We still remember and honor them.
My uncle is a veteran and was in the battle for Okinawa. To this day he has only said two things about the war.
1. He despises the Japanese.
2. People die in war and there isn’t anything you can do about it but move on and deal with it.
I would have thought it was impossible to live 16 days without water.
I visited the Arizona memorial a few years back. There was a reverence at the site. Everyone was silent or spoke softly, contemplative, aware of what had happened where they were standing. Even the small children were quiet.
I read about this years ago in some account of Pearl Harbor, and I remember reading that when the Marines drilled on the beach, they could hear the tapping in the hull. And then the taps became fewer and eventually stopped.
There was not much of a way to rescue them with what was available on Hawaii, so the decision was made not to bring in the equipment to cut into the hull, mostly because it wasn’t clear that any equipment they had available at that time would have been able to do it before the sailors died. So it would have been pointless to halt the war effort.
This was before modern wireless communications, so these men had no way of knowing what was going on outside their ship.
It still gives me nightmares and I always pray for these sailors in their horrible slow death, just as I pray for the poor people entombed under the WTC, who also took weeks to die.
God is eternal so time is nothing to Him, and he can use our prayers to alleviate sufferings at any earthly time. So I pray for them that he shorten or make more bearable their sufferings. And if we pray for them, surely they know this now.
The word among the West Virginia crewmen was that the compartment was haunted. Over the course of the next couple of years, crewmen would hear knocking from inside that compartment, open the WTD and find no one in the space. My dad, who served on WV during the war,knew several sailors that swore up and down the compartment was haunted.
PFL
There is a new film about the USS Oklahoma. They interviewed one of the men who was trapped, and how they could the activity of the rescue attempts. He trapped for about 30 hours. This films follows 3 or 4 families, and one was bringing home for proper burial the remains of a family member who served on the Oklahoma.