How much did the bomb that hit the USS Arizona weigh?

Answer 1

One ton, around 2000 pounds. Actually it was a shell made for the big guns of a battleship, an armored piercing shell. These had a specially hardened tip and a thick casing, to allow them to smash through the armor of a battleship's deck, and a slight delay fuse, so that the shell would travel some feet into the interior of the target ship before detonating. The Japanese had hit on the idea of fitting fins to these 15-inch armor-piercing battleship shells and dropping them from several thousand feet using a crude bombsight to aim them. By dropping them from that height the shells would be traveling just as fast as if they had been fired from a battleship's guns when they impacted the target, allowing them to smash through the armor. They used some of their torpedo planes as these "high level" bombers for this job. The torpedo planes were the largest carrier aircraft, with the biggest engines, so they could carry their usual armament, which was one torpedo, which also weighed one ton. The torpedo bombers did most of the damage to the US battleships in Pearl Harbor, in their designed role of launching torpedoes (just like those fired by submarines) into the sides of battleships, and also the one which hit the Arizona. That particular hit penetrated deep into the vitals of the American ship and set off the black powder magazine. This was full of black powder charges used to propel the ship's small observation plane down its short rail catapult into the air. This black powder magazine was located just outside the magazine for the second turret forward of the Arizona. This main battery magazine had steel walls more than one foot thick but still the explosion somehow flashed through - probably through a handling scuttle, something like the drawer at the drive-through window at a bank - and caused the Arizona's own propellant for her main battery shells to explode - more than one million pounds of explosive, instantly destroying the front half of the ship, causing it to bounce six feet out of the water, and killing nearly 1200 crewmen - about half of all those killed in the attack.

Answer 2

It had a displacement of 31,400 tons.