Ed Wentzlaff remembers well that December morning in 1941 when Japanese warplanes screamed out of the sky to bomb his ship, the USS Arizona.

"The concussion was frightful," he told about 200 people who gathered Monday in St. Paul for a Pearl Harbor remembrance ceremony.

Wentzlaff, a Minnesota sailor, was standing on the battleship's forward deck, waiting for a Sunday church service to start on Dec. 7 at 8 a.m. Minutes later the first wave of warplanes strafed the deck. Fire and rocking explosions followed. The sky darkened with planes and smoke.

Wentzlaff and another sailor escaped the ship on a barge and soon found men everywhere blackened from fire. "They were falling apart from burns," said Wentzlaff, now 92 and one of only 20 living survivors from the Arizona.

He was an aviation ordinance mate first class, trained for submarine duty but instead assigned to work in the Arizona's No. 2 turret ammunition magazine, "the one that got the big bomb" that killed so many of his friends.

Nearly 1,200 sailors and Marines died on the Arizona. Wentzlaff and other survivors spent their lifetimes fighting the haunting memories.

"Some moments in life are too ghastly to remember," Wentzlaff, a retired farmer from Milaca, told those assembled at the Minnesota Veterans Service Building. "Some are so horrible that they defy forgetting. I put that day at Pearl Harbor in that last category."

Many in his audience knew the pain. Dick Bernard of Woodbury brought newspaper clippings about his Uncle Frank Bernard, a shipfitter second class, who died that day on the Arizona. Geri Fisher of Oakdale brought a Navy photo of her father, Giles "Lee" LeClair, a sailor from Little Canada. He manned the gun on the USS Ward that took the first shot earlier that morning at a Japanese submarine, about 80 minutes before the main attack.

"Dads never talk about war with their children," Fisher said, although she learned enough before he died 15 years ago to know of his contribution. She later discovered that a photo of her father and other USS Ward sailors is etched on a granite monument at the World War II memorial on the State Capitol grounds.

Wentzlaff, who farmed for 38 years after the war, said he's been to Pearl Harbor eight times. "Every time I go there I look back and feel worse," he said.

But he plans his burial there -- close to all the men who didn't survive.

Kevin Giles • 612-673-4432