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USS Missouri and USS Arizona in unique juxtaposition
By ERIC NOLAND
LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS
HONOLULU -- Frank Hartwell was in a cheerful mood as he finished his rounds as a tour guide on the USS Missouri.
And why not? He could personally share in the collective pride over Mighty Mo, one of America's most celebrated warships. Hartwell, who joined the Navy while his family was living in California, had been assigned to the destroyer Satterlee during World War II, and had guarded the Missouri's flank during the furious battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
"We had picket duty. We formed the protection ring around her," Hartwell said. Then he laughed and added, "In other words, we were expendable. Our job was to keep the kamikazes (Japanese suicide bombers) off the big ships."
Now he stood just a few feet from a plaque on the Missouri's deck that commemorates the spot where Japan signed a surrender document in September 1945.
The sun was shining and Douglas MacArthur's voice -- recorded at the surrender ceremony -- boomed from a loudspeaker overhead: "May God preserve it. . . . These proceedings are closed."
But Hartwell's enjoyment of the moment was short-lived, as is the case with most visitors to the Missouri, which tied up in Pearl Harbor last January. Even on these decks, the eye is naturally drawn forward, to a point just off the bow, where the gleaming white USS Arizona Memorial lies silently in the water.
"I've visited it nine times," Hartwell said. "I can't help choking up every time, seeing those 1,177 names. It just grabs me."
Indeed, the two memorials, in unique juxtaposition, seize visitors in radically different ways.
The Arizona is a symbol of the start of America's war in the Pacific. In Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, it was torn apart when a bomb crashed into an ammunition magazine, sending the battleship to the harbor floor in less than nine minutes. Its loss of 1,177 crewmen -- 77 percent of them assigned to the ship at the time -- constitutes the single greatest naval disaster in American history.
The Missouri, with its famous Surrender Deck, represents the other bookend of World War II -- its conclusion. And its history is as storied as the Arizona's is tragic. The Missouri, whose hull was laid in 1941, was in action as recently as 1991, when its tomahawk missiles pounded Iraqi positions in Kuwait and Baghdad during Operation Desert Storm.
The Missouri was decommissioned the next year (the second time in its history it had been mothballed -- both times docked at Bremerton, Wash.) and ultimately came to rest in Honolulu.
As if in a symbolically protective gesture, the Missouri's famed 16-inch guns point directly over the top of the Arizona, which lies submerged a few hundred feet away.
The Mighty Mo has proven to be an irresistible lure for tourists stopping in to see the Arizona.
As a tourist attraction, the Missouri has been in a state of evolution. "Since opening (it), we've found that visitors are fascinated about seeing its interior and how sailors lived and worked," said Don Hess, the memorial's vice president of operations.
To accommodate the curiosity, the memorial association is gradually making over and opening up various rooms in the ship as exhibits in an attempt to show how they were used.
It's intriguing to walk through the area of the Surrender Deck, where black-and-white photos of the event are displayed and MacArthur's voice transports you back into history.
Visitors to the Missouri are collected at a ticket booth next to the USS Arizona Memorial parking lot, then carried over the bridge to Ford Island on open-air trolleys.
The nearby Arizona is maintaining its longstanding tradition of quiet dignity.
To begin the program, you file into a theater to watch a brief documentary film. Mercifully, the lights are dimmed for this presentation. Many visitors, particularly those who are old enough to have lived through Pearl Harbor and the horrors of the war, dab at their eyes as details of the Arizona's demise are presented.
Then visitors assemble on a sun-washed dock to climb into the launch that will carry them to the memorial. The boat is manned by young sailors in crisp white uniforms.
At the memorial itself, conversation tends to be hushed. The 184-foot slab of concrete spans the midsection of the ship, and the hulk lies just inches below the surface of the water, an aft turret and other rusted remnants protruding here and there. Many of the crewmen remain entombed below.
In the shrine room, at the end closest to Ford Island, a marble wall contains the names of the ship's 1,177 dead -- which represent more than half of the 2,340 military deaths suffered in the attack.
Out on the center section of the Arizona Memorial, park ranger Mary Kalishevich indicated a slick of oil near the protruding turret. "No," she says, "that did not come from the launch that brought us out here. It still gurgles forth from the sunken ship, all these years later."
"We have no idea how much oil was on the ship when she was sunk," Kalishevich said, "and we have no idea how much oil is left.
"There's a myth out here -- that when the last survivor dies, she will stop crying tears of oil for her crewmen to come back."
Also at Pearl Harbor, near the Missouri and Arizona, is the USS Bowfin Submarine Museum and Park.
The Bowfin Submarine Museum allows visitors to experience a World War II vintage submarine and learn of the role that submarines played in Naval history. The Bowfin was launched on Dec. 7, 1942, and became a permanent part of Pearl Harbor in 1979.
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