There’s something particularly chilling about looking through the periscope of a submarine at the sparkling waters of Pearl Harbour. Through the circular view finder, fringed with black, we could see the choppy ocean cheerfully reflecting the brilliant Pacific sunshine.
The modern naval base of Ford Island formed the backdrop. But below the waves, two ships sat silently on the seabed, hiding the horror of a day that finally forced the US into the thick of World War II.
On December 7, 1941, two privates were manning the radar station at Pearl Harbour, Honolulu. Among the static and shadows of the newly developed radar, they detected incoming planes; an “awful big flight”. The operators called their senior officer. It was his first week on the job and he was already expecting the return of friendly planes about half an hour later. He told them not to worry about it.
An hour later, almost 18 American ships had been sunk or damaged including eight battleships, and 188 planes (parked wing tip to wing tip to avoid sabotage from the ground) had been destroyed with another 159 damaged. Over 2,000 soldiers died and more than 1,000 were wounded. The Japanese air force had taken the Americans completely by surprise and left a deep and lasting scar on the American psyche. President Roosevelt declared it a “day of infamy”.
Today Pearl Harbour is home to the USS Arizona Memorial which remembers those dead men and women and is visited by over 1.7 million people a year (it’s the top visitor destination in the islands). We arrived at 9am to find that the next slot on the free tour was at 11.15am. We filled the time walking through the World War II Valour in the Pacific National Monument. The Americans have largely succeeded in avoiding the theme park atmosphere that accompanies many of their major tourist attractions (although they couldn’t resist the shop selling ‘Pearl Harbour pearls’ and stars and stripes paraphernalia). The grounds are dotted with World War II military artefacts most of which you can climb onto or into to experience them as the soldiers of the era once did.
One of the most interesting was the Kaiten, a Japanese suicide torpedo. The bomb had a cockpit inside it and the idea was that the pilot would leave the mother ship and guide the torpedo manually into the target. None of the pilots ever used the escape hatch but only one torpedo ever succeeded in sinking an American ship. It says a lot about the Japanese devotion to duty that 96 pilots died inthe Kaitens.
The cramped control room of a submarine gave us the chance to see the American pers-pective by using the original periscopes. It was chilling to think of the men who had pressed their own foreheads against the same cold metal, their lives in the balance, deep under the waves.
The interpretation in the museum at Pearl Harbour was clearly a challenge for the designers. On the one hand, thousands of Americans died in an arguably unprovoked attack by Japan. On the other, Japanese form the vast majority of foreign visitors to Hawaii bringing a large amount of yen with them. In addition, many Hawaiians are of Japanese descent and suffered for it during the war (despite there being almost no cases of sabotage by Japanese Americans being recorded). Their stories also need to be told.
The museum cleverly manages this by introducing the American perspective at the beginning of the museum and merging this into the Japanese account towards the end. Original footage from the Japanese aircraft carriers shows the bravery and intelligence of these fighters and compares this with the many acts of heroism of the Americans as they desperately tried to save their comrades and their ships.
The boat ride gave us a panoramic view of the harbour, and after the film it was easy to imagine it crowded with almost the entire Pacific fleet, moored up on Battleship Row
The tour itself starts with a 20-minute film giving the historical context of the attack and urging people to respect the monument they are about to visit. Then our group of 150 was shuffled out of the theatre into the blinding Hawaiian sunshine and on to a boat piloted by crew cut military men.
The boat ride gave us a panoramic view of the harbour, and after the film it was easy to imagine it crowded with almost the entire Pacific fleet, moored up on Battleship Row. In a spectacular failure of imagination, the commanders of the time had not comprehended the military prowess of the Japanese or the importance of fighter planes in a new chapter of military history. They believed that war would take place in one of the European colonies in the South Pacific and they would sail to it in their own time.
Consequently, their battleships were sitting ducks for the Japanese who had even accounted for the shallow water of the harbour, modifying their torpedoes so that when dropped from a low dive, they would not hit the bottom of the sea, but could proceed directly to their targets. One of those targets was the USS Arizona, now lying prone on the seabed with most of her crew entombed inside her. She is one of only two ships not to be salvaged after the bombing, since her forward magazine exploded after being hit by a shell.
This was our final destination. The ship lies just below the waves but above her, a starkly white memorial has been built that looks like a troop carrier but has the echoing, hallowed interior of a church.
We disembarked into this shrine and had about 10 minutes to look over the side at the Arizona. One of the ship’s funnels rises almost to eye height, its ladder broken off in a tangle of cables and twisted metal.
The rusted deck is clearly visible, hiding the terrible secrets of the last moments of the men that drowned here.
Every few seconds, a solitary ball of oil rises from deep in the hold of the stricken vessel and blooms into a blackened rainbow at the surface before floating off with the current. They call it the tears of the ship.
The name of each of the 1,177 crew members who died is engraved on a marble monument. Some of the survivors have also had their ashes buried here, to rejoin the comrades that they lost.
Their names are a reminder that even those who lived lost a piece of themselves on the Arizona.
With so many visitors moving through every day, there was little time to linger. We were rounded up as soon as the boat returned.
Back on shore, it was a short bus ride back to the waving palm trees and sandy beaches that most people associate with Honolulu.
But the stories remained in our minds of the Americans and the Japanese on that historic December day. As the Japanese Admiral Hara Tadaichi said: “We won a great tactical victory at Pearl Harbour and thereby lost the war.”