Why Is the USS Missouri Still Next to the USS Arizona

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]There are two battleships sitting in Pearl Harbor right now. One of them is the USS Arizona. It has been a tomb since 1941.

[00:00:09]Over a thousand men are still inside it.

[00:00:12][music] It never left the bottom. The other one is the USS Missouri. It ended the war. Japan surrendered on its deck.

[00:00:20][music] It sailed for 50 years. Then in 1999, the Navy deliberately parked it 400 yards away from the tomb, [music] bow facing it, watching over it. And here is the thing. Nobody really explains that decision, who made it, why they made it, and why there was a fight about it [music] is a more interesting story than most people realize. So, let's go through it properly. But before we do, this channel has just hit almost two million total views, and I genuinely want to say thank you to everyone watching. Where in the world are you watching this from? [music] Do you have any personal connection to either of these ships or to Pearl Harbor? A family member who served, [music] someone who visited, anything at all. First, the USS Arizona. On the morning of December the 7th, 1941, the USS Arizona was morowed at Pearl Harbor on what was called Battleship Row. It was a Sunday morning.

[00:01:25]Most of the crew were still below decks.

[00:01:27][music] Just before 8:00 in the morning, Japanese aircraft attacked. The USS Arizona was hit by several bombs. One of them tore through the deck and detonated the forward ammunition magazine. The explosion was catastrophic.

[00:01:41]The entire front of the ship disintegrated. [music] Black smoke climbed 1,500 ft into the air. The USS Arizona sank in 9 minutes. 1,177 men died. [music] Nearly half of all the American casualties that day came from one ship in under 10 minutes.

[00:02:00]And this is the part that matters for this video. Unlike every other ship sunk that day, the USS Arizona was never raised. The damage was too severe. The decision was made to leave the battleship exactly where it was on the bottom of Pearl Harbor as a permanent grave for the men still inside. [music] The USS Arizona is still there today, slowly dissolving into the harbor floor and still leaking oil. The oil continues to rise to the surface more than 80 years later. People call it the tears of the Arizona. Now, here is what most people do not know. The USS Arizona was not supposed to have a neighbor. When someone suggested it should, the people in charge of the memorial fought back hard.

[00:02:50]Now, the USS Missouri, the USS Missouri was commissioned in June 1944.

[00:02:58]The battleship never saw Pearl Harbor as a warship. The USS Missouri came into service three years after the attack, joined the Pacific Fleet, and spent the final year of the war bombarding Japanese positions at Ewima and Okinawa.

[00:03:13]But the USS Missouri's most important moment came on September 2nd, 1945.

[00:03:19]In Tokyo Bay, on the deck of the USS Missouri, representatives of Japan signed the instrument of surrender.

[00:03:25][music] General Douglas MacArthur presided. The ceremony lasted 23 minutes and [music] just like that, the deadliest conflict in human history was over. The USS Missouri had been the stage [music] for the end of the war. That made the battleship one of the most historically significant ships ever [music] built.

[00:03:45]The USS Missouri went on to serve in the Korean War. Then the battleship was mothballled and later it was brought back for the Gulf War in 1991 where the USS Missouri fired cruise missiles at targets in Iraq [music] and became the last American battleship ever to fire its guns in combat. The USS Missouri was decommissioned in 1992.

[00:04:09]And then the question became, what do you do with a ship like that?

[00:04:14]Plenty of ships get scrapped. Plenty get turned into museums in random ports around the country where nobody visits [music] them. The USS Missouri could easily have ended up forgotten in a shipyard somewhere. [music] The fact that the battleship did not, and the reason the USS Missouri ended up specifically at Pearl Harbor, [music] specifically facing the USS Arizona, came down to a fight that almost did not go the right way. In 1998, the [music] Secretary of the Navy donated the USS Missouri to the USS Missouri memorial association in Honolulu. The plan was to bring the battleship to Pearl Harbor as a museum ship, but the National Park Service, which runs the USS Arizona Memorial, pushed back. Their concern was straightforward. The USS Arizona Memorial was the centerpiece of Pearl Harbor. Nearly 2 million people visited every year. The memorial was quiet, solemn, [music] a war grave, and now someone wanted to park an 887 ft battleship right next to it. [music] The worry was that the USS Missouri would overshadow the memorial entirely, that Pearl Harbor would stop feeling like a place of remembrance and start feeling like a theme park. The debate went back and forth. [music] Eventually, a compromise was reached.

[00:05:31]The USS Missouri would come, but the battleship would be placed well back from the USS Arizona Memorial. [music] The USS Missouri would be positioned so that visitors on the battleship's off decks could not see the USS Arizona Memorial during ceremonies. The two ships would be kept as separate experiences. But there was one more decision, and this one was deliberate.

[00:05:55]The USS Missouri's bowl would face the USS Arizona not side on, not turned away, [music] facing directly towards the sunken battleship, watching over it.

[00:06:07]The official explanation was simple. The USS Missouri now stands watch over the remains of the USS Arizona so that the men inside the hole may rest. [music] A veteran dosent at the memorial put it more plainly when a visitor asked why the USS Missouri faces that way. he said quietly. This way, the Missouri will always be standing watch over our boys.

[00:06:30]And here's the detail that is genuinely hard to get your head around [music] when you think about it properly.

[00:06:36]The USS Arizona represents the moment America entered the war. December 7th, 1941, [music] the attack that changed everything. The USS Missouri represents the moment it ended. September 2nd, 1945, [music] the surrender on the deck.

[00:06:53]The beginning and the end of America's involvement in the deadliest war in history are sitting 400 yards apart in the same harbor. One on the bottom, one standing over it. That arrangement, that exact deliberate positioning only happened in 1999 because someone decided it should. It was not an accident. It was not geography. Someone looked at those two ships, looked at what they meant, and decided they should face each other forever.

[00:07:21]The USS Arizona will never move. The hull is too fragile now, too dissolved into the harbor bed. Moving the wreck would destroy it and disturb the men [music] still inside. And the USS Missouri, the battleship isn't going anywhere either. [music] The USS Missouri is exactly where someone decided it should be. [music] 400 yards apart. The start of the war and the end of it, facing each other across the water. That's why the USS Missouri is still next to the USS Arizona. And honestly, it's hard to imagine it any other way. If you want to see more stories like this one, subscribe and hit the bell. [music] And if you have ever visited Pearl Harbor and stood on that deck, drop a comment below. I would genuinely like to know what it felt like.