“A date which will live in infamy” is a day to remember those who died in the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. It’s a day when at least one survivor attended the ceremony at the USS Arizona — except for this year.
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There are only 12 living survivors of the 1941 attack. None of them could make the trip to Hawaii. Only two made it last year. Survivors have been present every year in recent memory except for 2020, when the Navy and the National Park Service closed the observance to the general public due to the pandemic. An estimated 87,000 troops were stationed there on that fateful day. More than 2,400 died.
Jared Frederick, a professor at Penn State Altoona, told The Associated Press that Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day is a commemoration of a cataclysmic event that Americans had not anticipated.
“It marked the beginning of a war that many Americans would have been happy to stay out of,” he said. “And it really marks the beginning of a new international era for the country, and how it was going to engage with the world in a more immediate sense for Americans in 1941.”
Remembrance ceremony
Sunday’s events began with a moment of silence at 7:55 a.m. This is the exact time the attack began 84 years ago. Following the silence, fighter jets flew overhead in “missing man formation.”
The event’s master of ceremonies, David Ono, said to those in attendance the ceremony serves not only as a moment of reflection and gratitude, but also as a call to action to build upon the solid foundation built by the Greatest Generation.
“With this commemoration we recognize the importance of remembering the moment in the past when the prospects for peace were shattered and our nation was plunged into global war,” Ono said.
