HEROES: Eight Years After

In the early morning hush, as the little party disembarked from two Navy launches and climbed up on the old Arizona’s rusted, heat-warped deck, Pearl Harbor seemed as desolate as an empty house. The visitors stood with bared heads in the sun. Beneath them in the battleship’s flooded compartments still lay the bodies of 1,092 U.S. sailors. It was a little after 8 a.m., Dec. 7, 1949—eight years after the day known in Hawaii as “Blitz Day.”

Intoned Chaplain E. B. Sharp: “We are assembled here on this occasion to pay a humble and grateful tribute to our honored dead . . .” Admiral Arthur W. Radford, commander in chief of the Pacific fleet, stepped forward and placed a wreath of carnations on a jagged hatch cover. Louisiana’s Senator Allen J. Ellender, ranking member of six visiting Congressmen, placed another wreath beside it. A bugler blew taps, and the small party re-embarked in the launches. Behind them, the waves licked at the oil-slimed plates, broke against the jagged holes, and, passing through, stirred muffled murmurings in the dark, twisted spaces of the battleship’s hulk.