MARIETTA – It was a typical Sunday morning in Hawaii. But just before 8 a.m. 70 years ago, the serene morning quickly turned hellish.
From the morning sky, 353 Japanese aircraft descended on the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor, intending “to destroy America’s military establishment in the Pacific.” A total of 2,400 Americans – 1,177 on the USS Arizona alone – were killed in the sneak attack.
“Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said the following day.
Following the attack, the United States entered into World War II. “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve,” Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto supposedly said following the attack. He was right.
“Today we honor the lives lost on Dec. 7,1941 at Pearl Harbor,” U.S. Rep. Tom Graves, R-Ga., said on Twitter. “Thank you to America’s ‘greatest generation’ for their courage and sacrifice.”
A visit to Pearl Harbor is indeed a moving one. But, remembering that day and honoring those who made sacrifices on Dec. 7, 1941, and during the years that followed doesn’t require a trip to Hawaii.
On Dec. 7, 1996, at Marietta National Cemetery, the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association unveiled a monument to the survivors of Pearl Harbor from Georgia.
Click here for a link to other World War II memorials in Metro Atlanta.