A Proud Name ...

(Source)

She lies there, in roughly forty feet of water, where she has lain since the 7th of December, 1941. Most of her crew are still aboard, they too have been there since that fateful moment when she exploded at roughly 0806 on a beautiful Sunday morning, lying at anchor at Pearl Harbor, on the island of Oahu, Hawaii.

I've written about the attack on Pearl Harbor just about every December 7th since I started blogging back in 2012. I reckon I'll do so until the blog ends, which I hope won't be for quite some time.

This year, rather than reminisce about that "date which will live in infamy," another topic sprang to mind, namely the re-use of the name Arizona for a United States warship. I wasn't aware of this until fairly recently, not sure how I missed it.

SSN-803, a Block 5 Virginia-class nuclear attack boat will bear the name USS Arizona. A small part of me likes the idea that that name shall once again sail the seas. Three other ships have borne that name prior to this one -

• USS Arizona, an iron-hulled, side-wheel merchant steamship. Seized by the Confederate States of America in 1862 during the American Civil War, she was captured later the same year by the United States Navy. (Read more about her here.)
• USS Neshaminy was a large and powerful 3,850-ton screw frigate with a length of 335 feet that was under construction at the Philadelphia Navy Yard when she was surveyed by Navy officials who found her construction work to be poor. Construction was halted by the Navy, which eventually sold her for scrap. (Read more about her here.) She had been renamed Arizona, then Nevada.
• USS Arizona (BB-39), a Pennsylvania-class battleship launched in 1915 and sunk by Japanese bombers in the attack on Pearl Harbor 7 December 1941. (Read more about her here.)

Yet there is another part of me which absolutely abhors the idea of another warship bearing that name. Part of that abhorrence is that BB-39 went to the bottom on one of the most painful days in American history, she was lost in a terrible defeat. She is an ever-present reminder of that defeat while, not that far away, is moored the USS Missouri (BB-63), a reminder of our eventual victory in World War II.

The decision to resurrect the name Arizona was announced back in December of 2019 by Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly, a fellow for whom I don't have a very high opinion of due to his actions during the fiasco surrounding the relief of the commanding officer of the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) during the initial stages of the great WuFlu "crisis" of the past few years. Which you can read about here, I shan't go into the details. Suffice to say, my son-in-law Big Time was a member of TR's Air Wing at the time.

As I recall, no one was happy with anything surrounding that event, in my opinion, Acting Secretary Modly brought great shame upon himself and the United States Navy during that fiasco. For which he quite rightly resigned. I'll say this for him, he f**ked up, but he owned up to it. Well, he is an Annapolis alumnus and a former active rotor-head (helicopter pilot), so credit where credit is due. At least he has a sense of honor.

At any rate, what say you as to the resurrection of the name Arizona? I confess to having mixed feelings, the Navy hasn't always named its ships in a fashion which makes any logical sense at times, but this goes beyond that. It is a proud name and meets the standards by which we name capital ships.

Chime in, I've said my piece.