By Dana Feldman and Hugh Gentry
LOS
ANGELES/HONOLULU (Reuters) - It has been 75 years, but U.S. Navy
veteran James Leavelle can still recall watching with horror as Japanese
warplanes rained bombs down on his fellow sailors in the surprise
attack at Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War
Two.
Bullets
bounced off the steel deck of his own ship, the USS Whitney, anchored
just outside Honolulu harbor, but a worse fate befell those aboard the
USS Arizona, USS Oklahoma, USS Utah and others that capsized in an
attack that killed 2,400 people.
"The
way the Japanese planes were coming in, when they dropped bombs, they'd
drop them and then circle back," said Leavelle, a 21-year-old Navy
Storekeeper Second Class at the time of the attack.
Leavelle,
now 96, was among 30 Pearl Harbor survivors honored at a reception in
Los Angeles before heading to Honolulu to mark Wednesday's 75th
anniversary of the attack.
The
bombing of Pearl Harbor took place at 7:55 a.m. Honolulu time on Dec.
7, 1941, famously dubbed "a date which will live in infamy" by U.S.
President Franklin Roosevelt. Fewer than 200 survivors of the attacks
there and on other military bases in Hawaii are still alive.
Wednesday's
commemoration at a pier overlooking the memorial to the sunken USS
Arizona built in the harbor is set to begin with a moment of silence at
precisely that time.
About
350 World War Two veterans and their families will be serenaded by the
Navy's Pacific Fleet Band with a musical remembrance made bittersweet by
the knowledge that every member of the USS Arizona band - one of the
best in the Navy - died that day.
Attendees
will watch a parade, and two families will participate in a private
ceremony in which the ashes of crew members who survived the attack and
later died, will be interred in a turret of the Arizona.
Across
the United States on Wednesday, Americans will pause to remember those
who died at Pearl Harbor, and the long and difficult war that followed.
WAR BEGINS
The
shock of the Pearl Harbor attack is vividly illustrated in an exhibit
at Massachusetts' Museum of World War II, which features relics
including a West Point cadet's letter to his father - then-Brigadier
General Dwight Eisenhower - on how to prepare himself for the coming
war. [L1N1E01KC]
The
United States declared war on Japan the next day. Three days after
that, Germany's Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States.
Will
Lehner, 95, was among those who had a chance to fight back in the 1941
Pearl Harbor attack. The 2nd class naval fireman was working in the
boiler room at the USS Ward, patrolling the entrance to the harbor when
crew members spotted a Japanese submarine.
"That
submarine was on the surface and our skipper didn't know if it was ours
or not," Lehner, 20 at the time of the attacks, said at the Los Angeles
event. "He said: 'Load your guns.'"
"The first shot went right over the top, the next shot right after it hit that submarine and punched a hole in it."
After
the war, a historical discrepancy nagged at Lehner. The remains of the
Japanese submarine had not been recovered, and many historians doubted
that it existed. That changed in 2002, when the sub was found.
"For 62 years," Lehner said, "Nobody believed us."
For
his part, Leavelle would be touched twice by the hand of history. After
the war, he became a policeman in Texas. On Nov. 24, 1963, he was the
Dallas officer handcuffed to Lee Harvey Oswald when the accused assassin
of President John F. Kennedy was shot to death by nightclub owner Jack
Ruby.
(Reporting
by Dana Feldman in Los Angeles and Hugh Gentry in Honolulu; Writing and
additional reporting by Sharon Bernstein; Editing by Peter Cooney)
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