Despite a hard-fought battle throughout the mid-1990s by local politicians to have the decommissioned and mothballed USS "Missouri", already in the Bremerton Navy Yard, stay in Bremerton as a museum ship and tourist attraction, Secretary of the Navy John H. Dalton awarded the ship to the Pearl Harbor Naval Base, Hawaii, in 1998. It now sits near the USS "Arizona" Memorial to demonstrate where U.S. involvement in World War II started on December 7, 1941, and where it ended by the signing of the instrument of surrender by the Japanese on board the USS "Missouri," on September 2, 1945.