Special thanks to surviving World War II soldiers on the 70th anniversary of the attack on America at Pearl Harbor

• United States ship Arizona topples over from surprise attack by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, ap

12/7/11, "That Infamous Date," "It was 70 years ago this morning that, as President Roosevelt put it the following day, “The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

Then, four days later, Adolf Hitler declared war on America.

Thus was a fundamentally isolationist nation, content until then to pretend that two wide oceans could protect it from a world at war, dragged roughly onto the international stage — where it remains, fitfully, to this day." NY Post, via wz

Above, World War II US Air Force pilot and his Stearman biplane; below same soldier in his Air Force Uniform sometime in the 1940's, surviving. At the end of the war in the Pacific, Dad rescued a bunch of American soldiers the Japanese had captured. He said the soldiers were in pretty bad shape.

• Born in Brooklyn in 1922.

• Christmas Eve, 2010.

Tweet Stumbleupon StumbleUpon