The World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., has 56 pillars representing the states and the territories of the United States that sent men and women into service during the Second World War.
Visitors are sometimes surprised because they expected 50 pillars, one for each state, but the United States has 50 states and five inhabited territories, plus the capitol, Washington, D.C.
The territories
The World War II Memorial includes 48 states — the number of states in the Union in the 1940s — and eight territories. The states are ranged in order of entry into the United States, but alternately across the Rainbow Pool. The territories are grouped together.
There are seven territories represented in the memorial:
- Alaska
- Hawaii
- the Philippines
- Puerto Rico
- Guam
- American Samoa
- the U.S. Virgin Islands
The first three on the list are no longer territories. Alaska and Hawaii were admitted as states in 1959, and the Philippines became an independent nation in 1946. All three were U.S. territories when the war broke out.
The other four on the list — Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, and the U.S. Virgin Islands — are still territories. But there is now a fifth U.S. territory: the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), which became a U.S. territory in 1986.
CNMI had been part of the The Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI), a United Nations trust territory in Micronesia administered by the United States from 1947 to 1994. The territory consisted of more than 2,000 islands scattered over about 3,000,000 square miles of the tropical western Pacific Ocean, many of which were the sites of significant WWII battles that change the course of the war.
In 1986, the Federated States of Micronesia and Republic of the Marshall Islands broke off from the TTPI and became independent countries. In 1994, Palau joined them. The CNMI, however, wanted to retain its strong affiliation with the U.S. and attain U.S. citizenship, so it became a U.S. territory.
The memorial
The World War II Memorial is a stately and beautiful installation, with many layers of meaning. One important message it carries is that the military service of people from the territories and D.C. has the same value as the service of people from the states. Both Puerto Rico and Guam have higher levels of participation in the armed services than states — and the top state in this regard is Alaska, the most recent territory to be admitted as a state.
