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| Angelika/Mike Schilli |
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Michael And this time we even took in the cultural program about "Pearl Harbor." If you paid attention in history class, you know that a battle took place in this harbor near Honolulu on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, after which America immediately entered World War II on the side of the Allies against Germany.
And this is how it happened: While Hitler's Germany rampaged across Europe in 1941, attacking one country after another, America shifted restlessly from one buttock to the other and was unable to intervene. Meanwhile, the Empire of Japan was rampaging in northern China, which the USA also did not like, and they quickly turned off Japan's oil supply through a trade embargo.
At that time, in 1941, Hawaii was not yet a state of the USA; that happened much later, in 1959. However, as early as around 1900, the USA had annexed the Hawaiian Islands after decades of back-and-forth and had parked all nine battleships of their Pacific Fleet in the harbor of Honolulu. By the way, the name "Pearl Harbor" of the harbor comes from the Hawaiians; "Pu'uloa" literally means "harbor of pearls" and refers to the pearl-producing oysters that were present there until the late 19th century.
From Japan to Hawaii is just a stone's throw of 5,000 kilometers, so the Japanese sent a fleet with aircraft carriers towards Hawaii, which actually cruised unnoticed through the South Seas for two weeks. 200 kilometers off Hawaii, the Japanese reached their target and launched 180 Japanese planes equipped with all sorts of explosives towards Pearl Harbor, catching the Americans off guard and bombing the entire American Pacific fleet to pieces.
A battleship, the "USS Arizona," sank with 1,100 men on board. The hull of the ship still lies in the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor, and a rusty steel tower juts out of the water. Instead of recovering the bodies of the soldiers, they were left there, and a memorial was built across the ship. Today, if you take the free "Pearl Harbor Tour" as a tourist, you can see how oil still leaks from the inside of the ship and floats around in the harbor!
The whole thing is, of course, set up in a rather grandiose manner, and I even shook the hand of a roughly hundred-year-old war veteran who was present and giving autographs. He probably didn't know that I was German, haha! The museum and the memorial aren't very informative, but if you're already there, you might as well take a look.
And the rest of the story is probably familiar to you: After the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the USA entered World War II, dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, and, with the help of the remaining Allies, thoroughly halted Germany as well. Living history!
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