Politics & Government
Air Force Association Honors Pearl Harbor Survivors at Airpower Museum
Four Pearl Harbor survivors visited the Farmingdale Airpower Museum for a commemorative ceremony on Pearl Harbor Day.
More than 300 people gathered at the at in Farmingdale to commemorate the 69th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor that occurred on Dec. 7, 1941.
The late-morning ceremony, sponsored by the Long Island Chapter #202 of the Air Force Association, honored four survivors and culminated when an AT-6 World War II vintage prop plane carrying three passengers and 69 red roses left the airport to fly over the Statue of Liberty where the flowers will be dropped into the New York City harbor. Each rose symbolizes a year that has passed since the attack in 1941; they are blessed with water taken from the Hawaiian harbor.
The Massapequa High School Marching Band lent a festive, and patriotic, air to the frigid indoor ceremony where four lone men, now in their late 80's and early 90's, were honored by legions of veterans' groups, politicians and civilians. The Pearl Harbor survivors were Bernard Berner of South Setauket, Gerard Barbosa of East Meadow, Seymour Blutt of Manhattan, and William Halleran of Merrick, NY.
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Berner, who turns 90 years old this month, was in the chemical warfare division of the Army when he served at Pearl Harbor.
"At first we thought the U.S. government was playing a joke on us," he said. "But it was no joke when the bombs began to fall." Berner suffered wounds from the attack. This was the first time he has attended this event to commemorate Pearl Harbor Day.
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Barbosa, an active World War II lecturer and veterans' advocate, served in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, first at the age of 17 for the Navy aboard a ship that was torpedoed and bombed in Pearl Harbor and later in England in the days leading up to the D-Day invasion of Normandy where he was injured. He recalls that the Japanese planes looked like "bees buzzing around" and he proudly recounts that he shot six of them down.
The Dropping of the Roses ceremony began forty years ago when Joseph S. Hydrusko, a resident of Massapequa and a former Navy seaman who survived Pearl Harbor, began a fly-by over the Statue of Liberty in a 1929 Curtiss Robin prop plane to commemorate the more than 2,400 Americans who perished. It was his idea to drop one rose for every year since Pearl Harbor.
Since Hydrusko's death in 1983, the annual tradition has continued. The AT-6's are part of the Geico Skytypers Air Show Team, a squadron of vintage planes that perform at air shows. Larry Arken commands the squadron, which also works with the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum.
"They fly into Manhattan, up the Hudson River, turn around at the George Washington Bridge, and on the way back, fly over the Statue of Liberty where they drop the roses over the water," said Fred Di Fabio, the event director and president of the Long Island chapter of the Air Force Association. "They drop their roses at exactly 12:55 p.m., the exact time, in New York, of the Pearl Harbor attack." The planes returned to Farmingdale by mid-afternoon.
