Why couldn’t they raise the USS Arizona?
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It’s a matter of cost vs. benefit. Of all of the ships that were sunk, three battleships never returned to service. The *USS Utah* was already pretty much retired and was being used as a target ship. There was no point in trying to raise her, and she’s still on the bottom of the harbor to this day (and yes, she has her own memorial). The *USS Oklahoma* took several torpedo hits in one side and quickly capsized during the attack. Between the internal compartments that were blown out by the torpedo hits and the severe damage to the superstructure from going belly-up in the water (and couple with the fact that she had been commissioned in 1916), it was determined that she would have been more expensive to repair and refit than building a whole new battleship, so they finally righted and raised her in 1943 and proptly picked her over for parts and sold her for scrap after the war (she never made it, she sank in a storm on her way to the breakers in San Francisco).
*USS Arizona,* though, was a completely different beast. Her forward magazine went up, and when that happened (according to witnesses) the whole front half of the ship lurched out of the water (more than half of the casualties of the attack on Pear Harbor are from the *Arizona*, alone). Pearl Harbor is only 40 feet (or so) deep, so the remnants of the ship didn’t have time to spread when she sank, but her entire forward hull isn’t much more than a shell with her original armor belt being the only thing holder her somewhat together. They’d have to lay a whole new keel and build a whole new hull for her, and like *Oklahoma* she was commissioned in 1916 and it just wasn’t worth it.
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