The Pearls of Honor Project
Their Duty to Remember
Sep 16, 2026
The Pearls of Honor Project is a historical preservation and photographic storytelling project dedicated to preserving the stories, faces and legacy of the men and women who survived the attack on Pearl Harbor—and the extraordinary responsibility they carried for the rest of their lives:
Their Duty to Remember.
For decades after December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor Survivors traveled across America and returned again and again to Hawaii. They attended reunions, visited schools, stood at memorials, participated in ceremonies, answered questions, shook thousands of hands and told their stories.
They did it because thousands of their friends never had the opportunity.
The survivors became witnesses for those who could no longer speak.
That is the story Pearls of Honor intends to preserve.
A Photographic History of the Survivors
At the heart of the project is a large-scale photo essay series built around an extensive collection of photographs, personal encounters, historical research and stories involving members of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association and the people who gathered around them.
These are not simply photographs of elderly veterans at commemorative events.
They document something much larger.
They show a disappearing generation actively carrying history forward.
There are survivors returning to Pearl Harbor. Families standing beside them. Sailors honoring sailors from another generation. First responders, veterans and ordinary Americans coming together in remembrance.
There are moments of ceremony and moments nobody planned.
Smiles.
Tears.
Old friends.
Last reunions.
And photographs that became far more historically important with the passage of time.
The Pearls of Honor Project will bring those images and their stories together as an expanding series of photographic essays:
Who they were.
What they experienced.
Who they remembered.
And why they kept coming back.
The Pearl Harbor tribute motorcycle, known as Metal of Honor, is one portion of that larger project.
Created as a rolling history lesson, the motorcycle contains more than 120 hand-engraved historical facts, figures, images and symbols associated with Pearl Harbor.
Among them are the story of USS Arizona and the story of Medal of Honor recipient John William Finn, who personally knew of the motorcycle, inspected it and signed the tank bearing his tribute.
Metal of Honor represents another method of doing exactly what the survivors themselves spent decades doing:
Making people stop, look, ask questions and remember.
Photography does it through an image.
Writing does it through a story.
Metal of Honor does it through steel.
They are different mediums serving the same historical purpose.
From One Generation of Veterans to Another
Pearls of Honor also looks forward.
The project is intended to help promote the Veterans Arts Warehouse, connecting the preservation of one generation of veterans’ stories with the creative voices of veterans living today.
There is a natural connection between those missions.
The Pearl Harbor Survivors demonstrated the importance of veterans telling their own stories rather than allowing their experiences to disappear into history.
Today’s veterans deserve opportunities to do the same.
Photography. Painting. Sculpture. Writing. Music. Film. Metalwork. Woodworking. Motorcycles.
Art gives veterans another language.
And sometimes that language can communicate things ordinary conversation cannot.
Their Duty to Remember
The title Their Duty to Remember comes from something deeper than remembering Pearl Harbor itself.
The survivors remembered people.
Shipmates.
Friends.
Pilots.
Sailors.
Marines.
Soldiers.
Nurses.
Men who were standing beside them one moment and gone the next.
For decades, the survivors carried those people with them.
Every reunion, every interview, every classroom visit and every December 7 ceremony was another act of remembrance.
But time has changed the mission.
The generation that once told us what happened is disappearing.
Their duty is becoming our duty.
The Pearls of Honor Project exists to preserve what they spent their lives trying to give us—their photographs, their stories, their memories and, most importantly, the people they refused to forget.
Metal of Honor is part of that story.
The photographs are part of that story.
Veterans Arts Warehouse carries that spirit forward for another generation.
And together they serve one simple purpose:
Remember the people who remembered.
Photos and article by Dana F. Harbaugh