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Beyond December 7th: A Pearl Harbor Remembrance
On December 7th we remember Pearl Harbor. It is the date on three men’s headstones who where casualties of that attack. But that isn’t the day they died.
Ronald Endicott, Clifford Olds and Louis Costin are three of the honored dead from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. Endicott and Costin were buried at the “Punchbowl” National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. Olds’ remains were returned to his hometown to be buried. All three headstones have “December 7th, 1941” inscribed on them, the “day that will live in infamy” as FDR declared it before Congress in asking for a declaration of war. A day that would be remembered even though these three of the 2,008 Navy personnel, 109 Marines, and 218 Army dead would seem a footnote, if they were remembered at all. Along with the 68 civilians who died, making the total dead 2,403, the fate of three men seems small, and barely worth mentioning. Almost half those numbers died on the memorialized USS Arizona alone. 106 men died on the USS West Virginia, with another 25 unaccounted for and presumed dead, including Endicott, Olds, and Costin.
Except they didn’t die on December 7th.
