Day 40 - Honolulu

As I mentioned yesterday today was going to be a bit of a history lesson. The reason for me coming to Hawaii was to shorten the non-stop flight home from 11 hours to only 9 hours the only thing I knew there was to see was Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor is not that close to Waikiki so the easiest way to get there was signing up for a full day tour which takes you around 4 different parts of the Pearl Harbor area. They are the USS Arizona Memorial; USS Bowfin Submarine; USS Missouri and the Pacific Aviation Museum.

First you start with a 30-min movie about the Pearl Harbor attack and what led up to the attack on 7 December 1941. It was a very good

movie. I have never done history so didn't know anything about the lead up to the attack and the start of the war. So it was a very good movie to learn about that information. After the movie you hop on a boat and get taken over to the USS Arizona memorial which is a white rectangular building built over the sunken ship. One of the walls is covered in the names of the crew members remaining in the ship. I think there was around 950 crew members remaining in the ship and surprisingly this number does increase occasionally. Members of the crew that survived are allowed to have their ashes put back on to the ship so they can be reunited with the rest of the crew who lost their lives.

After that we were able to take an audio tour of the USS Bowfin which is also known as the Pearl Harbor Avenger.

After that we got on the bus and drove over the bridge on to the US Naval base Ford Island which is where most of the Pearl Harbor film was shot. We went into the Pacific Aviation Museum which has a lot of old planes. One of the hangars that houses some of the exhibits still has bullet holes in the glass if the hangar door that were created during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
We then made our way to the USS Battleship Missouri. I was amazed

by the size of this ship but apparently when it was in use it would be host to 3000 sailors and would cost approximately $1m to run for one day! The deck of this ship was actually where the Japanese signed the declaration of surrender in Tokyo bay.

Something I was surprised to learn is that all but three of the ships which were sunk during the attack were repaired and used during the war. The three that weren't were obviously the USS Arizona. The USS Oklahoma was sunk where the USS Missouri is now docked. The USS Oklahoma was repaired later after the war so it could be sailed to San Francisco where it could be broken down for scrap metal. Unfortunately it sunk for a second time 800 miles of the coast of Hawaii. The third ship was the USS Utah.

It was a good day with some very interesting stuff learnt. I'm glad I went as the area has huge significance to the war and the many lives that were lost.