Naval Station Pearl Harbor Hawaii Arizona Memorial Patch

The flag over the USS Arizona Memorial flies from a pole fixed to the battleship's severed mainmast, and that flag is the first thing stitched at the center of this patch. The white span beneath it is the memorial itself, 184 feet long, sagging in the middle and rising at both ends, straddling a hull it never touches. Honolulu architect Alfred Preis designed it, and it was dedicated on Memorial Day, 30 May 1962. Naval Station Pearl Harbor grew up around that water, from a coal depot in 1899 to the home of the Pacific Fleet.

The Navy established Naval Station, Honolulu on 17 November 1899 and renamed it Naval Station, Hawaii in 1900, and dredging through the coral bar let the gunboat Petrel into the upper harbor in January 1905. The Navy bought Ford Island in 1917, and the Pacific Fleet made Pearl Harbor its headquarters in 1940. On the morning of 7 December 1941 a first wave of 183 Japanese aircraft and a second of 170 struck the airfields and Battleship Row, and USS Arizona (BB-39) went down with 1,177 of her crew. The battleship USS Missouri (BB-63), where Japan signed the surrender, has been moored nearby as a museum ship since 1998. In 2010 the naval station and Hickam Air Force Base were joined to form Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, still home port to Los Angeles-class attack submarines and surface ships of the Pacific Fleet.

The patch is a four-inch circle with a gold merrowed edge around a white ring. NAVAL STATION arcs across the top and PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII across the bottom in navy blue block letters, with a blue star on each side. Inside, a light blue field holds the white memorial with the flag flying red, white and blue above it. Below the waterline sits a globe drawn in gold grid lines with the green Hawaiian Islands strung across it, from Kauai down to the Big Island. It reads as a station that faces the whole Pacific from one harbor.

Ships entering Pearl Harbor man the rails and render honors as they pass the memorial, and crews stationed here did it again and again. Pearl was a fleet headquarters, a submarine base, a shipyard town and a liberty port all at once. Sailors who were stationed there remember Ford Island across the water, the boats nested at the submarine piers and the heat coming off the pavement. The station name changed with the joint base, but the harbor and the memorial at its center did not. For a lot of sailors, Pearl was the first duty station and the one they still talk about.

Mount it in a shadow box with the patches of the ships or boats you served on out of Pearl. It also fits a jacket, a vest worn to a reunion, or a gift for a shipmate who was stationed in Hawaii. The backing is iron-on, and it can be sewn on as well. A small circle of thread for a big piece of naval history.