Their ranks thinned by age, Pearl Harbor veterans today are commemorating the 66th anniversary of the Japanese attack and wondering whether Americans will remember one of the most defining moments in history after they die.
"When we're gone, we're gone," said 87-year-old Jack Ray Hammett. "We're already just a paragraph in the history books. Will even that disappear when the last one of us dies?"
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a speech to Congress, immortalized the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and other military installations on Oahu, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941, as a "date which will live in infamy." Today, those words are remembered mostly by the generation that lived through World War II.
It is a generation in steady decline. About 16 million Americans served in uniform during the war. The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates 2.7 million are living, but they are dying at the rate of about 1,000 per day.
The exact number of Pearl Harbor survivors, though unknown, is smaller, and they are older than the average WWII veteran. Hammett, a former Costa Mesa mayor, said he liked to think of his buddies as "walking, living history."
Some Pearl Harbor veterans in Southern California are keeping that history alive through Hammett's Freedom Committee of Orange County, a speakers bureau that arranges for survivors to speak before groups about the day that changed their lives and turned a reluctant United States into a superpower.
Martin K.A. Morgan, historian in residence at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, said Pearl Harbor was "where the United States rendezvoused with the destiny we are experiencing now as a world power."
"Almost everyone can trace how World War II touched his or her family," Morgan said. "When all of our World War II vets are gone, how much of this interest will continue?"
El Toro Memorial Park cemetery's annual Pearl Harbor Day ceremony today in southern Orange County will feature two speakers: Hammett and Orange resident Robert Thomas, who was awarded the Navy Cross for bravery during the battle. The medal is the service's second-highest award for bravery.
Thomas, 88, retired as a captain in 1964 and went on to become Orange County's first chief administrative officer. The county hall of administration is named in his honor.
The Japanese attack, which killed 2,403 Americans, jarred the country out of its isolationist lull.
