More than eighty years after December 7, 1941, oil still rises from the wreck of the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor, more than two quarts a day that visitors call black tears. This episode looks at everything the battleship lived through before that Sunday morning: a keel laid at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1914 with a young Franklin D. Roosevelt watching, a 1915 launch before 75,000 spectators, a christening with Ohio sparkling wine and Roosevelt Dam water because Arizona had banned alcohol, and a revolutionary all-or-nothing armor scheme that concentrated up to 18 inches of Krupp steel around the magazines and machinery while leaving the rest of the ship lightly protected.

The Arizona missed combat in World War I because Britain could not supply fuel oil, then spent the interwar years escorting Woodrow Wilson to the Paris Peace Conference, sheltering Americans at Smyrna, winning the Battenberg Cup rowing race against the USS Nevada, starring in a 1934 James Cagney film, and weathering a 1924 stowaway scandal that produced one of the largest peacetime courts-martial in naval history and a reprimand for a young ensign named Arleigh Burke. The episode then examines the eleven minutes of the attack, the 1,177 men lost in a single magazine explosion, the two competing theories about what set it off, and the remarkable afterlife of the ship’s salvaged 14-inch guns.

• Why all-or-nothing armor was a bet on plunging shells at long range and how modified battleship shells defeated it
• Fleet problems that simulated carrier air attacks on Hawaii years before 1941
• Black powder, an open hatch, or a direct hit: the unresolved mystery of the explosion
• How Turret II’s warped barrels were straightened and fired from the USS Nevada at Iwo Jima and Okinawa
• The 1962 memorial, the right to fly the flag, ashes interred by divers, and the death of the last survivor at 102 in 2024