On December 7, hundreds of visitors from Oklahoma and across the United States gathered at the USS Oklahoma Memorial to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

When Japanese dive bombers descended over Pearl Harbor, the USS Oklahoma was among the first battleships to be attacked, taking eight torpedoes and sinking with 415 sailors and 14 marines aboard. The loss of life was second only to the USS Arizona, which lost 1,177 sailors and marines.

The USS Oklahoma Memorial is now a fixture on Ford Island, where so much history from the Pearl Harbor attack is now commemorated, but that was not always the case.

Every other ship that had been sunk on Pearl Harbor’s battleship row had a memorial except the USS Oklahoma, so retired Navy officers Gregory Slavonic and Tucker McHugh teamed with other Oklahomans, including Oklahoma City architect Don Beck, to build a lasting tribute to the USS Oklahoma’s fallen heroes.

Slavonic and McHugh established a committee that raised $1.5 million in private donations to fund construction of the giant memorial featuring a black granite wall and 429 7-foot-tall standards cut from white marble, representing each life lost on the ship.

“There are rows of these standards representing each individual that lost their life,” said memorial designer Beck. “You can walk between these rows, and the idea is you can walk among the lost souls and get a feeling of what it’s like to see 429 who gave their lives.”

The memorial was completed in 2007, and it was dedicated on the shores of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, only a few weeks after Oklahoma’s 100th birthday.

“This is what we do as Americans,” said retired Navy Cmdr. McHugh. “You go back to the Civil War or the Revolutionary War, we build memorials to honor heroes who have come before us. The fact that 429 men on the USS Oklahoma died that day…, and there was nothing to honor them individually with their names on anything. That was just not right. That was not going to stand, so that’s why we built the memorial.”

The USS Oklahoma Memorial’s grass-roots origins within the Sooner state made it unique among other memorials commemorating Pearl Harbor Day, said retired Rear Adm. Slavonic.

“The Oklahoma is the first memorial that we know of – and the park service told us this – that funds were raised by a private organization that did all the leg work, did all the design work, and the only thing the park service did was allow us to have the land,” Slavonic said.

“That memorial, God willing, will be there for 100 plus years and you won’t have individuals taking it down,” Slavonic said. “It represents all the good things about our Navy, and about our state and our nation.”

Many veteran families will attend Tuesday’s Pearl Harbor Day commemoration, including two USS Oklahoma survivors.

Sailor David Russell barely survived the attack on the USS Oklahoma, managing to catch a rope and climb to safety aboard the USS Maryland. Despite that experience and seeing so many of his shipmates perish, he was onboard USS Mahan, a destroyer, serving as a gunner’s mate just 16 days after the attack. He served another 19 years in the U.S. Navy, and is now 101 years old, living in Virginia.

Sailor Swede Boreen was able to escape the USS Oklahoma before it sank and climbed aboard the USS Maryland. He only needed to slug down a cup of coffee before getting right back to work. He was given a rifle and was on patrol that very night. He then served another 18 years in the Navy and is now 101 years old, living in Oregon.