One of the battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 was the West Virginia. Six months after the attack, the vessel was refloated and the remains of 66 crewmen were recovered. The salvage team made the ghastly discovery of the bodies of three crewmen who had been trapped under the water in a sealed compartment and who had survived until December 23, until either their air or water supply had run out. The doomed men had kept track of the time by marking through the days on a calendar.
This discovery was not a surprise to the sentries who had been patrolling the damaged vessels in the harbor after the attack, as they had heard and had been tormented by the sounds of the slowly expiring crewmen pounding on the hull below the waterline.
The relatives of the 66 men were informed that all of the casualties had died on December 7. The story of the three trapped crewmen was not released until several decades later.
The West Virginia was eventually fully repaired and upgraded and served with distinction in several campaigns in the Pacific. She was put in mothballs in 1947 and decommissioned and sold for scrap in 1959.
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