Alongside you sits the USS Midway, the longest-serving American aircraft carrier of the twentieth century and now the most-visited naval ship museum in the world. Commissioned just one week after Japan's surrender in September 1945, the Midway served the US Navy for forty-seven years — through the Cold War, Vietnam, and the Gulf War — before being decommissioned in 1992. At 1,001 feet long and displacing 70,000 tons, she could carry up to eighty aircraft and four thousand sailors.
San Diego is home to the largest concentration of US Navy assets anywhere on Earth — Naval Base San Diego, Naval Air Station North Island, and dozens of associated commands make this the Navy's Pacific anchor. The Midway is the floating symbol of that relationship. On her flight deck, you can walk among restored aircraft: F-14 Tomcats, F/A-18 Hornets, an A-6 Intruder.
Below decks, audio tours narrate the carrier's journey through nearly five decades of American military history. The ship also carries a famous piece of photographic history: a large reproduction of Alfred Eisenstaedt's V-J Day Times Square kiss, a sailor kissing a nurse, a moment that resonates differently today than it did in 1945.