War Sacrifice Memorialized Through Art, Web & Wreaths

by Ned Benton

(December 5, 2007) Friday, December 7th marks the 66th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. While no one from Larchmont or Mamaroneck was killed that day at Pearl Harbor, the bombing launched America into a war that eventually led to the death of 99 local men and one local woman. Ten of them are memorialized at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific on Oahu, not far from the USS Arizona underwater memorial to the 1,117 sailors and marines lost when the ship was attacked.

A detail from the Library of Congress photograph of the bombing of the USS Arizona, which is included in Ms. Dupré's book.

Photographs of the USS Arizona memorial are included in a new book by Judith Dupré, a Mamaroneck resident, architectural historian and bestselling author. In Monuments: America’s History in Art and Memory, Ms. Dupré remembers Pearl Harbor and dozens of other US memorials and fallen soldiers through rare photographs and interviews. (For more on the book, see Ms. Dupré's website.)

In its own way, the Larchmont Historical Society is remembering the local residents interred at the cemetery near Pearl Harbor. As part of its Larchmont War Memorials website launched last year, links to the photographs of the memorials to the ten are included along with other information about their service on. Three of the ten, Robert E. Frye, Lawrence Wollenberg, and Stanley King Turner, are buried on the grounds of the Cemetery of the Pacific, which lies within an old volcano crater known as the "Punchbowl."

The names of seven Larchmont-Mamaroneck residents are among those listed on the giant tablets of the missing (at left) in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii. Three others are interred on the grounds.

The other seven are named on the giant stone tablets in the cemetery’s Courts of the Missing among the 28,788 military personnel who are missing in action or who were lost or buried at sea in the Pacific. They include:

• Soloman I. Blechman
• Lawrence Wollenberg
• Frank M. Romano
• James Allen Callaghan
• John J. Landsberg
• Thomas D. Sullivan
• Joseph J. Sganga

Also this month, on Thursday, December 13 at around 10:30 am at Mamaroneck’s Kemper Memorial Park, there will be another unique remembrance to America’s fallen service members. Now in its fifteenth year, the Journey of the Wreaths, billed as the “longest veterans parade,” will bring two tractor-trailer trucks and dozens of motorcycle escorts to Mamaroneck for a brief ceremony as they make their way from Harrington, Maine to Arlington, Virginia. The trucks are carrying 10,000 wreaths donated by the Worcester Wreath Company for placement at the Tomb of the Unknowns and on grave stones at Arlington National Cemetery on December 15. (For more, see Journey of the Wreaths.)

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