USS Arizona Memorial

On Dec. 7, 1941, radios buzzed with the news that several hundred Japanese planes attacked a U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, killing more than 2,400 Americans as well as damaging or destroying eight Navy battleships and more than 100 planes. Though it would be some time before people learned the full scope of the damage, within days a once-distant war in Europe and the Pacific became a central part of life in the United States, affecting politics, business, media, and entertainment. In his new book, December 1941: 31 Days That Changed America and Saved the World, Craig Shirley offers a day-by-day chronicle of the full month and recounts Pearl Harbor's political, economic, and cultural implications as they happen. Shirley, the president and CEO of a Washington, D.C., area public relations firm and author of two books on Ronald Reagan, recently spoke with U.S. News about how Americans responded to Pearl Harbor in 1941 and what its legacy is 75 years later. The Japanese did not see their attack on Pearl Harbor as foolish at all. What in retrospect seems suicidal, did not necessarily seem so at the time. In hindsight, the wiser Japanese course would have been to absorb the orphaned colonial Far Eastern possessions of France, the Netherlands and Great Britain that were largely defenseless after June 1941. By carefully avoiding the Philippines and Pearl Harbor, the Japanese might have inherited the European colonial empire in the Pacific without starting a war with the United States. The Japanese and Germans coordinated strategy, the two might have attacked Russia simultaneously in June 1941 without prompting a wider war with the United States, or in the case of Japan, an immediate conflict necessarily with Great Britain. But in the Japanese view, the Soviets had proved stubborn opponents in a series of border wars, and it was felt wiser to achieve a secure rear in Manchuria to divert attention to the west (the Russians, in fact, honored their non-aggression pact with the Japanese until late 1945) – especially given the fact that the Wehrmacht in December 1941 seemed likely to knock the Soviet Union out of the war in a few weeks or by early 1942. In the imperial Japanese mind, the moment was everything: It was high time to get in on the easy pickings in the Pacific before Germany ended the war altogether. While the United States had belatedly begun rearming in the late 1930s, the Japanese were still convinced that in a naval war, their ships, planes, and personnel were at least as modern and plentiful, if not more numerous and qualitatively better than what was available to the United States. The growing isolationism of the United States that had been championed by the likes of icons like Walt Disney and Charles Lindbergh, the persistent Depression, and the fact that the United States had not intervened in Europe, but instead watched Britain get battered for some 26 months from September 1939 to December 1941, suggested to many in the Japanese military command that the United States might either negotiate or respond only halfheartedly after …show more content…
The USS Arizona Memorial was formally dedicated on May 30, 1962 (Memorial Day) by Texas Congressman and Chairman of Veteran Affairs Olin E. Teague and Governor John A. Burns.
It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 15, 1966. While the wreck of USS Arizona was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1989, the memorial does not share this status. Rather, it is listed separately from the wreck on the National Register of Historic Places. The joint administration of the memorial by the United States Navy and the National Park Service was established on September 9, 1980.
Oil leaking from the sunken battleship can still be seen rising from the wreckage to the water's surface. This oil is sometimes referred to as "the tears of the Arizona" or "black tears." In a National Geographic feature published in 2001, concerns were expressed that the continued deterioration of the Arizona's bulkheads and oil tanks from saltwater corrosion could pose a significant environmental threat from a rupture, resulting in a significant release of oil.[15] The National Park Service states it has an ongoing program that closely monitors the submerged vessel's