remembering the Utah

Too often, we forget to remember the other guys.

It's easy to compare Pearl Harbor to 9/11 by using raw numbers:

• 2,403 (mostly military) died at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941
• of those .. 1,177 lost their lives on the USS Arizona. Another 58 died on the USS Utah.
• 2,973 (mostly civilian) died in the terrorist attacks of 9/11
• of those .. 2,749 lost their lives in the World Trade Center (including the victims on the jets, but not the hijackers). Another 184 died in the attack on the Pentagon.

The WTC disaster could have been much worse; about 50,000 people worked in the buildings. I found one website (afronets.org) which said basically "so what?" since 7,000 died of AIDS in Africa that day, and every day since then.

I caught the tail end of a History Channel piece about Pearl Harbor a day or so ago, and it mentioned the USS Utah Memorial, which I did not visit, nor recall even seeing. When I visited Pearl Harbor, I saw the submarine USS Bowfin and the USS Arizona, but not the USS Utah. Did I miss something?

I nosed around the National Park Service website seeking anything that said USS but this only led to 4 memorials: the Arizona; Cairo; Cassin Young; and the venerable Constitution.

It took some digging, but indeed there is info on the Utah (where 58 died on 7 December 1941) and why the Arizona is visited more often. I found a good 5-page PDF titled Lost Heritage: WWII Battlegrounds in the Pacific written ten years ago, for Cultural Resource Management by J. Steven Moore. It's worth a read, and helps us remember that the death toll from the initial strike (whether it be Pearl Harbor, or the World Trade Center) often pales in comparison to what comes in retaliation.