PEARL: Don't let memory fade away

Seventy-one years seems to have diminished the importance and the memory of a fateful day for our nation. The coverage of the event, although of significance to Mr. Emory mentioned on page nine of the Coeur d’Alene Press, dated Dec. 7, fails to honor those who perished and to our nation that arose to the threat and devastation of the attack.

The citizens of our great nation today do not comprehend the significance of that day, from it the nation rallied and came together as never before in the history of our country. We were jolted out of our lethargy of isolationism, and we responded as never before.

The world threat in those days of the early ‘40s was confined to a very small area as compared to what the world faces today. Throughout the world today we, the United States, is being assailed in every quarter of the globe, and political correctness seems to want to sweep this under the rug. History, in spite of many so-called experts, does in fact repeat itself. Individual complacency can and will subject our nation to a challenge far greater than what happened at Pearl Harbor.

It is my firm belief that every paper, local as well as national, should endeavor to inform and teach the uneducated what the real significance is of Dec. 7, 1941. We were unprepared and many brave and innocent men gave their lives for the mistake.

The Pearl Harbor Survivor’s Association has now disbanded, because of our members ages and the number that have passed on to their final anchorage, but our motto lives on and should be emblazoned on the front page of every newspaper on Dec. 7; “LEST WE FORGET, REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR.”

WALTER FRED HAMELRATH

U.S. Navy (retired)

Pearl Harbor survivor

Hayden