Day 15: Pearl Harbor

At dawn on December 7, 1941, more than half of the United States Pacific Fleet, approximately 150 vessels and service craft, lay at anchor or alongside piers in Pearl Harbor. All but one of the Pacific fleet's battleships were in port that morning, most of them moored to quays flanking Ford Island. By 10:00 a.m., the tranquil Sunday calm had been shattered. Twenty-one vessels lay sunk or damaged, the fighting backbone of the fleet apparently broken. Smoke from burning planes and hangars filled the sky, while oil from sinking ships clogged the harbor. Death was everywhere.                        - 
National Park Service Website

On Wednesday morning I woke up ridiculously early and drove Janine's car down to Pearl Harbor Visitor Center (successfully) in hopes of securing a walk-up ticket to view the USS Arizona later on that day. Pearl Harbor and the USS Arizona actually topped my O'ahu To-Do list and I had looked into making accommodations for a visit within a day or two of arriving in Hawai'i only to find that tickets were sold out straight through mid-July. This left me with only one option: waking up at 5am and driving to Pearl Harbor Visitor Center to be first in line for a walk-up ticket. I arrived successfully 30 minutes before opening time, only to find ~35 people already in line. Thankfully, after standing in line for close to an hour, a kind burly gentleman handed me an extra ticket that a tour group did not need for a 10:30am tour. To kill the three hours between then and my tour time, he pointed me toward a self-guided audio tour booth and suggested that I explore the Visitor Center's Museums. For the next few hours I read about the political and economic events that preceded the attack on Pearl Harbor, which felt like a more detailed version of my high school social studies class but with real artifacts and audio accounts of survivors. The audio clips and movies of survivors recounting horrific tales of their crew members being burned alive inside the hulls of smoldering battleships were haunting. From the Visitor's Center I could see Battleship Row, where the prize battleships of the U.S. Navy had been docked on the day that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

The U.S.S. Arizona Memorial is only accessible by boat. It straddles the remains of the sunken USS Arizona, which serves as a watery National Cemetary for the 1,177 crwemen whose bodies are still trapped inside. Casualties onboard the USS Arizona account for almost half of the total death toll of the Attack on Pearl Harbor. We were instructed to keep our voices low and asked to drop a flower into the water to honor the dead who lay imprisoned below. The memorial itself is simple and beautiful. National Park Service Website). I was surprised to learn that, 72 years after its destruction, an average of 2-9 quarts oil still surfaces from the wreckage of the USS Arizona on a daily basis.
The signature Tree of Life pattern (the white geometric pattern seen in photos above) from the Visitor Center's statue is also built into the architecture of the USS Arizona Memorial, creating a cohesive symmetry between the structures on land and in the harbor. The memorial consists of three sections: an entry room, a central area designed for ceremonies and general observation, and a shrine room where the names of the victims of the USS Arizona are engraved on a wall. Looking down from the memorial I could see glimpses of the sunken ship below the plumes of oil that danced on the water's surface. The USS arizona, which held approximately 1.5 million gallons of “Bunker-C” oil at the time that it was torpedoed, burned for 2 1/2 days (

I cannot say that this day was a happy one, although I was glad for the opportunity to visit the USS Arizona Memorial. I left the park in a somber and somewhat conflicted mood, trying to reconcile the images of destruction inflicted upon Pearl Harbor with the entirely unmentioned mental images of the United States later blowing parts of Japan sky-high with nuclear bombs. Standing over the sunken remnants of a once great battleship whose crew had drowned and burned alive in the service of the United States Military, I found that my awareness of the preciousness of human life heightened. How horrible that so many human beings - not Americans or Japanese - died in pursuit of imperialism, expansion, and ownership. Was it worth it? Was it necessary? I left the park feeling humbled, small, and pensive.