Peter Muschal Elementary School sponsors Pearl Harbor Assembly
By: William Wichert
A smile spread across Robert Gallagher’s face as he watched the students at Peter Muschal Elementary School last week sing of that infamous December day in Hawaii 64 years ago.
"Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition! Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition!"
The students swayed together on the floor of the school auditorium, and Mr. Gallagher moved the microphone closer to the speakers sending those lyrics across the room, still smiling.
"Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition! Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition, and we’ll all stay free!"
It wasn’t the words that mattered so much as where they came from, for Mr. Gallagher and two other local veterans were trying to show the students the importance of what happened on Dec. 7, 1941the day Pearl Harbor was attacked and United States involvement in World War II began.
"You see how a symbolic phrase in a moment of total chaos went on to be a spirit-raising call during the early days of World War II," Mr. Gallagher told the children after the song had ended during the Dec. 7 school presentation.
Mr. Gallagher and his fellow American Legion Post 26 members, George Heupel and Joseph DeAntonio, were not present when Japanese war planes descended on Pearl Harbor, but they each explained how that day affected their lives and the lives of countless other soldiers in World War II.
"It was Sunday morning," began Mr. Gallagher’s opening narrative. The weather was beautiful and a band was playing "The Star-Spangled Banner" aboard one of the Navy ships in port, when the sounds of approaching airplanes came near. "Suddenly, the entire harbor was in chaos."
The attack took the lives of over 2,400 Americans and set in motion a war that would ultimately put the young Mr. Gallagher, Mr. Heupel, and Mr. DeAntonio in uniform. Mr. DeAntonio became an infantry soldier in 1942, and Mr. Gallagher and Mr. Heupel joined the Navy in 1943.
Mr. Gallagher, who served in the Navy for a total of 28 years, worked on aircraft in the Pacific theater, and Mr. Heupel, who did not see any military action himself, was on his way to Okinawa when the war ended.
Steeped in the middle of an armed conflict, however, was where Mr. DeAntonio found himself as one of six prisoners of war captured by German troops and forced to work alongside slave labor.
"It always stays in my mind," Mr. DeAntonio told the gathered students, recalling how the workers would collapse on the ground. Lifted onto flatbed trucks, the bodies would be brought to mass graves and covered with dirt, he said. "Today, they call it the Holocaust. Then it was the horror camps."
Before Mr. Gallagher started playing the song, Mr. DeAntonio left the students with one last bit of knowledge to take away from the presentation.
"There’s one thing: The more you learn, the more you earn," he said, adding a little holiday humor. "And Merry Christmas is spelled, M-A-R-Y." The students cracked up.

