KEY POINTS:
The sky is a perfect and pale comic-book blue, the breeze as warm as a whisper. Palm trees line the white sandy beach, the very image of a Pacific cliché. In the downtown streets before the shops and offices open, people make their sleepy way to work. It
is the start to yet another balmy December day in Honolulu.
On just such a morning, I remind myself as I wait for a taxi, sudden death came to this island.
It was December 7, 1941 - "a date which will live in infamy", said President Roosevelt - when Japanese aircraft attacked the US Pacific fleet moored at nearby Pearl Harbour. They wreaked such destruction, a subsequent US enquiry described it as "the greatest military and naval disaster in our nation's history".
It is a tragic reflection of our times that military memorials, killing fields, rows of white crosses and tombs to unknown soldiers are so common.
And where New Zealand once stopped at 11am on November 11 to acknowledge Armistice Day, today the hour goes unobserved. Yet war memorials and anniversaries can still give us pause for thought, and every Anzac Day seems bigger than the last.
A visit to Pearl Harbour, where the wreckage of the USS Arizona lies still visible in the shallow waters beneath a white memorial platform, can be a singularly moving experience - and reminds you that momentous events can arrive with terrible suddenness.
"What history teaches us," says Dr Donald M. Goldstein, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, "is that when you are not prepared, it usually happens".
It happened just like that here in "Pearl", as the locals call it.
In two hours, 18 ships were sunk and almost 2400 Americans - military and civilian - were killed. Within a day, America declared war on Japan. The isolationists, prominent among them aviator hero Charles Lindberg, had been proven horribly wrong.
Pearl Harbour is some way from central Honolulu, yet every year 1.5 million people come to the memorial and visitors' centre, twice the number the centre expected when it was opened in 1980. Today an urgent fundraising programme is under way to replace the often-overcrowded building - which is also sinking and suffering structural deterioration - and to create more space to display historic artefacts, documents and personal memorabilia.
Despite the numbers, a visit to the Pearl Harbour floating memorial above the USS Arizona - partly financed by Elvis Presley's 1961 concert in Honolulu - is a quiet experience.
Before the short boat trip to the site, visitors are shown a brief, impartial film using historic footage, which sketches the lead-up to the attack.
It is a catalogue of American un-preparedness: 18 months before the attack, the US fleet had been moved here from San Diego as a deterrent to Japanese expansionism; many of the 185 vessels in the harbour that day were moored side-by-side to protect them from sabotage; when the first wave of over 180 Japanese aircraft swept across the island of Oahu, heading for strategic airfields, they were thought to be US planes from the mainland ...
It was also a Sunday morning after a Saturday night when bands had played and many sailors and Bugleman Richard Fiske, who was on the USS West Virginia, speaks of the attractions of Honolulu: "the ice-cream parlours, the bathing beauties on Waikiki, the beer for 25 cents and the romantic possibilities of the tropical island".
And so, as Pearl Harbour and its people woke up to yet another day in paradise, they were lulled by their surroundings. The extensive bookshop selling DVDs, scholarly texts, posters, maps and replicas of contemporary newspapers doesn't shy away from these uncomfortable facts. As with the documentary film, there is an admirable honesty to the accounts.
The suddenness of the attack, the consequences for America and the battering the country's pride took have inescapable resonance after the events of September 11, 2001. In a curious coincidence, the very morning the attacks happened in New York, a group was presenting its finding on exactly how the USS Arizona was sunk at Pearl Harbour.
But historical analysis only tells one part of the Pearl Harbour story; the more affecting aspects are written in the lives of those who were there.
Tickets to the floating memorial carry a synopsis of the life of someone involved that bright morning: Harry TL Pang of Honolulu, the first civilian firefighter to receive the Purple Heart, who was gunned down outside a hangar; second lieutenant Ken Marlar Taylor from Oklahoma who received the Distinguished Service Cross for getting his plane airborne, engaging Japanese dive bombers and shooting down two...
These brief accounts - and the presence of attack survivors - bring home the human dimension amidst the great swathe of history, and perhaps that explains why visitors observe a respectful silence as the boat makes its way across the still waters to the distinctive white memorial.
Since it was dedicated in 1962, more than 40 million have stepped on to the unadorned platform and gazed down at the rusting hulk of the USS Arizona, which burned for two days after the attack and in which many of the 1177 men aboard remain entombed.
The structure sags in the centre, said designer Alfred Preis, but stands strong and vigorous at the ends, expressing initial defeat and ultimate victory. The overall effect is one of serenity. Overtones of sadness have been omitted to permit the individual to contemplate his own personal responses.
That is certainly the effect as visitors look into the shallow blue water or at the names of those killed on the USS Arizona which, when it was launched in 1914, was referred to as the ship of destiny.
"When you go to the memorial," says Daniel Martinez, a historian with the National Park Service, "it's not so much to relive the horrors of that day, but it's a place where you can contemplate in silence the events of December 7 and World War II.
"The [people] gaze at the wall and see the names of the 1177 sailors and marines etched in marble and some wonder, 'Who were they?' and 'What did we lose?"'
Graham Reid travelled to Hawaii courtesy of the House of Travel and Hawaii Tourism.
GETTING THERE:
Air New Zealand flies to Honolulu twice a week with an additional service operating in July, August and September. See airnz.co.nz.
PEARL HARBOUR:
The Pearl Harbour visitor centre is open daily from 7.30am to 5pm and is a 30-40 minute drive from Waikiki. Local buses run there regularly and take around one hour.
The centre, which has cafes and a large gift shop, issues free numbered tickets for the short boat trip to the floating memorial but because of visitor numbers, and depending on the time you arrive, you may have to wait more than hour before you are called. Early morning is best, the last trip to the memorial is around 3pm.
For details see pearlharborvisitorcenter.com.
FURTHER INFORMATION:
See Hawaii Tourism's website at gohawaii.com or ring (09) 977 2234.