A memorial service was held at the National World War II Memorial in Washington to honour the dead in the Japanese bombing on Pearl Harbour 74 years ago.
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“I was in Pearl Harbor in 1944-1945 and saw the devastation that had not been cleaned up”, said Sheridan Marquardt, retired Navy. Hall, who later went on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge, didn’t know where his ship was headed at the time – but it made its way to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, where the USA fleet had been devastated just a few months before on December 7, 1941.
Monday’s ceremony on the Iowa in San Pedro featured Navy veteran and Pearl Harbor survivor Howard Bender, who was on board the USS Maryland that day.
More than 2,000 United States servicemen were killed in the attack and more than 1,000 were wounded.
There was a moment of silence along with a reading of the names of those killed on the U.S.S. Arizona battleship from Kansas.
In Hawaii, the USS Arizona Memorial commemorates the attack, and the Battleship Missouri symbolizes the end of WWII.
The attack on Pearl Harbor lasted 90 minutes. “They stopped the motion picture and a military police officer came out and said everybody outside immediately”, World War II Veteran Evan Taylor said.
“You can’t discount the people that stayed home and didn’t go, everyone pitched in and did something”, said Walker.
Addressing the crowd gathered at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Harry Harris, the US top military commander in the Pacific said the day ‘must forever remain burned into the American consciousness’. “You ask majority, they don’t know what you’re talking about”.
“Somebody says, my God the Japanese has bombed Pearl Harbor”, said Gunter. “That event became a focal point for America going forward from just being a nation to becoming a world power”.
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“Every two or three days I think of something that happened to me or something to my buddies”, Sanders said.
