Attack on Pearl Harbor in popular culture
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The attack on Pearl Harbor has received substantial attention in popular culture in multiple media and cultural formats including film, architecture, memorial statues, non-fiction writing, historical writing, and historical fiction. Today, the USS Arizona Memorial on the island of Oahu honors the dead. Visitors to the memorial reach it via boats from the naval base at Pearl Harbor. The memorial was designed by Alfred Preis, and has a sagging center but strong and vigorous ends, expressing "initial defeat and ultimate victory". It commemorates all lives lost on December 7, 1941.[1]
Although December 7 is known as National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day it is not a federal holiday in the United States. The nation does however pay homage remembering the thousands injured and killed when attacked by the Japanese in 1941 and on Pearl Harbor Day the American flag should be flown at half-staff until sunset. Schools and other establishments in many places around the country do observe lowering the American flag to half-staff out of respect. Ceremonies are held annually at Pearl Harbor itself, attended each year by some of the ever-dwindling number of elderly veterans who were there on the morning of the attack.[2]
The naval vessel where the war ended on September 2, 1945—the last U.S. Navy battleship ever built, USS Missouri—is now a museum ship moored in Pearl Harbor, with its bow barely 1,000 feet (300 meters) southwest of the Arizona memorial. The last surviving vessels from the attack are also museum ships, the US Coast Guard cutter USCGC Taney, which is located in the Inner Harbor of Baltimore, Maryland, and the US Navy tug Hoga at the Arkansas Inland Maritime Museum.