By Roger McKinney
rmckinney@joplinglobe.com
RIVERTON, Kan. — Riverton students on Monday remembered the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor and recognized area veterans of World War II.
One honored guest at the ceremony, 90-year-old Byron Lengquist, had a firsthand perspective. He witnessed the attack on Hickam Field by Japanese planes that preceded the harbor bombing.
Lengquist, of Riverton, said he watched as the first bomb fell on the Hickam Field barracks, killing 32. He said a second bomb struck a hangar. Then the first bomb to fall on the harbor was dropped.
“From then on, it was just chaos,” Lengquist told the students. “There was planes everywhere.”
He said in an interview before the event that he had started for downtown Honolulu to perform duties he had been assigned when the attack began. Lengquist, a flight engineer in the Army Air Corps, said that when the bombs started to explode, he decided he was needed back at the airfield.
He told the students that when he returned, he found there was little he could do, so he found an open manhole.
“I crawled in there while the lead was flying,” Lengquist said.
He saw action the following year, when he participated in bombing missions against Japanese forces at Guadalcanal, where fighting began on Aug. 7, 1942.
Lengquist said before the event that people always refer to World War II veterans as heroes.
“I don’t feel that way,” he said. “It’s something we had to do.”
He said his brother, Philip Lengquist, died after a bombing mission in the Marshall Islands.
Lengquist said it is nice that students continue to learn about and remember the Pearl Harbor attack.
Retired Army Brig. Gen. Jim Aubuchon also spoke to the middle-school and high-school students.
“The blow to America 67 years ago rocked its soul,” Aubuchon said. “The fallout from that day was a long and savage war on foreign soil.”
He said that though the weapons and the enemies have changed, today’s men and women in the military carry on the tradition of the World War II troops and stand ready to protect the country.
“Pearl Harbor now provides an opportunity for reflection,” Aubuchon said. “We wonder what lessons we learned, and stand in awe of that greatest generation.”
Bagpiper Joel Wren played several songs for the event. Ruth Dorsey and Betty Ikenberry, with the Veterans of Foreign Wars Ladies Auxiliary, oversaw a candle-lighting ceremony recognizing the 28 Kansas troops who died overseas and whose remains have not been returned.
USS Arizona
A new visitors center at the USS Arizona Memorial is scheduled to open Dec. 7, 2010. Of the 2,400 killed during the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, 1,177 died on the Arizona.
Source: The Associated Press
