Linkmeister

New museum opens at Pearl Harbor

Later this week the new Pacific Aviation Museum will open at Pearl Harbor. While we've got the Arizona Memorial, the USS Bowfin submarine and the USS Missouri, this will be the first memorial to aviation in Honolulu.

Visitors to the museum will begin their experience in the first phase of the museum and the nearest hangar to the Control Tower, Hangar 37. Here in the large format theater they will see film of the December 7th attack that details the battle scene with original film and still photographs interposed. Scenes of Hawaii awakening on December 7, 1941 will add to the orientation. For example, sailors are seen tumbling from bunks on the Oklahoma and racing to their battle stations. CINCPACFLT HQ, in another scene, has officers receiving confusing messages from Washington. The two Army radar technicians at Opana Point are shown practicing with their new gear. Army sentries are guarding the closely lined P-40s at Wheeler Field. Hawaiian music on the radios is gradually drowned out by the sound of aircraft and the ensuing battle.

At the conclusion of the introductory film, visitors will exit into the exhibit area where they will experience the air attack on Hawaii through dioramas with aircraft and artifacts from WWII in the Pacific.

As visitors complete their tour of Hangar 37, they will exit on the ramp and relive the aftermath of the Japanese attack with a debris field, smoking PBYs an other seaplanes. Jitneys outfitted as Red Cross vehicles will be employed to next move the visitors on their museum tour toward the adjacent hangars, stopping first at Hangar 79. Here visitors will see the scars of war from December 7th, 1941 that still exist today: shrapnel marks on concrete walls and bullet holes from Japanese strafing clearly visible in glass panes of the massive hangar doors . They will hear a first-hand account of the attack in the voices of survivors as they ride jitneys along the tour route.

I think Phase 1 (Hangar 37) is the only one that's been completed, but you can understand why the directors wanted to open the museum now; this week marks the 65th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and it may be the last one which many survivors will be able to attend.