You don’t have to go to Hawaii to take part in a commemoration
of Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day. You can mark
the occasion in Baltimore aboard the U.S. Coast Guard
Cutter Roger B. Taney, the last warship still afloat that
was in Hawaii during the 1941 Japanese attack on U.S. military
installations. The event is popular among military veterans, and
some local Pearl Harbor survivors will probably be on hand.
But it is open to the general public, there is plenty of room, and
admission is free.
The ship is permanently moored in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor
as part of the Baltimore Maritime Museum, at 802 South Caroline
Street. Commissioned in 1936 and named for a Marylander
who served as secretary of the Treasury and chief justice of the
United States, the Taney was one of the newest U.S. warships
on hand in the tense months leading up to American entry into
the war. So President Franklin D. Roosevelt transferred the Taney
and the rest of the Coast Guard’s 327-foot cutters to control of
the Navy.
When Japanese planes struck the naval anchorage,
the Taney was moored in Honolulu Harbor, six miles away. Her
crew fired at the attacking aircraft, but they were out of range.
For the rest of the war, the Taney served as a convoy escort
and as a flagship for the amphibious force during the battle for
Okinawa.
After serving during the occupation of Japan and off
Vietnam during that war, she was decommissioned in 1986.
This year’s ceremony will begin at 11:45 a.m. Tuesday,
December 7, and will include a memorial tribute by Rear Admiral Sandra Stosz, U.S. Coast Guard. The event is open to the public and the USO will provide light refreshments after the ceremony.
Remember Pearl Harbor
December 7, 2010
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Dec 07, 2010 @ 20:28:45
When I taught at The Kamehameha Schools in the late ’50s, there were a few teachers there who remembered the Japanese attack on Dec. 7 and described for me the way they looked down from the hill where the school’s buildings perched and saw the bombs exploding in Pearl Harbor and heard the weird delay in the sound of ordnance as it traveled up from below and ducked as the Japanese planes pulled up from their dive over the harbor and gained altitude after buzzing the school grounds. They also showed me the spot where an unexploded bomb had plowed into the ground on the school’s parade field. But unlike the U.S. Mainland, where fear of Japanese Americas led to thousands of them being interned in camps, in Hawai’i, where Japanese-descended people comprised about a third of the population, they caused little fear among the non-Japanese, who knew them to be loyal American citizens.