Pearl Harbor 2006

Today's the 65th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the U.S. into World War II. It means more to me this year after getting the chance to travel to Hawaii and Pearl Harbor back in August.

After getting up that morning about 4, getting to Pearl Harbor by bus at around 6:30 a.m. to find a HUGE line of people already there to the 7 a.m. opening...then waiting almost 2 hours through the huge line to get into the Pearl Harbor memorial, I stood on the USS Arizona Memorial and looked across the water and tried to imagine what it would've been like that fateful morning.

I looked down and saw the drops of oil that still leak up from the wreckage of he battleship ("the ship's tears") that also is the final resting place for hundreds of sailors. I could see parts of the ship just below the surface.

They ask you to be quiet while on the memorial to honor the site. So the noise you heard was tourist cameras clicking or whiring, the wind whipping and the whispers of folks around you as they looked over the memorial. You can look over the distant mountains and think about seeing the hundreds of warplanes appearing on the horizon on that Sunday morning in 1941.

In the course of the tour, you read and hear about all of the coincidences and instances where the attack might've been discovered before it happened. I wondered how differently it all might've been had operators of that early radar system not mistaken the attack force for a group of U.S. bombers due on the island that day.

I also kept thinking about how history and the war played out after that devastating attack.

The U.S. rose up and led the Allies to victory and assumed its role as a world superpower. The atomic bomb. The U.S. as a check to the rise of communism. Did the attack have to happen as it did...did all those sailors have to die on the Arizona and around Pearl Harbor in order for American history to play out exactly as it did?

It's a sobering thought and being there was a reminder of the sacrifices made by those in uniform. And how fortunate we Americans were that the war turned out as it did.

UPDATE: Poignant story here from the AP about the last meeting today of Pearl Harbor survivors.

The survivors have met here every five years for four decades, but they're now in their 80s or 90s and are not counting on a 70th reunion. They have made every effort to report for one final roll call.

"We're like the dodo bird. We're almost extinct," said Mal Middlesworth, now an 83-year-old retiree from Upland, Calif., but then — on Dec. 7, 1941 — an 18-year-old Marine on the USS San Francisco.

Pearl Harbor Survivors Meet for the Last Time [AP via Yahoo]