Chief Cabin Boy on USS Bogan.
Day 35
It's about one hours bus ride to Pearl Harbor; an hour of stop, start, stop, start along Waikiki Beach, through Downtown Honolulu, past Chinatown, and industrial areas to the Visitor Centre, which is run, like, Alcatraz, by the National Park Service.
The tour begins with a film on the Japanese attack on ‘the date of Infamy', Sunday 7th December, 1941. At the time of the attack, battleships were lined up two deep along that far shore (pictured above). The white building is where the USS Arizona was docked, and the grey ship on the far left is the USS Missouri. The Japanese sunk or damaged 21 ships here with a total of 2,388 people killed and 1,178 wounded.
Immediately after the film we board a boat to the Arizona Memorial (pictured above) crewed by the United States Navy. The water is shallow here, and you can see the base of the gun turret (pictured below), the white buoy marks the stern of the battleship Arizona. A Japanese bomb ignited the ammuniton stored on the boat, subsequently causing a catastrophic explosion, thus sinking the ship, and killing most of the crew.
Oil still seeps from the ship, called the “tears of the Arizona”, which I just happened to see. At the far end of the memorial is a white wall with the names of the 1,177 crew killed, and it is eerie to think that many of them are entombed beneath us.
Then it was back on the boat to the Visitors Centre, where we managed to take this photograph (pictured above) with one of the sailors.
He said, "I love Australia. I've been to Sydney, Darwin, and Brisbane." (with the Navy).
The Arizonia Memorial tour is absolutely free, however to visit the USS Bowfin & USS Missouri it costs $24 per adult.
This is the USS Bowfin submarine (pictured above - with some idiot on it saluting), which sank 44 enemy ships over the course of 9 missions during World War 2. US submarines were the unsung heroes of the war, sinking over half the available ships, a crippling blow to an Island nation having to import most of their raw materials.The tour of the submarine was fascinating:
This is the business end - the Torpedo room. 24 torpedoes were carried.
This is the bunk room. There were not enough beds to go around, so they had to 'hot bunk'; the sailor coming off duty had to get into the 'hot' bed of the sailor coming on duty.
This is the engine room. If attacked by Japanese ships the submarine would 'run silent, run deep' - turning off the diesel engine, and run on electric battery power and dive to over 300 feet deep.
This is the galley, where the crew ate. There was even an icecream machine, that was obviously very popular.
We board a bus to take us to the battleship, USS Missouri (pictured above), which is where Japan formerly surrendered. The ship is absolutely massive and had a crew of 1,500. The living quarters are positively palatial compared to the submarine we just visited.
Back at Waikaki, we had walk along the beach, which is actually quite narrow, a cement boardwalk is needed in places (pictured below).
Tomorrow we are having a relaxing day in Waikiki.
