Thursday, 4:30 PM
After 65 years, they remember Pearl Harbor
(Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff)
Barney Murphy, a Pearl Harbor survivor who was a sailor on the USS Maryland, saluted just after wreathes were thrown in Boston Harbor today at the Charlestown Navy Yard.
By Andrew Ryan, Globe Correspondent
Local survivors of the "Day of Infamy" tossed memorial wreaths of ferns and flowers into Boston Harbor today at 12:55 p.m. to mark the exact moment 65 years ago that the Japanese began their assault on Pearl Harbor.
The somber ceremony, attended by about 50 people, took place at the Charlestown Navy Yard aboard the USS Cassin Young, a destroyer named for a naval commander awarded the Medal of Honor for his bravery that day in Hawaii. There was a US Marine honor guard, a rifle salute, a recording of a bugler playing "Taps," and a few of the last living survivors who witnessed the attack.
One of the survivors, Donald Tabbut of Winthrop, was an 18-year-old radio operator who been out with friends drinking beer the night before when the bombs jolted him from bed that Sunday morning. The 83-year-old said today he will never forget the sight of men covered completely in oil crawling out of the harbor from the sinking USS Arizona.
"They were walking in, not as men, but moving blobs of black oil," Tabbut recalled today after the ceremony. "The only way I could tell they were men was by the whites of the eyes and their teeth."
Tabbut is the commander of the group Pearl Harbor Survivors and Friends. After 65 years, he still has some of the same thoughts he did on Dec. 7, 1941. Despite the oceans that separate the United States from Asia and Europe, the country is part of the rest of the world -- no matter how isolated some Americans like to think they are, Tabbut said.
There is also the lesson that came after Pearl Harbor.
"The American people, when they are in a heavy war situation like World War II, they get off their seat," Tabbut said.
