It has been 75 years but U.S. Navy veteran James Leavelle can still recall watching with horror as Japanese warplanes rained bombs on his fellow sailors in the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor that plunged the United States into World War II.
Bullets bounced off the steel deck of his own ship, the Whitney, anchored just outside Honolulu harbor, but a worse fate befell those aboard the Arizona, Oklahoma, Utah and other U.S. ships that sank or capsized in the attack that killed 2,400 people.
"The way the Japanese planes were coming in, when they dropped bombs, they'd drop them and then circle back," said Leavelle, a 21-year-old navy storekeeper at the time of the attack.