The proposed sale of a number of silver items recovered by a diver in the 1940s from the USS Arizona is causing controversy among veterans For an antiques hunter it doesn’t get much better than this: an early 20th-century, silver tea set including a candlestick, pedestal bowl, sauce boat and a teapot salvaged from the officer’s mess of the USS Arizona — one of the ships destroyed by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.

But plans by a presenter from the US version of the Antiques Roadshow to auction the 24-piece set have become mired in controversy, with military veterans calling the silverware “sacred material” and “stolen goods” that ought to be donated to a museum.

“It kind of turned my stomach, you bet,” Arthur Herriford, 87, president of the Pearl Harbor Survivors’ Association, told the Honolulu Advertiser.

“Anybody who would pull that kind of stuff [from Pearl Harbor], I got no use for,” he said. Mr Herriford was a 19-year-old crewman on the USS Detroit when he watched as the USS Arizona was sunk by a 1,760lb (800kg) armour-piercing bomb.

Times Archive, 1941: Japan at war with US and Britain

Without any formal declaration of war, the Japanese yesterday attacked American bases in the Pacific

• Archive topic: Pearl Harbor

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“I was looking directly at it when it got hit,” he recalled. “I saw a flash and a column of flames and smoke shooting up above it.” The attack on the USS Arizona killed 1,177 of the 1,400 crewmen on board. The wreckage was never salvaged.

The tea set, which became encrusted with lime while under water, is thought to belong to the daughter of Carl Keenum, the navy diver who retrieved it while on a mission between 1942 and 1943 to salvage ammunition.

Reed & Barton and Gorham Manufacturing Company are the only visible manufacturers’ stamps. The value of the set is thought to be about $20,000 (£12,120).

Mr Keenum, who was serving as a battalion master of arms on the USS Oklahoma when the Japanese attacked, reportedly helped to save the lives of 37 crewmen after the strike, which destroyed 11 ships and 188 aircraft. He died in 1964.

The tea set remained a family secret for almost 70 years until it was included in a catalogue for an auction. The sale by Cowan’s Auctions is to take place in Cincinnati, Ohio, on December 9.

But outrage over the proposed sale has been so strong that Cowan’s has now deleted the set from its catalogue pending a decision by the navy’s Judge Advocate General Corps on whether it can be sold.

“We have encouraged the present owner to strongly consider donating the collection to the navy or to the USS Arizona Memorial,” said Wes Cowan, famous for his roles in the television shows Antiques Roadshow and History Detectives.

Hawaii’s USS Arizona Memorial, which attracts 1.5 million visitors every year, is already thought to own other items from the same tea set. It is now against the law to take items from any stricken US vessel. In the 1940s, however, no such regulations existed.

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