Photo: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential
Library and Museum of the National Archives and Records Administration
The flaming wreckage of the American battleship USS Arizona at
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, during the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941, which
killed 1177 on board.
[T]he heart of Pearl Harbor was "Battleship Row," on the east side of Ford Island, where seven of America's greatest warships were moored this Sunday morning ... Their construction had begun on the Navy Department watch of Franklin Roosevelt, who as assistant navy secretary from 1913 to 1920 had employed every means of patriotic persuasion, bureaucratic guile, and political finesse to augment America's naval power. The Arizona, the Oklahomoa, the Tennessee, and the Nevada, now gleaming in the morning sun, were his babies, and no father was prouder.[1]The Arizona was built at the Brooklyn Navy Yard — FDR was present for the keel-laying in 1914 — and it was launched in 1915.[2]
References
- Brands, H.W., Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Anchor Books (2008), p.5.
- USS_Arizona_(BB-39), Wikipedia (accessed 10 June 2018).