Battleship USS Arizona: "Herbert Hoover Visits Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands" 1931 Paramount News Newsreel (Patreon)

more at http://quickfound.net/

Silent, with some title cards.

Originally a public domain film from the Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Arizona_(BB-39)

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

USS Arizona (BB-39) was a Pennsylvania class battleship built for the United States Navy in the mid-1910s. Named in honor of the 48th state's recent admission into the union, the ship was the second and last of the Pennsylvania class of "super-dreadnought" battleships. Although commissioned in 1916, the ship remained stateside during World War I. Shortly after the end of the war, Arizona was one of a number of American ships that briefly escorted President Woodrow Wilson to the Paris Peace Conference. The ship was sent to Turkey in 1919 at the beginning of the Greco-Turkish War to represent American interests for several months. Several years later, she was transferred to the Pacific Fleet and remained there for the rest of her career.

Aside from a comprehensive modernization in 1929–1931, Arizona was regularly used for training exercises between the wars, including the annual Fleet Problems (training exercises). When an earthquake struck Long Beach, California, on 10 March 1933, Arizona's crew provided aid to the survivors. In July 1934, the ship was featured in a James Cagney film, Here Comes the Navy, about the romantic troubles of a sailor. In April 1940, she and the rest of the Pacific Fleet were transferred from California to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, as a deterrent to Japanese imperialism.

Arizona was hit by Japanese torpedo bombers during the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. After one of their bombs detonated in a magazine, she exploded violently and sank, with the loss of 1,177 officers and crewmen. Unlike many of the other ships sunk or damaged that day, Arizona was irreparably damaged by the force of the magazine explosion...

The keel of battleship number 39 was laid on the morning of 16 March 1914 with Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt in attendance. The builders intended to set a world-record ten months between the ship's keel-laying and launch, for what the New York Times declared would be "the world's biggest and most powerful, both offensively and defensively, superdreadnought ever constructed,"... She was launched on 19 June 1915, making it about fifteen months from keel-laying to launch...

The New York Times estimated that 75,000 people attended the launch...

In company with six battleships and eighteen destroyers, Arizona was sent south again to transit the Panama Canal in January 1921... After a short return to the Atlantic, which included an overhaul in New York, Arizona, under the command of Jehu V. Chase, returned to Peru in the summer before she began operating from her new home port of San Pedro, California, part of Los Angeles, where she was based until 1940.

For the rest of the 1920s, Arizona's service consisted of routine training exercises... A recurring theme in these years were the annual Fleet Problems, which began in 1923 and simulated large fleet actions by having most of the active fleet face off against each other...

Sometime in early March 1924, a woman stowed away, trading sex for a free voyage to San Pedro until she was discovered on 12 April while the ship was anchored in Balboa, Panama. She was sent back to New York City and Captain Percy Olmstead later convened courts-martial for 23 sailors once the ship began her refit in the Bremerton Navy Yard, which imposed sentences of up to 10 years imprisonment...

Four months after Fleet Problem IX in January 1929, Arizona was modernized at the Norfolk Navy Yard...

On 19 March 1931, even before Arizona was put through post-modernization sea trials, she hosted President Herbert Hoover for a brief vacation in the Caribbean. The President visited Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Returning on 29 March, Arizona conducted her sea trials at Rockland, Maine, and had another catapult fitted on the top of Turret III, before she was transferred to the West Coast in August with her sister Pennsylvania. In February 1932, the ship participated in Grand Joint Exercise No. 4 in which carrier aircraft successfully attacked Pearl Harbor on Sunday morning, 7 February...