Pearl Harbor National Monument
Pearl Harbor National Monument.Located at the Pearl Harbor Naval Base at Oahu, Hawaii, the overturned hull of the sunken battleship USS Arizona is one of the most important American memorials to World War II in the Pacific. On 7 December 1941, in the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese bombers sank the 1912 battleship with a direct hit on its forward ammunition magazine. Within minutes, the ship rolled over and sank in the shallow harbor; many of the crew were entombed in the wreckage. In 1949, the Hawaiian territorial government's Pacific War Memorial Commission made the ship's wreckage the focal point of efforts to create a permanent monument to the dead at Pearl Harbor. A year later, the U.S. Navy attached a flagpole to the protruding mainmast of the sunken ship and erected a temporary floating platform over the vessel.
In 1958, Congress authorized the commission to raise private funds for a memorial, which was...
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