The Mysterious Origins of Arizona’s Double-Barreled World War II Memorial
On December 7, 1941, a surprise attack by Japanese aircraft on Pearl Harbor sank the battleship USS Arizona and caused the U.S. to enter World War II. Less than four years later, on September 2, 1945, Japan formally surrendered on the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, ending the war.
Mammoth guns from both of these battleships, which symbolically bookend World War II, are displayed at Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza in the "Guns to Salute the Fallen Memorial.” The memorial, just west of Downtown Phoenix, was dedicated in 2013.
With the USS Arizona (BB-39) lying in memorial underneath the waters of Pearl Harbor and the USS Missouri (BB-63) serving as a museum ship nearby, how did Arizona acquire guns from both battleships? It’s a mystery that involved two U.S. Naval bases on the other side of the country.
The USS Arizona, commissioned in 1916, was a 30,000-ton battleship with a main armament of a dozen 14-inch guns. The 57,000-ton USS Missouri nicknamed the “Mighty Mo” and the nation’s last commissioned battleship in 1944, had a main armament of a dozen 16-inch guns. But in a little-known detail, each had extra main gun barrels stored off the ship.
“The Navy rotated the gun barrels periodically after so many shells had been shot,” Ken Bennett, who was instrumental in creating the memorial, told Arizona Contractor & Community magazine in 2014. “Inside, a re-filed inner lining would deteriorate and start to protrude out of the barrel.”
The gun barrel now displayed in Phoenix was being re-lined when the USS Arizona sank and had been stored at the Dahlgren Naval Support Facility in northern Virginia for 60 years. St. Julien's Creek Naval Annex, near Portsmouth, Virginia, supplied the 16-inch barrel once used on the USS Missouri.
The guns were shipped by rail across the country. Private donations funded all aspects of the memorial, designed by local architect Rich Pawelco.
The gun barrels are 405 inches apart, with each inch representing 1,000 American lives lost in World War II. Nine blue steel pillars between the gun barrels represent the nine minutes it took the USS Arizona to sink. The pillars emerge from the ground and bow out of the top, like a ship's hull. On the sides of the pillars hang stainless steel name plates for each of the 1,902 Arizonans who were killed in the war. "In the sunlight, when the wind blows, they appear like slight waves in water. It's just gorgeous,” said Bennett in 2014.
As December 7th, National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day nears, it is poignant to recall the statement made by U.S. General Douglas MacArthur during the Japanese surrender ceremony aboard the USS Missouri in 1945. “It is my earnest hope—indeed the hope of all mankind—that from this solemn occasion, a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past, a world founded upon faith and understanding, a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish for freedom, tolerance, and justice.”
Douglas C. Towne is the editor of Arizona Contractor & Community magazine, www.arizcc.com