USS Arizona

The story of the USS Arizona encompasses far more than the milli-second BOOM! that split her hull and snuffed out the lives of 1177 men aboard her. The huge battleship led a fascinating life before her demise, and--as a poignant symbol of the attack that thrust the United States into World War II--has impacted millions of lives since. She lays where she sank, in the silt of Pearl Harbor, spanned now by a graceful white memorial that pays tribute to her dead. MacKinnon Simpson's newest book, USS Arizona  -  Warship • Tomb •  Monument, pays tribute to the ship, her crews, and her symbolism through the years. Packed with many rarely-before seen images, the book includes such unlikely characters as Elvis Presley, whose benefit concert helped trigger the fund-raising for the Memorial, and Henry Williams, a three-year-old boy who placed the first bolt in her keel in 1915 and read a newspaper by the light of her raging fires as a lieutenant at Pearl Harbor in 1941. USS Arizona  -  Warship • Tomb • Monument tells a story that needed to be told, of why the Arizona is still so important to people from around the world who trek to visit her each year.