Death of USS Arizona Survivor Donald Stratton-- Part 3: Crawled to Safety Across 70 Feet of Rope Above a Burning Inferno

And, Donald Stratton's ordeal was not over.  He survived the explosion and fires, though severely burned, but he had to find a way to get off the ship.  He and five other badly burned men staggered  across their splintered warship  that glowed red hot from the fires fueled by oil and munitions.

The six survivors banded together, looking for a way to escape route to the water, but there wasn't one.  The water was on fire.

But then, an alert sailor, Joseph Leon George, on the repair ship USS Vestal, tied up next to the Arizona saw them.  After several tries, he managed  to get a heaving line over to the doomed ship and then a heavy line so that the survivors could crawl along the rope, four stories above the burning inferno that the water had become.

There was seventy feet of rope they had to cover, burned as they were, to get to safety on the Vestal.

They got across, but later two of them died from their burns.  Donald Stratton was one of the four who survived.

--GreGen