Aside from the wreckage of the battleship U.S.S. Arizona, now resting beneath the waters of Hawaii, it may well be the most striking surviving artifact from the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Frighteningly black and sleek, the 76-foot-long, 40-ton submarine known only by its assigned battle number, HA-19, served as part of the Japanese fleet’s vanguard, arriving at Hawaii even before the first bomb fell.
Yet this relic of the War in the Pacific sits not in Hawaii, where it washed ashore the day after that fateful morning, nor even at the Smithsonian. If you want to visit HA-19, you’ll need to travel some 3,700 miles from Oahu—indeed, 1,000 miles from the nearest ocean—to a museum located just off the main street of Fredericksburg, Texas, a lazy hill country town of 12,500 or so residents.
