In Remembrance...

[Mr70]

..of this day @7:55AM (HST) during 1941.

[Stuart Adams]

[GRB]

A day they said would live in infamy. A day we would remember forever. Oh well, at least they remembered PH longer than our genearation remembered 9/11.

[1970Bluel78]

They bow there heads as they walk into the Toyota dealer. Hopefully 9/11 will be remembered as much as Pearl

[427TJ]

I just now went to the post office to pick up a package and the man in front of me in line, in his 90s, was a WWII B-24 pilot. I held out my hand and told him that I was a tanker pilot (KC-135 refueling aircraft). We had a great chat for ten minutes. He was shot down on his 6th mission over Germany and was a POW for fifteen months. As he jumped from his burning B-24 (hit in the fuselage fuel tanks where the wings met the fuselage) the B-24 exploded. He let himself fall from above 20,000 feet to below 10,000 before pulling his D-ring. The actor Jimmy Stewart was also a pilot in his bomb group. Very awe-inspiring to be in the presence of such men.

[Canuck]

I had the Honor to visit the Arizona Memorial in 1996. As the events of Dec 7 1941 have always fascinated me,I was moved by being able to visit this sacred site. As Hawaii gets a lot of visitors from the "Pacific Rim" (being politicly correct here)the Arizona site was crowded with hundreds of visitors. I was appalled at the lack of respect by some groups who were there for the picture taking and were acting like they were at Disneyland.
I am a firm believer of respect and quiet dignity when visiting churches,cemetaries and memorial sits.I have visited many War Memorials through out Europe and there is always a big lump in my throat remembering my Relatives and fellow Canadians who made a sacfifice. I have fond memories of the opportunity to visit the Arizona that day in 1996,I am saddended that it was not respected by everyone there at the same time.

[427TJ]

My wife and I went to the Arizona memorial in November 1995 when we were on our honeymoon. Getting off of the Navy launch and stepping onto the memorial, everyone went into hushed silence. Looking down on the aft turrets I saw the Arizona's fuel oil ooze to the surface and dissipate. Very moving. When we got back to shore we stopped by the gift shop. Outside was Richard Fiske, a Marine Corps and USAF veteran and U.S.S. Pennsylvania Marine crewmember on 12/7/41. The Pennsylvania was a sister-ship to the Arizona. I introduced myself and immediately started asking him about that day. He told harrowing stories about the attack and of the herosim and valor of our servicemen that day. He told me about his days as a Marine on Okinawa and showed me his buffalo-head nickel that had been in his pocket when he landed on Okinawa during that awful battle. A piece of spent shrapnel had struck him and the coin, in his pocket, had taken the brunt of the impact which bent the coin into a conical shape! His whole side was bruised but he kept fighting. He's kept that coin in his pocket ever since. He then said that he had gotten out of the Corps in late 1945 because he knew his number would be up if he stayed in the Marines so he transferred into the Army Air Force and stayed, retiring as a USAF KC-135 Crew Chief in 1970. Hey!, I said, I flew the KC-135! Man, we got along like gangbusters once he knew he was talking to a fellow serviceman. My wife and I stood there for two hours talking to Dick Fiske, getting him to tell more WWII stories. He said that the hardest part for him were the decades after the war. He lived stateside and he had terrible recurring dreams of the horrors he'd seen in the war, on Okinawa, and he said he finally had to move back to Hawaii in the 1980s, to Pearl Harbor, where he said he finally began sleeping through the night after all those years. He said, "I have to be near those guys" and he pointed toward the Arizona. He said that in the days after the Pearl Harbor attack he would walk back to his barracks on Ford Island, along battleship row, after evening chow and he could hear trapped crewmen inside the capsized U.S.S. Oklahoma banging on the inside of the hull with (probably) hammers, letting rescuers know where they were inside the ship. Not all of those men could be saved. He said that he would be asleep at night in the years after the war and he'd hear that banging, wake up and go to his front door and open it and nobody was there. He'd realize that the banging was not someone at his front door but the his trapped comrades banging on the hull, trapped inside the Oklahoma. After two hours we had to go but I shook his hand and asked him to inscribe the frontspiece of a big book on the history of the U.S.S. Arizona that I purchased in the memorial gift shop. We shook hands, my wife took this picture, and I thanked him for two fascinating, emotional hours of history. He said that talking about it helped him deal with it and that he enjoyed passing on his stories. I think we both had welled-up eyes when I bade him farewell.

I've since seen Dick on television shows on History and A&E and I always think of him telling us about his buddies trapped in the Oklahoma. Soon these men will be all gone.