“December 7th, 1941
– a day that will live in infamy…”
They say she still weeps for her lost crew…and until you are standing above what’s left of her deck, looking at that shining rainbow of oil on the glistening green surface of Pearl Harbor…you don’t really understand…
The USS Arizona is indeed…crying…
I read up on the site before I went. I was prepared. As prepared as you can be for something like this. But in truth, nothing really prepares you for standing above a site where not only so many died, but where so much began. Nothing can prepare you for the silence. Because it is silent. Nearly totally silent. Except for the occasional mother silencing a child that doesn’t understand what they are seeing – people speak in whispers, if they speak at all.
If you can be said to Hear Silence, that is perhaps the best expression of what you feel standing there, looking at the massive rusted hulk that is memorial, monument and tomb to 1,117 men, all killed in a single stunning swoop when an armor piercing bomb blasted through her top deck and ignited her own ammunitions against her.
They would never have known what hit them.
When you think about it, perhaps the US Military was just too naïve to believe anything could happen to them, their battleships were their biggest defense; placed in Hawaii as a deterrent to the Japanese forces, a warning of “look what will move against you if you fail to comply”…and yet, it had the opposite effect. One of the articles I read before I made the trip quotes a Japanese Admiral as saying “never, even in times of maximum world peace, could he dream that military might of nation would have its unprotected chin stuck so far out, just begging for a right cross to the jaw. “
By the time the smoke had cleared, “3,566 Americans were dead or wounded, six mighty ships had sunk into the ooze, 12 others stumbled around battered and punch-drunk and 323 warplanes were useless heaps of scrap”. …and the world had changed forever
In an odd twist of irony, if you stand at one side of the memorial and look across the ragged remnants of the Arizona’s bow you find yourself gazing directly towards the proud figure of the USS Missouri, where it all ended…as if they are looking at each other across time…
Pearl Harbor also did something that the Japanese could not have accounted for, with all of their planning and careful deployment: it rallied the Western World, and united them in such a way that they proved stronger than before. But it did so at an almost incomprehensible cost.
It doesn’t hit you, not really, until you’re standing in the shrine room, backing up, and find that you’re unable to fit the entire massive marble wall – containing all the names – into one picture. It’s simply too big, there are too many, and, no matter how far back you stand, you can’t catch them all.
My father is a musician. I grew up hearing a lot of interesting stories, and one horribly tragic one, that even as a child, made me want to cry and scream and stomp my feet at the unfairness of it all. About a band, on a US warship, that had played a huge dance of an evening, and were granted the next morning off as a reward. That morning was December 7th, 1941, and that band, was the US Navy Band #22, aboard the USS Arizona. They would become the only US navy band in history which was formed together, trained together, transferred together, reported aboard a ship together, fought together, and died together.
Today, I stood in the blazing Hawaiian sunshine and looked down upon their graves, and could think of nothing to say. I couldn’t even cry, until much later when I was back at work, and trying to process what I had felt, or what I thought I hadn’t felt. At the time I just stood there, and stared, and tried to think of something to say, something to think, something to feel, that would capture everything.
But it was all lost in the Silence.
In a perfect world, we would say that the lesson was learned, that such events were never again repeated…but we all know that, six decades later, our generation had its own “day of infamy”, the other “day America’s luck ran out”
“For Pearl Harbor, it took an empire’s entire military might – a whole fleet of ships and subs, including six aircraft carriers, 353 planes and thousands of soldiers. September 11th required 4 planes and 19 men with box cutters. But whatever the source, it awakened a nation that had previously felt safe and isolated from the harshness of the world”
I am not American, but places like Pearl Harbor are not only significant to Americans, because they are a reminder that nothing is permanent. Nothing is guaranteed, and everything can change in a heartbeat for the better or for the worse.
Standing there, in the blazing heat, staring at that rainbow stain on the water…you find that you are of no nationality, you are merely human…and as such…you feel the silence tell you how to mourn…