Naval Station Pearl Harbor Hawaii Patch

The flag at the center of this patch flies from a pole attached to the severed mainmast of USS Arizona (BB-39), put there by Admiral Arthur W. Radford in 1950. Below it sits the white span of the USS Arizona Memorial, which straddles the sunken hull without touching it. Naval Station Pearl Harbor grew up around that water. The Navy established Naval Station, Honolulu on 17 November 1899 and renamed it Naval Station, Hawaii in February 1900. Pacific Fleet headquarters has been at Pearl Harbor since 1940.

Congress authorized dredging the channel and lochs on 13 May 1908, the same year Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard was established. Work on the first drydock began on 21 September 1909, the structure collapsed in February 1913, and the rebuilt dock was opened to flooding in August 1919. The Navy and Army bought Ford Island in 1917 for joint use, and on Sunday, 7 December 1941, the battleships moored along its shore took the attack. USS Arizona lost 1,177 sailors and Marines, and 1,102 of them are still aboard. The battleship USS Missouri (BB-63), commissioned in June 1944, is now a museum ship in the same harbor, so the start and the finish of the Pacific war share one anchorage.

The patch is a 4 inch circle ringed in twisted gold and blue rope, finished with a thin blue edge. NAVAL STATION arcs across the top in black block letters and PEARL HARBOR HAWAII runs along the bottom, with a black star at each side. Inside, the white memorial sits under a rainbow and a bank of white cloud, with the flag rising from its middle. Below the memorial, gold lines of latitude and longitude cross a deep blue sea, and the Hawaiian Islands are stitched in gold with the Big Island at the lower right. It puts the base exactly where it is on the chart, alone in the middle of the Pacific.

The memorial was dedicated on Memorial Day, 30 May 1962, and its 21 open windows, seven on each wall and seven in the ceiling, commemorate the date of the attack. Pearl Harbor was designated a National Historic Landmark on 29 January 1964. In 2010 the naval station and Hickam Air Force Base were combined into Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, so this patch carries the name the base wore for generations before the merger. The harbor is still the only intermediate maintenance facility for submarines in the Middle Pacific, and more than 160 commands work from the base. A sailor stationed here did his work in the same waters where the Pacific war began.

It fits a shadow box beside a cruise book from a Pacific deployment, or the jacket worn to a ship's reunion. It is also a fitting gift for anyone in the family who served on Oahu or is headed there to see the memorial. The patch has an iron-on backing and can also be sewn on. Pearl Harbor, stitched the way the Navy knew it.