Brian booked us tickets to go see the Arizona memorial. You have to reserve them well in advance and they release the tickets at two intervals prior to the date… I don’t know it’s very confusing… but Brian picked this past Saturday at 1pm so we went.
We started by visiting the USS Utah remains. It’s less talked about and on the other side of Ford Island. I’m not even sure many people go there. We have base access so we made a stop before heading to the Missouri. Not much left of it.
Then we headed to the USS Missouri. It was the last served battleship (I didn’t realize that we only have destroyers now. More agile apparently). It was the host of the surrender of the Japanese after WWII.
We think that’s part of why it was picked to be a living memorial… you can see the start and end of WWII from the same place. Pretty unique. (The USS Arizona memorial is just barely peaking out past the poles in the water.)
Supposedly the little green missile pictured below weighed 2,000lbs… I didn’t test it.
A museum ranger asked us where we were from, and we told him Brian was stationed here on a sub. He replied “Ah, well have fun seeing what a real warship looks like”. To which Brian later told me “this is no warship, it’s a cruise ship” (As evidence by the DONUT shop, pictured and his equivalent role’s stateroom which looks like a normal size room)
There was a display of letters the Kamikaze pilots wrote to their families when they knew they were going on their final suicide mission. Those were very, very, very sad.
The USS Oklahoma memorial is right outside the USS Missouri, also a lesser talked about memorial.
This is the view of the USS Arizona memorial from the USS Missouri, but you actually have to go back across the bridge to catch the boat to go to the memorial itself.
You can see parts of the wreckage above water. We did also see oil. One of these things is not like the other…
The boat gives you a half hour there to explore, which I thought was the right amount of time but some people seemingly thought was too much. There’s a movie to watch at an outdoor seating area before you go (used to be indoor, but, COVID). The movie was very good.
There is so much to explore at Pearl Harbor, but Brian narrowed it down to these 4 things for this day. I think we chose wisely, because it was really cool to go explore the USS Missouri and then stand over the equivalent (sunken) warship at the USS Arizona memorial. It was nice to have that perspective before standing over it.