Not Even Not Traveling 70: Hawaii - Oahu, Pearl Harbor

Visiting Pearl Harbor

We were headed to a place where ride-share drivers can't get in and cell service goes to die. When ten thousand people are trying to use a cell tower simultaneously, neither ET nor you can phone home. (I believe this is also how the Hawaiian tourism board keeps people from checking their email.)
 
Our bus driver checked our identification and handed us our tickets — not for the bus ride, but for our Navy transport to the U.S.S. Arizona. Those were the reason Diane had booked us with a cheesy little tourist company with a red, double-decker bus.

We stepped aboard as the first bus passengers. Unlike many others from the Zaandam, we hadn't waited until the day of the tour to try to get into the memorial. From the dock, we rode in pre-arranged bliss - not splendor but still, it wasn't bad - diagonally across a third of Oahu, picking up other visitors along the way. 

The Arizona

We arrived at the Pearl Harbor National Memorial with time to spare, confirmed our reservations, and toured the park and museums before getting in line. Finally, the Navy called us up. We sat in a theatre and watched a newsreel about the U.S.S. Arizona. The basic theme was: this is a gravesite. Be respectful.

When we boarded the Navy transport to the sunken grave, that was the theme, too.

"You are not expected to be silent," said the Lieutenant to the crowded seats in the main cabin. "However, you will be escorted from the memorial if your behavior is loud or irreverent. Remember, there are passengers coming to visit their relatives who died here. There are over nine hundred men buried in the ship due to the battle. We have the remains of forty-eight men who have died since. They have chosen to be buried with their comrades, serving in the eternal duty, as is their right."

"You will also not be permitted to take pictures on the way to the memorial or to stand up in this craft while it is moving." He gestured to the pilot. The lieutenant had earlier given cast-off orders to a seaman recruit and a petty officer. Now, his ship accelerated.
 
Our transport was a small, partly open vehicle. Even from my seat, I could see how shockingly shallow the harbor was. We coasted less than forty feet above the silt-covered bottom. How had cruisers and aircraft carriers ever navigated through here? There must be deeper channels somewhere, though the whole place seems to have the nautical depth of a wading pool. No wonder the attack used only mini-subs — a full-sized sub would have gotten stuck like a bathtub toy in the sink. No wonder so many American ships got grounded here, too. Even the U.S.S. Nevada, which escaped during the attack, deliberately ran aground near Hospital Point. The crew had no choice; they had to beach their damaged battleship or risk blocking the harbor channel.

The memorial itself was a small building, spare and scrubbed, set in calm position above the sunken ship. Walking up the ramp, the crowd fell quiet. Inside, even the children stayed subdued — which, if you have taken children anywhere solemn, you know is miraculous. Yes, everyone had been warned. But warnings and children have a complicated relationship. This time, at least, they listened.

We filed into the place with a long pause to look down at the rusty remains of the U.S.S. Arizona. Then we nudged ourselves forward and went to pay our respects. We stood in the sanctum with the list of names carved in marble. We read them all, slowly. Then we looked for family names. We noticed a Naylor, a Hess, and several Roberts who died that day. There were six of the Roberts clan, in fact, and the lieutenant had mentioned to us, in an offhand way, how some sailors had been entertaining approved visitors when the surprise attack began. It looked like the Roberts family had been in attendance and the guests had died here along with the sailors.

Later, in the hallway over the water, we leaned over the rail and studied a rusted hatch of the Arizona. We thought about the men buried here by the attack and their friends who had asked to be buried with them.

The Pearl Harbor Museum

Back on land, we spent a lot of time reading about the attack. We watched footage, too. Hundreds of people told their stories, including children who survived, a few of the Japanese-American soldiers, the husband and wife teams in the military, the Japanese-Americans who were classified as 4-C and weren’t allowed to serve, the firemen who tried to stop the blazes and got shot by both Japanese and American forces, a pilot who had managed to get his plane off the ground, and another pilot who flew in from an aircraft carrier and was shot by his own side.

As it turned out, Diane had not known the timeline of the attack. It helped her to find the museum being so clear about the order of things. I might not have noticed, myself, but she commented on it twice.

We both liked the interview footage. In one of the museum buildings, interviews played on a loop. Each film captured the stories of soldiers (American and Japanese), civilians, children, and Hawaiians of all backgrounds as they were affected by the opening attack of a war. These were firsthand accounts. True, they were mostly captured forty or fifty years after the incident but at least someone thought to record the stories.

Personally, I was peeved that the codebreaker display in the museum was broken. There was a decoding device available, a flimsy cardboard-and-plastic thing about a yard long filled with dialed numbers. It was possibly a replica of the Purple Machine. But no one could get it to work. A gear inside had stripped and no operator could dial up the decoding sequences.

However, I enjoyed the statistical displays, including the military demographic ones. At the time of the attack, the Japanese had a much greater military force than the United States. Seeing the forces graphed side by side helped make the disparity clear. You could understand why Japan's leadership felt it was reasonable to try to knock the United States out of the action. They could dispense with America as a second-place opposing power in one shot. That may have been wishful thinking, of course. Some Japanese leaders thought so at the time. But the military advantages Japan possessed apparently convinced the rest.

And Japan did succeed. At the end of the day on December 7, the United States Navy had only three aircraft carriers left. Those were out on a routine patrol, so they missed the action. Add to those the four cruisers, a couple submarines, and a few smaller ships always on patrol, and the U.S. had a tiny fleet, too small to offer a serious fight. The Pearl Harbor attack led to as good an outcome as the Japanese military could have hoped. Yet it wasn't enough.

Japanese conquered most of China, swaths of the Soviet Union, Taiwan, Korea, South Sakhalin, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, Burma, East Timor, Guam, the South Seas Mandate, Wake Island, Kiribati, and many Pacific islands too small to list. Some of those countries don't exist anymore, of course, but the point is that Japan succeeded in occupying them all. They had plans to subjugate more, including Australia, New Zealand, and Siberia. They accomplished it all largely without allies, except for Germany on the other side of the world, and Thailand, which was not a major force. If they hadn't kept expanding - if they had paused to solidify their positions - they might have kept an empire.

The Submarine Museum

We only saw the outside of the U.S.S. Bowfin, a beautiful submarine, because we'd miscalculated our time. After the Pearl Harbor museum, we walked over to find we had half an hour before our tour bus left.

"We could run through," I suggested.

"Pretty sure they won't let us," said Diane.

We had time to walk around the submarine memorial outside and read the plaques. While I did, I tried to learn what we were missing. Life aboard submarines had always seemed claustrophobic to me, and after reading about it — yep, it was absolutely awful. Submariners lived in a sealed metal tube with no sunlight, no privacy, and no way out, like an open-plan office building but with torpedoes.

What I did enjoy learning about was the evolution of submarine technology. The improvements were remarkable; running an early submarine required either extraordinary bravery or a complete failure to read the brochure.

The Navy built the U.S.S. Bowfin as an upgrade to the fleet. It launched exactly one year after the Pearl Harbor attack and went on to become one of the most decorated submarines of the Pacific Theater. It earned credit for sinking thirty enemy craft and damaging seven more. Like the U.S.S. Missouri, the Bowfin is now open to the public. And the museum attached to it has four thousand or so submarine-related mementos. It's got a dissected Poseidon missile. It includes an audio tour so you can get a good idea of what the relics mean and how they were used. But we mostly toured the Waterfront Memorial.

The Waterfront Memorial

The Navy can't recover the remains of those lost when a submarine gets destroyed. Instead, they have a memorial outside the submarine museum for those people. The site arranges fifty-two plaques in a semi-circle. It offers specifics on each of the lost submarines, including the names of the crew members.

Close by on the park grounds, the Navy displays more war relics. You can look through a periscope from the USS Parche. You can see parts of a Japanese Kaiten, which was a manned torpedo. As one might imagine, the pilots of the Kaiten had to be pretty dedicated. Due to a manufacturing problem, water leaked into the operator and engine compartments. Solving the problem was never a priority. Instead, Japan issued the pilots a self-destruct mechanism in case, for some reason - like taking in too much water - they missed their target.

More Oahu

Well, Honolulu is unlike anything else in Hawaii because it's a true city, not a town, and it's anchored by a world-class international harbor, Kulolia. Pearl Harbor, too, is set apart from the rest, although in spirit it felt to me a little like Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau, the City of Refuge on the big island. They are both places shaped by the hardships endured there and the sacrifices made. Maybe that's the only connection they have but, to me personally, one reminded me of the other.

The attack on Pearl Harbor changed Hawaii's place in America. Before December 7, 1941, Hawaiians had reason to doubt whether the mainland would stand by them in a crisis. After that day, they knew. America had felt struck when Hawaii was struck. Mainlanders had come to the aid of the islands.

Before the war, there hadn't been much sentiment one way or another about making Hawaii a state. After, the question of statehood seemed redundant. Most citizens knew their answer. Hawaiians were Americans.