Pearl Harbor Day sees fewer surviving veterans from 1941 Hawaii attack(VIDEO)
Pearl Harbor Day is being recognized across the US on December 7. There is a shrinking number of soldiers and sailors who survived the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Day, 69 years ago in Hawaii.
Visitors enter the USS Arizona memorial at the W.W. II Valor in the Pacific National Monument at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii December 4. The loss of life aboard the Arizona accounted for nearly half of the 2,390 Americans who perished at Pearl Harbor and 13 other attack sites on the island on December 7, 1941, the day that drew the United States' into World War II.
Hugh Gentry/Reuters
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii
Sixty-nine years after Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor, survivors of the attack are due to gather at the base to remember those killed.
Some 100 survivors, the youngest of whom are in their late 80s, have traveled from around the country to attend Tuesday's ceremony.
The event is being held across the harbor from the USS Arizona, which sank in the attack and where the remains of nearly 1,000 sailors and Marines are still entombed.
The survivors will be welcomed by a new $56 million center for visitors and take a boat out to the memorial that sits on top of the battleship.
The new center has twice the exhibition space as the old one, offering a deeper understanding of the attack.
IN PICTURES: Pearl Harbor remembered