Ceremony honors LI’s Pearl Harbor veterans

Long Island veterans who survived the attack on Pearl Harbor were honored Monday at the American Airpower Museum in Farmingdale. Monday marked the 74th anniversary of the surprise Japanese attack on

News 12 Staff

Dec 8, 2015, 3:49 AM

Updated 3,233 days ago

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Long Island veterans who survived the attack on Pearl Harbor were honored Monday at the American Airpower Museum in Farmingdale.
Monday marked the 74th anniversary of the surprise Japanese attack on the U.S. base in Hawaii in 1941. About 2,400 Americans were killed and 1,200 were injured.
The somber ceremony at the museum honored veterans like Gerard Barbosa, who was a gunner on the USS Raleigh stationed at Pearl Harbor. Barbosa remembers running for his life as a hail of machine gun fire rained down on him.
"I was shaking like a leaf," he recalls. "I don't know how fast I was running, and I got to my gun station and we shot down six planes... I wasn't worried about living, I was worried about shooting down those planes so that our ship could stay afloat."
Annabelle Weiss, of Lindenhurst, served in the Marines during World War II. She said the attack on Pearl Harbor prompted her to join the service.
During the ceremony, dozens of roses were blessed and brought aboard a WWII plane, which took off to fly over the Statue of Liberty and drop the roses in honor of the victims.