08/29/2026
Forty Years of Remembering. The Greatest Generation. An Entire Nation Called to Serve…
For nearly 40 years, whenever I have visited Oahu I make it a point to go by the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific the Punchbowl, I have stopped at these two graves, paid my respects, left a flower, and a coin for the boatman…
I never knew either of these men, found their graves purely by accident, yet through the years they have come to represent something deeply important to me—the obligation we have to remember the individual people behind the history.
Private Anson E. Robbins was from Massachusetts and was born December 18, 1911. He served with the 25th Materiel Squadron of the U.S. Army Air Corps at Wheeler Field, Hawaii. On the morning of December 7, 1941, Robbins was at Wheeler when Japanese aircraft attacked the airfield as part of the assault on Pearl Harbor. He was killed that morning at just 29 years old—only eleven days before his 30th birthday. His grave at Punchbowl records his service with the 18th Air Base Group.
A few feet away rests Private Kazuo Matsushima, a young man from Waimea, Kauai. He was the son of Toyoichi and Misao Matsushima, attended school in Waimea and worked as a mechanic for the Olokele Sugar Company before entering the Army. He was inducted in March 1943 and underwent combat training at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, before going overseas with the famed Japanese-American soldiers of the 100th Infantry Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team.
Matsushima fought in Italy and was killed in action on June 2, 1944, during the advance from Anzio toward Rome. His service brought him the Purple Heart, Combat Infantryman Badge and other campaign honors. He was only 24 years old.
There is something particularly meaningful to me about visiting these two men together.
Robbins died in the Pacific on the day the United States entered World War II. Matsushima died in Europe two and a half years later as American troops fought their way toward Rome.
Members of my own family fought in both the Pacific and European theaters, and perhaps that is one reason I have continued coming back to these two graves for four decades. Their stories encompass both sides of the enormous struggle in which an entire generation was asked to serve.
It is also why their stories speak so directly to the mission of the Palm Springs Air Museum.
We preserve airplanes, uniforms, photographs and artifacts—but ultimately our mission is about people. Every aircraft represents the young men and women who flew it, maintained it, fought beside it and waited for it to come home.
For many years we had another extraordinary connection to that generation: the World War II veterans who served as our docents.
So many of them are gone now.
They weren't simply people who had studied history and told visitors about it. They had lived it. They could stand beside an aircraft and tell a child what it sounded like, what it smelled like, what they were afraid of, who their friends were—and why what happened more than 80 years ago still matters today.
Every time we lose one of those veterans, we lose another firsthand voice.
Standing here again at Punchbowl, I think not only of Anson Robbins and Kazuo Matsushima, but of all of our WWII veterans and beloved museum docents who have passed away.
The responsibility now belongs to us.
Remember their names.
Tell their stories.
Preserve their aircraft.
Teach the next generation.
That is why places like Punchbowl matter.
And that is why the mission of the Palm Springs Air Museum matters.
Forty years later, I still stop. I still remember. And I still say thank you…
We will remember them.
Vice Chairman Fred Bell…
