While President Donald Trump hosted Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on board the USS Intrepid in New York last Thursday to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Coral Sea, throngs of police lined the street outside to keep order over protesters shouting from behind barricades.

Some demonstrators yelled "shame!" at the dignitaries and honored guests as they headed to the dinner aboard the carrier. Eight of those attending the dinner were American and Australian veterans of the four-day naval battle in 1942 which halted Japan's advance toward Australia.Ironically, the men seated on the deck of the Intrepid were the ones responsible for preserving the rights of those assembled outside to protest and shout their slogans.Although the veterans are all in their 90s, no protest could intimidate or threaten them. From the hardships of the Great Depression to the horrors of world war, they had seen and experienced much worse trials during their lifetimes.Two of the veterans, Roger Spooner and Wendell Thrasher, both served aboard the carrier Yorktown when it fought two pivotal sea battles in the Pacific front within a month - The Battle of Coral Sea, in early May 1942, and the Battle of Midway, which occurred a month later.Before the Battle of Coral Sea, a frightened shipmate asked Thrasher, then just 17, to trade places with him on a gun platform. During the Japanese air attack, Thrasher bent over to pick up ammunition, remembered a flash and then everyone falling on him.When he regained consciousness, he was piled up with the dead. Someone washing the blood off with saltwater noticed he was alive. Thrasher was not injured, but the sailor he traded places with was killed, along with the rest of the gun crew.A month later at Midway, Spooner stood on the deck of the Yorktown, loading 54-pound shells to fire at circling Japanese kamikaze planes diving into the carrier. Spooner and many of his mates who had to abandon the sinking Yorktown spent about 10 hours trying to survive as enemy dive bombers strafed the victims bobbing in the water. He was rescued by a cruiser about 10 hours later.There were 165 men who died on the Yorktown that day, and Spooner was one of the 85 survivors.While Trump paid tribute to the 656 Americans sailors and airmen who lost their lives in the Battle of the Coral Sea, he also recognized the surviving Australian veterans who were flown in to share in the tribute. He noted how the battle forged a special alliance between the two nations that continues today.During the ceremony, there was a reading of the fourth stanza of "The Poem for the Fallen" by Robert Laurence Binyon (1869-1943). It was written in mid-September 1914, a few weeks after the outbreak of the first World War.Binyon, who lost several close friends and his brother-in-law in the war, composed his best-known poem while sitting on the cliff-top off the English coastline looking out to sea.His poem was adopted by the Royal British Legion as an exhortation for ceremonies of remembrance to commemorate fallen servicemen and women. The fourth stanza states:"They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.At the going down of the sun and in the morningWe will remember them."Thankfully, a grateful President Trump joined in the joint-nation ceremony last week to help assure that the Americans and Aussies who died in the Battle of Coral Sea will never be forgotten.By Jim Zbick |

tneditor@tnonline.com