Saturday was another day of relaxing at home; on Sunday, Christmas Eve Day, we did quite a lot of sightseeing! In the afternoon Judy, Cheryl, and Mark went to Pearl Harbor, and we visited Battleship Row: the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial and the U.S.S. Missouri, representing respectively the beginning and end of America's involvement in World War II.
The U.S.S. Arizona Memorial appears to float in the harbor; it is built across the hull of the sunken hulk of the great battleship, about where the bridge was. Almost half the deaths that occurred in the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 happened in an instant when the forward magazine of the Arizona exploded; most of those killed are still entombed aboard her. The Memorial opened about twenty years after the attack, to commemorate all those who died that day.
The only major part of the ship still above water is the foundation of her number 3 turret, also visible next to the memorial in the photo at top. (The concrete mooring platform to the right in the photo was built during salvage operations after the attack.) Still visible after 59 years is a slick of oil leaking underwater from the bunkers of the ship, "as if she were still weeping for her crew" suggests the narration. I (Mark) found it very moving to visit the site of events I had heard about all my life.
After returning from the memorial (which is reached by boat, after you view a 20-minute film consisting entirely of historical footage), we went over to the U.S.S. Bowfin museum to buy tickets to visit the U.S.S. Missouri. The submarine Bowfin, commissioned one year to the day after the attack, became known as the "Pearl Harbor Avenger." Unfortunately, we didn't have time to visit her or tour the museum, as we spent the remainder of the afternoon aboard the Mighty Mo. You can see the Bowfin in the background of this photograph; in the foreground are two early Polaris SLBM's (submarine-launched ballistic missiles) from later generations of U.S. Navy subs.
We couldn't get to a vantage point that let us capture in a photograph the sheer size of the last battleship commissioned by the U.S. Navy; perhaps this shot, looking aft toward the number 1 gun turret, gives some idea. The two tiny figures below the guns are Cheryl & Judy; these 16" guns could fling a shell weighing as much as a Volkswagen over 20 miles! The keel of the ship was laid in January 1941, and she was commissioned in early 1944; while in service during the Gulf War nearly fifty years later, she was the last operational battleship in the world.
The surrender document that ended the Second World War was signed aboard the U.S.S. Missouri while she was moored in Tokyo Bay; the location of the signing, starboard and aft of the number 2 turret, is marked by the plaque shown above, set into the deck.
The photograph above shows Battleship Row, where the great behemoths were moored during the attack. The quays are painted with the names of the ships moored there; you can see the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial, and in the background the U.S.S. Missouri. The latter has been back at Pearl Harbor only since about 1998, and open to the public only in the last year or so; after her service in the Gulf War and just before she was decommissioned, she steamed into Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1991, the fiftieth anniversary of the attack, with all hands standing on deck to salute her sunken sister and her crew. It's hard to imagine what the sailors and Marines aboard the old battlewagon returning home must have felt.
That evening, all six of us squeezed into the family Camry (to ensure we didn't have to try to keep two cars in a convoy in downtown traffic!) and went to dinner, then to the Honolulu City Lights. This is an annual display of lights outside city-government buildings downtown; the Board of Water Supply in particular is known for complex moving light-pictures (for example, of a plant that grows up after rain falls). There was also a competition for hand-crafted wreaths, with categories for adults, for children, and separately for the theme "Visions of Sugarplums and Spam Musubi" (I think that was the actual theme of the contest--certainly it was quoted as the title of one wreath; spam musubi is a local favorite made with, you guessed it, sushi fixin's and spam!). The wreaths were along two very crowded hallways inside the city administrative offices, as you can see in the photo above.
There was also a central hall full of Christmas trees decorated by different city departments; this photo is a view through the entrance, since the inside was too crowded for satisfactory photography. The whole exhibit, indoors and outdoors, was very well attended, and apparently had been for days--it wasn't just now, on Christmas Eve. We can't think of any comparable displays in the Los Angeles area; the burg is just too spread out to have some central gathering like this. People living in the Honolulu area are very fortunate to have an event like this to which they can take their families!
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to Photo Albumnew 24 December 2000, revised 26 December 2000