Notice the teak decks of the USS Missouri, the battleship that ended the very war the Arizona began. On September 2, 1945, in Tokyo Bay, Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and General Yoshijiro Umezu climbed aboard this very deck and signed the Instrument of Surrender, formally ending the Second World War. General Douglas MacArthur presided over the ceremony.
Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz signed for the United States. The ceremony lasted just twenty-three minutes. The deliberate placement of the Missouri here at Pearl Harbor, berthed just a few hundred yards from the sunken Arizona, is deeply intentional.
Together these two ships bookend the entire Pacific War — one marking its devastating beginning on December 7, 1941, the other marking its triumphant conclusion nearly four years later. Walk the teak decks of the Mighty Mo and find the brass plaque marking the exact spot where the surrender documents were signed. It is one of the most consequential patches of ground — or rather, deck — in the twentieth century.