Hawaii ? The USS Arizona Memorial, honoring Americans killed during the attack that plunged the nation into World War II, draws 1.5 million visitors a year, many awed by its symbolism.

But when the gleaming-white, 184-foot open structure was completed, exactly 40 years ago on Saturday, there was more ridicule than rapture.

“Initially, the memorial was criticized heavily by some people and equated to a squashed milk carton,” said Jan-Peter Preis, son of the structure’s late architect, Alfred Preis, an Austrian who moved to Hawaii after fleeing the Nazis in 1939.

“At that time, it was a foreign piece of architecture, it was not the sort of thing that you see in Hawaii, and not in 1962.”