in the collision; this new revision did away with Measure 1 and the 5-L Light Gray above the top of the stacks that Arizona was painted in at the time of the attack.

This leaves us with the following questions:

What paint did Arizona and Pearl Harbor Navy Yard have on hand during her repairs in October/November and whose stocks were used to repaint her following the repairs?

What directives were in place at the time of Arizona's repair? If SHIPS-2 Revision 1 had come through after the orders for repair had been issued, but before the ship were actually painted, would they have performed a change order on the paint to be used?

Do we have all of the directives that were in effect at that time? We have a smattering of some from the Commander Cruisers and Commander Destroyers, Battle Force, but none from Commander Battleships, Battle Force. We have some from the Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, but do we have them all?

For this reason I say that no one has the answer to the question of Arizona's final paint colors. I'm planning a trip to NARA II this fall to go through some records that haven't been explored before for this purpose to see what I can find. My hope is that we'll be able to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor by finally being able to tell people how the ships actually looked as so many awoke to their last day on earth.

Pearl Harbor Camouflage

First, a little background. For those that don't know, there is a little controversy in regards to the camouflage worn by many ships of the US Navy during the attack at Pearl Harbor. My introduction to this was the winter of 2005, when myself and a couple of others were asked for help in determining Battleship Arizona's final paint scheme. We found some highly circumstantial evidence but no proof, and I have maintained a keen interest in finding out one way or another just what this historic ship looked like at the time of her demise.

At this point the search has seen extensive research in two archives (San Francisco and Seattle) and the records of three shipyards (Mare Island, Pearl Harbor, and Puget Sound) and one naval district (13th Naval District, essentially the Northwestern US) along with some non-Pearl Harbor research in various other records such as Astoria Navy Base just to try and build a complete understanding about how the Navy went about camouflage in the Second World War.

Using those resources we have been able to build up a "higher resolution" picture of the turbulent year of 1941, and yet there is much that remains unknown.

We know that in January, 1941 a change in camouflage was ordered, but that due to production problems and supply difficulties, it took time to build up significant quantities of the new paints and adoptions seems to have started around June of that year. However, the main color for the majority of the ships, 5-D Dark Gray, was not found satisfactory and by July the Navy ordered its production halted and 5-S Sea Blue mixed as its replacement.

This is the point at which things really get murky. The Navy did not do a good job of promulgating this order, sending it only to the three Navy Yards responsible for manufacturing paint for the various fleets as well as four commands (Atlantic Fleet, Pacific Fleet, "Air Force" [Not Army Air Force but the Navy command in charge of aircraft], and OPNAV [Office of the Chief of Naval Operations]). This resulted in a lot of confusion and resentment when ships and commands kept sending in requisitions for old paint formulas.

Initially Mare Island Navy Yard answered the requests of other yards and ships with letters listing the new formulas and an order to re-request the desired materials, but by late September they were ordered to simply substitute the new paints for the old.

So it would seem that by October the Navy Yard at Pearl Harbor and ships based there should have started receiving the new paints, but this is not a hard fact at all. Indeed, a memo found in the records of the suggest that at the earliest it was late October that they knew for sure.

This memo deserves its own discussion. There is a typo in a date that can be confusing; the second paragraph starts with "Today, August 22..." This is clearly incorrect as the date occurs before the shipyard received the file. This memo discusses a letter from Mare Island to Pearl Harbor that was lost for six weeks in internal mail before being found and finally delivered. The letter in question was the aforementioned Letter to re-calculate paint needed and re-requisition the amounts. So Pearl Harbor did not officially know about the new paints until October 22.

This might not be that big of a deal in that the new paints were actually made using the same stocks as some of the old ones. 5-L Light Gray and 5-O Ocean gray were made by mixing specific amounts of a tinting paste into a white, un-tinted base. 5-S Sea Blue and 5-H Haze Gray were created by simply creating different ratios of the same tinting paste and untinted base, so if they had the stock to mix Ocean Gray they could do Sea Blue. But, at this point we don't even know when Pearl Harbor had the supplies to issue those two components of the paints.

Documents from August and September hint that Pearl Harbor did not have the facilities to provide the new paints; CL-50 Helena was not only ordered to paint into 5-S Sea Blue at Mare Island, but was also ordered to pick up paints for other cruisers at Mare Island at the end of September. Ships of Destroyer Division Nine were ordered to paint in variations of measures during overhaul at Mare Island in October.

These last documents throw in a new wrinkle; they are not from the Bureau of Ships or any Navy Yard, but from the Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, Commander of Destroyer Flotilla One, and the Commander Cruisers, Battle Force.

The question left unsolved at this point is, if the Commander of Cruisers, Battle Force, knew about the new paints and Pearl Harbor Navy Yard didn't, would there be any sort of interaction that would bring this to Pearl Harbor's attention? Would ComCruBatFor have requested the paint from PHNY first, or is there some other documentation thus undiscovered that would explain more?

What orders could these commands have given to the ships they administered that we haven't seen yet? And if Pearl Harbor didn't have the knowledge about the paints until late October, does it really matter if the various commands of the fleet DID have the knowledge and their supply chains did not exclusively flow through Pearl Harbor Navy Yard?