The 1,760-pound Japanese armor-piercing bomb dropped from 10,000 feet onto the USS Arizona would wreck the ship, kill most of the crew and catapult the old battleship into the national consciousness.

The explosion ignited aviation fuel stores and the powder magazines for the 14-inch guns, instantly separating most of the bow from the ship and lifting the 33,000-ton vessel out of the water.

Maritime archaeologist James Delgado later wrote that the partially sunken battleship’s burning decks and leaning superstructure and foremast, photographed and emblazoned in newspapers across America, epitomized to the nation the words “Remember Pearl Harbor!”

Just two of 21 damaged Pacific Fleet ships would never again leave Pearl Harbor — the Arizona and target training ship USS Utah — and both became watery graves and memorials to crew members who remain aboard.

A third ship, the battleship Oklahoma, which was heavily damaged by torpedoes, would also never rejoin the fleet. They were the exception, however, to the successful salvage of what seemed to many to be unsalvageable ships.

A total of 1,177 sailors and Marines had been killed on the Arizona. The Oklahoma presented the clearest approach path for attacking Japanese torpedo bombers, and the dreadnought capsized at 8:08 a.m., about 12 minutes after the first of up to nine torpedoes split her open. It was the second-greatest loss of life at Pearl Harbor: 429 crew members were dead.

Delgado, writing in “Historical Archaeology,” said that even before the Arizona itself became a relic, pieces of it — anchors, the ship’s bells, bulkhead hatches, a bugle and clocks — made their way into patriotic displays and war bond drives.

The planners of the Japanese attack had ordered pilots to ignore the former battleship Utah, which was commissioned in 1911 and converted to a target training ship in 1931, but it was still mistaken for an active battleship and torpedoed. At about 8:12 a.m. the Utah capsized.

The decision was made to leave the bodies of about 58 crewmen aboard, considering them buried at sea, the National Park Service said. The Utah memorial was dedicated on May 27, 1972.

“The Utah has been almost forgotten,” the Park Service said in a study of submerged cultural resources. “Seldom honored by public visits, it rests in the waters of Pearl Harbor as a distant memory of America’s most remembered day, a sad epitaph for a fine battleship.”

The damaged Oklahoma was floated and sold for scrap in 1946. The Oklahoma was under tow by two tugs when it went down in a storm 500 miles northeast of Hawaii on May 17, 1947.