San Pedro Tutors

About San Pedro

If you’re in San Pedro, California, you have the unique opportunity to view a very important part of history. You can visit the Battleship USS Iowa Museum, a real-life battleship that has been made available to the public for tours and sight-seeing.

This gigantic boat of floating steel was used in World War II, along with a long list of other Battleships. Along with other uses these ships transported literal tons of military equipment and supplies across seas. The west coast saw the most action on their ports then any other part of the nation, with what seemed like a constant barrage of battleships coming in and out. Just imagine that sight, large battleships floating past the beaches as you sit in the sand, preparing to dock and load up more equipment, setting sail again just as soon as they had landed.

These ships are used today to remind us of what those sailors sacrificed, in many ways that are hard to fathom without stepping into the world they lived in. These battleships were not just their work stations, but their whole lives. They lived on these ships for extended periods of time, for some, they never left. On these tours, you get to see things like the showers, the bunks, the mess hall, and really take in the sacrifices of these men and women. In a world where we no longer have to worry about the draft, where we can choose whether to join the military or not, it can be shocking to see. Your whole lifestyle was sacrificed, and the military became your world.

The only way to keep history alive is by remembering it, and sometimes the best way to remember it is to experience it. You might be taking history lessons with your San Pedro tutor, and this will give you a good solid foundation, but to truly appreciate what these sailors went through, you really have to see one of these ships. The guides in a lot of ways act as a second San Pedro tutor, giving you general narratives about life on the ship as well as personal narratives about individual sailors that called this boat their home. Because that’s what it was for them, their home. And when you walk into the ship you are walking into a space that these sailors called home, and that thought alone might give you a new perspective and new respect for these people that sacrificed so much.