Lee joined the Hawaii Territorial Guard the next day, and later the U.S. “Very heroic, I thought,” Lee said of them. Sailors who were able to boarded small boats that shuttled them back to their vessels. Lee and his mother used Fels-Naptha soap to help wash them. Many were covered in the thick, heavy oil that coated the harbor. Sailors jumped into the water to escape their burning ships and swam to the landing near Lee's house. He still remembers the hissing sound of the fire. “Within a few seconds, that explosion then came out with huge tongues of flame right straight up over the ship itself - but hundreds of feet up,” Lee said in an interview Monday after a boat tour of the harbor. He saw the hull of the USS Arizona turn a deep orange-red after an aerial bomb hit it. He got up to yell for someone to shut the door only to look out the window at Japanese planes dropping torpedo bombs from the sky. woke him up, making him think a door was slamming in the wind. The home was just about 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) across the harbor from where the USS Arizona was moored on battleship row. Robert John Lee recalls being a 20-year-old civilian living at his parent's home on the naval base where his father ran the water pumping station. Most of the Arizona's fallen remained entombed in the ship, which sits on the harbor floor. The USS Arizona alone lost 1,177 sailors and Marines, nearly half the death toll. “The ever-lasting legacy of Pearl Harbor will be shared at this site for all time, as we must never forget those who came before us so that we can chart a more just and peaceful path for those who follow,” said Tom Leatherman, superintendent of the Pearl Harbor National Memorial.Ībout 2,400 servicemen were killed in the bombing, which launched the U.S. Ken Stevens, a 100-year-old survivor from the USS Whitney, returned the salute. Sailors aboard the USS Daniel Inouye stood along the rails of the guided missile destroyer while it passed both by the grassy shoreline where the ceremony was held and the USS Arizona Memorial to honor the survivors and those killed in the attack. The audience sat quietly during a moment of silence at 7:55 a.m., the same time the attack began on Dec. PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii - A handful of centenarian survivors of the attack on Pearl Harbor joined about 2,500 members of the public at the scene of the Japanese bombing on Wednesday to commemorate those who perished 81 years ago.
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