Editorial

Pearl Harbor

Oil from the sunken battleship still bubbles to the surface at the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. Silence settles over the occupants when tour boats arrive from the dock. Visitors know this is not only a memorial but a tomb.

The Arizona's crew accounted for nearly half the 2,390 lives lost in the Sunday morning attack on Dec. 7, 1941. The name of every man is engraved on the marble wall in the shrine.

In all, 12 ships were sunk or beached and another nine were damaged. More than 320 aircraft were destroyed or damaged. The American flag flying over the Arizona Memorial means it memorializes all who lost their lives that day. The attack drew the United States into World War II.

Dec. 7, 1941, "will live in infamy," President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared the next day. Sixty-four years later, the American generation that saved the world from Hitler and from Japanese expansionism is departing. The rest of us owe it to the lost veterans never to forget their sacrifices.

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