The 100-year-old homes look over Battleship Row, "where sailors and Marines swam ashore through flaming oil to safety," Gillman said. The expansion would not require any new construction, he argues, because the park service was given ownership a decade ago of a series of buildings on Ford Island, the Chief Petty Officers Bungalows, located not far from the memorials to the battleships Oklahoma and Utah. Gillman would like to see the interpretive spaces at the Pearl Harbor National Memorial expanded to accommodate a National Park Service warehouse full of artifacts and materials that aren’t available for public view. He also has set his sights on a larger effort - to get more money allotted to the park. He has lobbied every park superintendent and is hoping Leatherman will be the man to make the changes. He has written to his congressional representatives and the secretary of the Interior to get the errors fixed. Gillman believes the musical chairs and lack of funding have left it woefully neglected. In 2018, the National Park Service shut down the USS Arizona Memorial for a major renovation to stabilize the monument's dock system and improve the infrastructure - a $2.1 million renovation that was completed in 2019. It has suffered from high turnover at the superintendent level, with four acting superintendents since 2020. However, she said, the park service does not "have a finalized timeline or cost estimate for the updates at this time." 5 and plans to research the items he has identified as problematic and make corrections as needed. She added that Leatherman met with Gillman on Nov. and it seldom works," Wenger said.Įmily Pruett, the public affairs officer for the Pearl Harbor National Memorial, said the National Park Service is aware of the issues, and Superintendent Tom Leatherman, who took over in October, has every intention to "address the errors." "A lot of these decisions - selection of material and interpretation of material - is sometimes done by committee. Sometimes, there's too much information, he added, making it difficult to verify "tiny bits of information."Īnd finally, many parks and museums simply don't have military historians on staff who can oversee every detail of the displays and collections. And you have to know a lot about the event in order to be able to properly interpret them," Wenger told. "The documents and photography in the archives, many of them do not have a proper context. Mike Wenger, who has written a series of books about the attack on Pearl Harbor for the Naval Institute Press, says mistakes can happen for a number of reasons, the first being that the subject matter is extremely complex. But the current errors were introduced in renovations that took place between 20, according to Gillman and historians who have visited the park. Twenty years later, the visitors center at Pearl Harbor, managed by the National Park Service, opened. The distinctive USS Arizona Memorial opened to visitors in 1962. "If they asked for money, perhaps they think they're putting themselves on report for screwing this up in the first place at taxpayer expense." "What does it take to get these guys to fix these things?" Gillman asked during an interview with. And the USS Arizona’' memorial wall contains five names that don't have ranks or rates. Some photos are missing captions others are incorrectly labeled or don't properly illustrate the display. In addition to the Miller blunder, there are mistakes in photos: a 1941 photo of a Navy PBY Catalina aircraft that is dated as being from 1943 and a photo of the Japanese carrier Shokaku from the Battle of Santa Cruz in 1942 that is mislabeled as the Akagi, taken on Dec. "How many thousands of people have to see these things and they're wrong?" "I've been tilting at this windmill since 2013," said former Navy aviator and retired Capt. The error about an icon for the civil rights movement, whose name will adorn a future Ford-class aircraft carrier, is one of several at the Pearl Harbor National Memorial that simply drive historians and history buffs nuts.Īt least one is working to get them fixed.
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