Sixty-three years after the sneak attack that plunged the United States into World War II, hundreds of men who died aboard the battleship USS Oklahoma are finally getting their own special tribute. A new exhibit of photos, artifacts and oral histories was unveiled Monday to honor the 429 men from the Oklahoma who died in the Dec. 7, 1941 attack. That is the second-highest number of Pearl Harbor casualties behind the USS Arizona, where most of its 1,177 killed crewmen remain entombed after the ship sank in the Japanese attack. The anniversary also will be marked with simultaneous ceremonies Tuesday aboard the Arizona Memorial above that sunken battleship, and on shore at the National Park Service's visitors center. Each ceremony was to feature a silence pause at 7:55 a.m. - the minute the attack started.
``It's about time,'' said Oklahoma survivor George Smith, 80, of Tenino, Wash. While the better-known Arizona has a gleaming white memorial straddling its hull, the Oklahoma has gone largely unrecognized over the years. On Monday, 86-year-old Paul Goodyear, head of the USS Oklahoma Survivors Association, joined four other survivors and about two dozen friends and family for the exhibit's unveiling at the USS Arizona Memorial museum and visitors center. Goodyear, who organizes an annual USS Oklahoma reunion, had lobbied for the exhibit at the Oklahoma state capitol earlier this year. Survivors of the USS Oklahoma are pressing for a permanent memorial. ``There was more than one ship out here, yet nobody knows the Oklahoma,'' Goodyear said Monday. ``I don't think it will come in our lifetime.''
Goodyear said there are 143 survivors left, and Smith is the youngest of them. When it sank, the Oklahoma was anchored off Ford Island on Battleship Row in the middle of the harbor, next to the USS Maryland. The Oklahoma took the brunt of the torpedoes, leaving the Maryland relatively intact. The Oklahoma was refloated in 1943 and sold for scrap after the war, but it sank in the Pacific while being towed to California.
| Can't imagine what it was like to be in Oahu that morning. |
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