Pacific Aviation Museum, USS Missouri and USS Bowfin Submarine

The torpedo room. Cooool.

USS Bowfin Submarine

"Whoah!"

The main gun batteries were big. I mean really really BIG.

USS Missouri

American SBD Dive bomber

Notice the red circle is missing vs the P40. I was told by the tour guide that the the red circles on American planes were eventually removed due to the confusion that would arise during combat with Japanese Zeros.

Japanese Zero

American B-25 Medium Bomber

American P-40

I've been eagerly anticipating the Ken Burn's WWII documentary series of "The War" that premiered on PBS this past week. My Motorola DVR from Time Warner can only hold about 7.5 hours tops of HD content. I wanted to record the season openers of Heroes, House, and Grey's Anatomy and so I had little room to record "The War." I watched a bit of "The War" while in Oahu and luckily it would be rebroadcasted when I got home. A very moving and polished documentary. It didn't try to be the mother of all WWII docs and even tells you from the get go that WWII was fought in many places with many many stories for any one documentary to cover. Instead, the scope was limited to describing the WWII events and experiences strictly though the eyes of soldiers and civilians from four US cities and in chronological order (1941 - 1945). No "experts" or "historians". There is no deep examination into the horrific events like The Holocaust or The rape of Nanking. Out of scope but that's OK because that wasn't the intent of the film and there are other good documentaries for those events.

I think it's safe to say that if you didn't serve in WWII, you can never fully comprehend and appreciate the experiences of the soldiers who were actually there. But I think visiting the memorial, the historic sites along with watching the "The War" really elevated my level of understanding of the events that happened at that time vs just visiting the sites alone or just watching the documentary by itself.