About 20 survivors are expected to gather today at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. They come to pay tribute to the thousands of men who lost their lives in the Japanese attack of the military base there 77 years ago.
The youngest of the veterans are in their mid-90s. The Navy and National Park Service will jointly host the remembrance ceremony. It will be held at a grassy site overlooking the water and the USS Arizona Memorial.
Attendees are expected to observe a moment of silence at 7:55 a.m. local time. (That would be 9:55 a.m. Pacific time and 12:55 p.m. Eastern time for mainland Americans.) The moment of silence coincides with the time the attack began on December 7, 1941. Hawaii Air National Guard F-22 jets are scheduled to fly overhead in “missing man formation” to break the silence.
This year, no survivor from the USS Arizona will be attending the ceremony. None of the men were able to make the trip to Hawaii.
The Arizona sank after two bombs hit the ship, triggering tremendous explosions. The Arizona lost 1,177 sailors and Marines, the greatest number of casualties from any ship. Most remain entombed in the sunken hull of the battleship at the bottom of the harbor. Altogether, the Pearl Harbor attack killed nearly 2,400 U.S. servicemen.
Dozens of those killed have been recently identified and reburied in cemeteries across the country. The military had launched a new effort to analyze bones and DNA of hundreds long classified as “unknowns.”
This led to the 2015 exhumation of 388 sets of remains from the USS Oklahoma. Those unknown remains had been buried in a national cemetery in Honolulu. The Oklahoma had the second highest number of dead after the Arizona at 429. Only 35 were identified in the immediate years after the attack.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency has identified 168 sailors and Marines from the Oklahoma since the exhumations three years ago. It says it expects to identify about 80 percent of the 388 by 2020.
The 1941 attack was the critical event that drew the United States into World War II. It was called by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “A day that will live in infamy.”
(The destroyer USS Shaw explodes after being hit by bombs during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. U.S. Navy photo, via AP)
