Wow.
Posted on 04/15/2010 1:12:31 AM PDT by Palter
"Sixty-eight years after he was killed on Dec. 7, 1941," The Honolulu Advertiser writes, DNA lifted from envelopes that 18-year-old sailor Gerald Lehman licked when he sent letters home to his mother have helped identify his remains.
Now, the remains will be brought from Hawaii back to Michigan. His mother died in 2005. Her daughter, Peggy Germain, said it was the woman's "dearest wish" to have Lehman's body brought home for burial. It was Germain's research that led to the discovery that Lehman's remains had been buried with others in Hawaii -- and eventually to the DNA tests that confirmed the identity.
Wow.
The Punchbowl is the final resting place for many lost at Iwo.
We visited Honolulu in March.
Saw Pearl Harbor (the Missouri, Arizona Memorial, bowfin/submarine memorial) but didn’t get to the Punchbowl.
It’s been many years since I was in Hawaii last. In fact the U.S.S. Missouri was a commissioned ship in the Navy still. Am I to understand that it is docked at Pearl Harbor now? If true, that’s pretty neat. Did you get to go on board the deck where the gold seal is displayed where the Japanese signed the Peace treaty?
Yes.
The Mighty Missouri had just been moved in and out of dry dock for a complete repaint and tidying up. It looked like a brand new battleship.
Groups of eight or ten people were accompanied by guides who told the ship’s story, the history of the Iowa Class BBs and some little known insights from the signing ceremony.
We could go up inside the gun mounts, inside the control room (ancient round radar screens side by side with 1980s missile control equipment that was added under RR.) We looked in on the ward room, set with dinner service for the officers, awaiting their return. Very cool.
On the ship’s port side, a canvas awning covers about fifty feet of the teak deck where the brass marker is punched into the decking and a plexiglass table displays a copy of the signed documents. There is also a metal sign that recounts the signing ceremony and a 30 star US flag that General MacArthur wanted to have displayed for the event (from the opening of Japan, Adm Perry, 1853.)
The bow of the battleship is about 100 yards from the Arizona Memorial, as if to signify the beginning and end of the war. The Arizona wreck gives up about a pint of heavy oil every day which you can see and smell as soon as you get aboard the memorial. Inside the memorial are the names of the lost sailors from December 7, 1941.
The submarine Bowfin and the memorial to lost submarines on the other side of the harbor is very moving. It consists of a series of stones in a circle that represent each sub and its crew.
And the Navy also insinuated that a couple of the guys were gay and it was some sort of jilted lovers quarrel thing and he wanted revenge on his former lover or something like that. It was real sickening stuff that some brass was trying to perpetrate to save their butts. Unless you have some good proof, you shouldn’t be smearing a guy who died while serving his country.
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Thanks Palter for posting this, thanks Decimon for the pointer. |
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duh, forgot to put you into the ping.
If you would like to be added or dropped from the Michigan ping list, please freepmail me.
Are they grave markers or just memorial stones? I ask because I watched a program on Iwo that suggested sailors and Marines were buried at sea.
I’ve always wanted to go, haven’t made it yet.
www.navsource.org
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