Let's all pause for a moment today in Honor of those who lost their lives on this fateful day.

 

Great reminder George...thanks!!!

 

Glad you posted this. There's nothing in the news or anywhere about this. Guess people forgot, like in "Never Forget". We owe veterans a lot.

 

Thanks for the reminder. Terrible what happened. My grandfather was involved in the war as an officer on a ship. Nothing about WW2, as we are taught today, satisfies me. All that death, even atomic bombs, I question it all, because I don't want to see good men die like that. I've read the memoirs of former presidents and the work of independent historians. Learning about Pearl Harbor is what taught me to oppose war generally. Unfortunately I'm watching events in the world today and it's not looking good.

 

Both local TV stations featured Pearl Harbor on their newscasts.

 

I was assigned to my first submarine homeported at sub base Pear Harbor from 1980-1982. We were in port for December 7th 1980 and we were one of the boats assigned to open up for tours. The entire complex that now makes up Joint Base Hickam AFB and Naval Station Pearl Harbor open the gates to the public on PH day or the Saturday closes to the 7th.

I was 19 years old in 1980 but smart enough to listen to the old timers as they walked about my boat in aww. The sub sailors of WWII really had it rough sailing on what was then known as "pig boats". No conditioned air except heat, no underway showers till the boat tied up and got shore water and certainly very very limited automatic or remotely operated valves and equipment. And yet, these courageous warriors took the fight right to the doorsteps of our sworn enemies.

While in PH, I was able to take the harbor tour and see Battleship Row and I was able to make it to the Arizona Museum and Monument. Later in life after I transferred to the Coast Guard, I made it back to PH and got a tour on USS Missouri which is tied up at Ford Island. Each of these historical events was life changing and emotional for me.

My youngest daughter who is now in the Army simply did not understand and perhaps thought that her old man was losing it. Then she deployed to Europe and while she was there, she was able to tour two concentration camps and make it to the Marne River where in both world wars, the US Army 3rd infantry Division was instrumental in preventing the Germans from entering France and occupying Paris. She called me directly after each event and as I had hoped, she was highly emotional. Now she understands.

Thank you all for acknowledging this piece of history that seems to be slipping from America's memory.

 

Far worse events than this have slipped from your nations memory.

 

Saw very little on Pearl Harbor yesterday. A couple of “ honorable mentions and one channel that was playing the movie ‘Pearl Harbor’ back to back all day long.

I had an uncle that was on the Enterprise on that day. They were on their way back from Wake. A distant cousin was on the Arizona. When I was a kid, before he passed, he would tell us that there wasn’t much for him to say. One second he was in his rack below decks, the next he was being fished out of the water with a serious back injury back injury and a belly & lungs full of oil, clothes missing, covered in oil and they had to wrap a rope under his arms because they couldn’t hold onto him to get him in the skiff. Never saw a single plane nor heard a single shot fired that he could remember.
Following in his brother’s footsteps, Dad ended up in the Navy as a bomb sight technician and in the back seat of an SBD but after Pearl Harbor. He always said that when he got to Ford Island with a squadron, everything was still a mess.

When I was stationed at NAS Barbers Point in the early 70’s, we spent a lot of time at Pearl. Did the Harbor tour numerous times to include the Utah in addition to the Arizona. Couldn’t get enough of the history. That and a girlfriend’s dad was Blue Crew COB on the USS Robert E Lee.
Also flew over Pearl quite a bit in the P3. I was always amazed that 31 to 35 years later, when you visited or flew over, you could still see the sheen of oil leaking from the Arizona.