The story of the photograph of USS Shaw's magazine detonating at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941: three dive-bomb hits on a destroyer in a floating dry dock, the blast that removed her bow in front of the USS Nevada's stern, and what the frame teaches a player about dating a 1941 photograph.
The photograph shows a plume of smoke rising from the center of Pearl Harbor while, at its foot, a U.S. Navy destroyer explodes: USS Shaw (DD-373) had her forward magazine detonate roughly an hour into the Japanese attack, and the frame caught the instant the bow was blown off. It is the most famous single image of the attack on Pearl Harbor — the picture textbooks, documentaries and veterans' memorials reach for first. The stern of the battleship USS Nevada (BB-36), having beached near Hospital Point just minutes earlier, is visible in the foreground — evidence of how closely the chaos of that morning was packed: the ship exploding in the dry dock and the ship that tried to run for the channel ended up within a few hundred yards of each other.
Shaw was a Mahan-class destroyer, built at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, laid down on 1 October 1934 and commissioned on 18 September 1936 — a mid-1930s design that had already served in the Atlantic before transferring to the Pacific. On the morning of 7 December 1941 she was berthed in the floating dry dock YFD-2 at the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard, out of the water, undergoing adjustments to her depth-charge mechanisms. Being in dry dock left her helpless: no engines, no way to get underway, her hull exposed above the waterline of the basin. That vulnerability is part of what makes the photograph so striking — the ship that could not move, caught in a raid that burned a battleship row less than a mile away.
During the attack Shaw took three bomb hits from Japanese dive bombers — two through the forward machine-gun platform and one through the port wing of the bridge. Fires spread through the ship faster than her crew could fight them; by 09:25 all firefighting facilities were exhausted and the order to abandon ship was given. Attempts to flood the dry dock to quench the flames were only partially successful, and shortly after 09:30 her forward magazine exploded, completely removing her bow. The blast also punctured YFD-2 and the harbor tug Sotoyomo moored alongside: both sank — the dry dock partially, the tug completely — leaving Shaw's after section afloat and burning. The ship had been written off by many at the scene, but temporary repairs at Pearl Harbor through January 1942, a new bow fitted after she reached San Francisco in February 1942, and the durability that earned her the nickname a ship too tough to die saw her back in action by August 1942, serving through the rest of the Pacific war and earning 11 battle stars before she was decommissioned in October 1945.
The photograph is catalogued by the National Archives as NARA 80-G-16871, credited simply to an unknown U.S. Navy photographer. The archive records the ship, the date, the event — and stops there, because the record genuinely does not say who pressed the shutter. That is the same discipline guessNow applies to every reveal: the attribution shown is exactly what the source supports, even when the source supports only the words an unknown navy photographer. The image's stature — the National Archives' own magazine Prologue named 80-G-16871 one of its top-ten requested images — rests on what it shows, not on who made it, which is itself a lesson about how photographs become history.
For a guessNow player this photograph is one of the most precisely-dateable frames in the archive, because the event it shows is famous down to the minute: the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the surprise Japanese raid that brought the United States into the Second World War. The reading order is the usual one. The newest thing in the frame — a 1930s destroyer's bow disintegrating in a wartime explosion inside a U.S. naval base — could only be a ship of the mid-1930s or later (Shaw was commissioned in 1936) and an attack on that base happened on exactly one morning: 7 December 1941. So the explosion pins the date to a single day. The battleship beached beyond narrows that bracket further with the morning's sequence, but the player does not need it: a Pacific war that suddenly includes the United States means late 1941, and the attack everyone knows removes even the month. For the wider mid-century cues, our how to date a 1940s photograph guide and the general how to date an old photograph work through the tells in detail.
The photograph is one of the rounds in guessNow's archive. It arrives revealed piece by piece, and you slide to the year you think it was taken before your HP runs out — can you land the explosion on 1941? Read first from the newest thing in the frame, then from the ship's identity and the event's fame, and see whether you can pin the date to the year the way the record itself does.