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).