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Lt. Jim Downing – The Other Side of Infamy: My Journey Through Pearl Harbor and the World of War

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Featured in The New York Sun – Americans, Who Walked on the Moon, Cower in the Face of an Orange Sky – Dean Karayanis

December 5, 2016 – In this episode we meet 103-year-old Lt. Jim Downing, the second-oldest survivor of the Pearl Harbor attack, who will speak at the 75th commemoration in Hawaii on December 7th, 2016. Jim not only witnessed his ship, USS West Virginia, go up in flames on that day of infamy, but he later served in the Korean War, and in 1956 stumbled into the H-Bomb test at Bikini Atoll.

A man of great faith and soon to be the oldest male author in the Guinness Book of World Records, Jim Downing is also a spiritual leader with The Navigators, a worldwide Christian ministry. This unique and inspiring veteran joins us to share his memoir, The Other Side of Infamy: My Journey Through Pearl Harbor and the World of War.

If you enjoy this first-person account of the war, check out our chat with Roger Boas, who’s a few years short of 100 and a veteran of George S. Patton’s Third Army. He shared many war stories and his struggles to adjust to civilian life in Battle Rattle: A Last Memoir of World War Two.