At Pearl Harbor luncheon, all but a few veterans are gone

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Sandra Anderson Mathis sat at the head of the table in the Barn Door restaurant as the clock struck 11:55 a.m. and the guests bowed their heads in silence to mark the moment America entered World War II.

Mattis sat where her dad, retired Air Force Maj. Richard Anderson, would have been if he’d lived to see another Pearl Harbor Day. But a part of him was here — his Pearl Harbor Association cap, a framed photo and the memories.

“This is a wonderful way to celebrate his legacy, his life,” said Mathis, who described Anderson as an amazing father and a humble, noble, hardworking man who loved his Pearl Harbor comrades. “He would never seek recognition, and he was always very quiet about his war experiences, but he loved the camaraderie here because these men went through this together, and they were boys, not men.”

Blind and using hearing aids that amplified words but often made them harder to understand, Anderson was failing at last year’s luncheon, part of an ever-shrinking group of men who were on the ground floor of World War II.

The San Antonio chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association had a robust roster of 64 members a quarter century ago. Now it’s down to four.

Most of the 42 people at the Red Barn on Thursday were family and friends of Pearl Harbor veterans who’d come to salute their loved ones. Just two veterans of the battle were there. William St. John, 96, and retired Tech Sgt. Kenneth Platt, 95 were in fine spirits, more so than usual in a year where both have struggled with illness.

Veteran John Buchanan was at another event while Gilbert Meyer, who served aboard the USS Utah, was thought to be observing the 76th anniversary of the attack in Hawaii.

Retired Army Maj. Virgil Lee Ward, who isn’t an association member but was at last year’s luncheon, wasn’t on hand.

Anderson and Leo Wally died this year, while another veteran, Bill Hayes, has moved into a nursing home. Attendees were unsure if he was alive.

“The thing is, it’s part of life, but you develop a relationship with these men and unfortunately you only see them once a year, and the only other time is when the family says he’s passed,” said Irene Hernandez, who coordinates the luncheon.

“So that’s why it’s important to keep the memory of the attack alive with all the children and grandchildren. We always put on our invitations ‘Lest we forget,’ because we don’t want to forget about it.”

The waves of Japanese warplanes that roared over Pearl Harbor killed more than 2,330 American sailors, soldiers and Marines. It was the first of a string of Japanese victories across the Pacific. When the Philippines fell, Tokyo’s brutality to U.S. and allied prisoners was so horrific it led to war crimes trials after V-J Day. The tide of the war changed after the Battle of Midway in mid-1942.

Platt was sound asleep in his bunk at Schofield Barracks when Japanese machine gun bullets crashed through a window four feet away. He quickly crawled underneath his bed.

“I still think about what they done,” he said, but added there is no anger. “None whatsoever.”

A radioman first class, St. John had just gotten off work with a fellow sailor, Woodrow Strauss, at a newly established air station on Kaneohe Bay surrounded by three towers that stood 180 feet when the attack began. They saw plane after plane drop their bombs in the distance.

“I was coming off midnight shift, so I was up and about, and was eyeball to eyeball with one of the Japanese pilots,” he recalled. “The only reason he didn’t shoot me was he had a tower he had to go up and over, so he didn’t have a shot at me. And he would have ripped me in half.”

Johnnie Singleton was drinking coffee and making cinnamon toast in the officers’ pantry aboard the USS Maryland when bombs hit his ship and the nearby USS Oklahoma. He’s gone now, but his wife, Rosa, and sister, Della Elam, sat at a table to honor him.

“It was luck,” Rosa Singleton, 76, of San Antonio said, “that he was here.”

sigc@express-news.net

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Nvidia’s Titan V giant: $3000 buys you ‘most powerful PC GPU ever’

Nvidia has announced the Titan V, the “world’s most powerful PC GPU”. It’s based on Nvidia’s Volta, the same architecture as the Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs behind Amazon Web Service’s recently launched top-end P3 instances, which are dedicated to artificial-intelligence applications.

The Titan V for PCs is also aimed at researchers and scientists and was unveiled at the big Neural Information Processing System (NIPS) AI conference on this week in Long Beach.

The graphics card consists of six graphic processing clusters, featuring 21.1 billion transistors, 12GB memory, and 640 Tensor Cores, which are capable of performing 110 teraflops, or a 110 trillion floating-point operations per second.

That performance trounces one of Nvidia’s best gaming GPUs, the Maxwell-based GTX 980, which is capable of 4.6 teraflops, as well as the 11 teraflops that the newer Pascal-based GTX 1080 Ti is capable of. At $2,999 it also costs about six times as much as those top-of-the-line gaming GPUs.

Nvidia says the Titan V has nine times the power of its predecessor, the $1,200 Titan Xp, and double the energy efficiency of Pascal GPUs. The gear is fabricated on TMCS’s 12-nanometer FFN manufacturing process.

“Our vision for Volta was to push the outer limits of high-performance computing and AI. We broke new ground with its new processor architecture, instructions, numerical formats, memory architecture and processor links,” said Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang.

“With TITAN V, we are putting Volta into the hands of researchers and scientists all over the world. I can’t wait to see their breakthrough discoveries.”

The Titan V has a similar form factor to its gaming GPUs but comes in black and gold. As with the Titan Xp, each customer can only purchase two units.

Nvidia is also making its recently released AI software packages available via its GPU cloud.

The growth of AI and adoption of GPUs in the cloud to support AI applications have been a major win for Nvidia. Gaming is still Nvidia’s biggest market by revenue but datacenter income from the likes of Microsoft, Baidu and AWS have seen the sector’s revenue more than double over the past year to $500m.

Nvidia’s video details the Titan V specification.

Nvidia

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