Pearl Harbor

"Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. " With these words, President Franklin D. Roosevelt officially notified Congress of the attack 70 years ago today on Pearl Harbor. He subsequently asked for a declaration of war and the United States, which had managed to remain aloof from bloody conflicts embroiling the rest of the planet, became the last major power to join World War II. Our country limped into the conflict from the Great Depression as one of many powerful — though economically afflicted — nations.

Kennedy Krieger High School student Jeremy Holmes had two dreams after graduating in 2013: visiting Hawaii and following his father's footsteps to stand alongside U.S. Marines. On Sunday, both dreams will be realized early, when Holmes boards a plane to Hawaii with four of his classmates to take part in ceremonies commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The students are part of the Central Maryland Young Marines Unit at Kennedy Krieger High School, a national youth program offered at the non-public school that serves special-education students referred from school districts across the region.

Anthony C. Canova, a retired vending machine mechanic and World War II veteran, died Oct. 23 from complications of a stroke at Gilchrist Hospice Care in Towson. The Hamilton resident was 88. He was born and raised in the former 10th Ward of Baltimore. He attended city public schools until the seventh grade, when he went to work to help support his family. Before enlisting in the Navy, he was a mechanic for Canteen Corp. During World War II, Mr. Canova served with the Seabees, the Navy's construction battalion, from 1943 until being discharged in 1946.

Michael Chrvala's current students were 3 years old on Sept. 11, 2001. They didn't see the hijacked airliners crash into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, or the plane plow into Pentagon, and they didn't hear news reports about the jet that crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pa. Nevertheless Chrvala, a Towson resident who has taught social studies in the Carroll County Public Schools for 18 years, takes every opportunity to teach...

At a town hall meeting in Catonsville last week, Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin spent a half-hour answering questions, including whether Congress would cut Medicare, address immigration or impeach President Barack Obama. Despite the breadth of the discussion, the Maryland Democrat and member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee did not hear a single question about Iraq or Afghanistan, the broader goal of curtailing terrorism or efforts to bolster security in the United States. Ten years after the attacks of Sept.

The news that the U.S. had killed Osama bin Laden arrived Sunday night with bracing clarity — the kind rarely seen since 9/11 itself. It's been almost 10 years since terrorists killed nearly 3,000 Americans on a single day, a shocking event that instantly seemed to divide life into before and after. Pearl Harbor, the JFK assassination, Antietam — no historical antecedent seemed too overstated. And yet, somehow, unless you lost someone to the terrorist attacks or the subsequent wars fought in its name, 9/11 eventually lost its hold on the ever-fleeting American attention span.

On Dec. 7, 1941, a young Army nurse reported to Schofield barracks hospital in Hawaii for what would be her first solo weekend assignment. She would not leave for about three months. At 97, Myrtle Miller Watson, a longtime Baltimore resident who lives at Oak Crest Retirement Community in Parkville, can vividly recall the details of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the men whose lives she touched. She remembers the fatally wounded soldier, who could barely breathe but asked her to check on his buddy.

Raymond Kenneth Hebden, a retired aircraft inspector and foreman of mechanics at Westinghouse Electric Corp. and a World War II veteran, died Dec. 13 of complications from colon cancer at Gilchrist Hospice Care. The longtime Roland Park resident was 88. Mr. Hebden was born in Baltimore and spent his early years in Cedarcroft. He later was raised in Elkridge, where his father was superintendent of Parkwood Cemetery and Meadowridge Cemetery. He graduated from City College in 1939, and enlisted in the Army Air Corps the next year.

It happened 68 years ago today, but Clarence J.M. Davis can still clearly remember the noise, confusion, frenzied activity and deadliness of the attack that propelled the United States into World War II. The St. Mary's County resident, now 86, is one of a few dozen known survivors of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor who are still alive and living in Maryland. He plans to mark the day, and remember the dead, at a ceremony scheduled for 12:30 p.m. at Maryland's World War II Memorial, beside Route 450 near Annapolis.