Mik's right in his post. How many of this new fat, lazy..I-Pod generation don't even know what today is about...65 years later.
I was just six years old, but remember well my beloved Mother running down the basement steps shouting at my father..."The Jap's have bombed Pearl Harbor". America and the world changed.
How well those words rang in my memory some years later in 1957 when I got off the launch at 'Landing Charlie' and walked over to my office at the Fleet Intelligence Center, on Ford Island in Pearl Harbor. The whitewashed concrete building were fresh and clean, yet the scars of the bullets from strafing Jap planes were still there...purposely left as a reminder of that 'Day of Infamy".
We flew in the far western Pacific but our home base was NAS Barbers Point...about an hours drive west, near Ewa, Oahu.
As I got off the launch still in some of my flight gear, I looked down at the water next to the launch, and saw some of the rainbow colors of oil in the water...floating down from the U.S.S. Arizona...about 300 yards to the north.
For us Navy guys...it is a living memorial...saluted by all U.S. ships leaving or entering Pearl.
Forget.......? Not hardly!