FORD ISLAND — Students too young to remember the horrors of war spoke to men who couldn't forget it yesterday at the first video conference that connected students in Japan with Pearl Harbor attack survivors.

Some 78 female high school students at Kinjo Gakuin High School in Nagoya, Japan, probed the survivors' memories and emotions about a time in history when the United States and Japan were mortal enemies.

The video conference, which lasted an hour and 40 minutes, was fraught with technical difficulties that kept cutting the connection between Hawai'i and Japan. But the Japanese students and teachers persisted, redialing each time until they got the answers to 10 questions that covered such topics as the use of atomic bombs, reconciliation and the effectiveness of the Japanese attack on Dec. 7, 1941.

Pearl Harbor survivor Sterling Cale, 88, and Herb Weatherwax, 92, who witnessed the attack, were frank but emphasized the changed relationship between the U.S. and Japan.

Cale, who was a pharmacist's mate stationed at the Naval Hospital at Pearl Harbor in 1941, talked about the horror of first watching Japanese bombs strike one battleship after another and the giant explosion and fire after the USS Arizona was struck with a 1,500-pound bomb.

Later, Cale helped recover bodies from the water. There was so much fire and oil on the water that he had to dive below the surface to look for the wounded and dead, he said. After four hours he had retrieved 46 people, he said.

"Sometimes for people who were dead, I had to throw a rope around their leg and haul them behind (a boat) so I could get them to shore," Cale said.

When asked if they hated the Japanese during the war, both men said yes. But Weatherwax, who was born and raised in Hawai'i, qualified his answer, saying he did not hate the Japanese-Americans in Hawai'i. He said many were his friends, who were also angry at the Japanese for bombing Pearl Harbor.

After the war, the animosity waned and Weatherwax met one of the Japanese bomber pilots and visited him in Japan.

"We got together and we shook hands," said Weatherwax, who served in the National Guard in Hawai'i at the time of the attack. "We said that we were friends because we realized that as soldiers we were not responsible for our action."

The girls were curious about the effectiveness of the attack and the men's thoughts on the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended the war.

Weatherwax said he was happy to learn that the war had ended.

"We had gone through hell in the battles in Europe already and our feeling was, 'At last they have something that made the Japanese stop,' " he said.

Daniel Martinez, National Park Service historian, said the attack on Pearl Harbor neutralized the United States' air and naval power and temporarily set back the American forces..

"It was an innovative, well planned attack on our fleet," Martinez said. "It changed (America) in two hours from a battleship navy to a carrier navy and it reshaped naval strategy and tactics."

The conference was part of the Arizona Memorial Museum Association's Witness to History program.

To date, more than 179 schools in 25 states, one U.S. territory and three foreign countries have participated. The Japanese school is the first for that country.

For information about the program, visit www.arizonamemorial.org/education/education-services-vc.html or call Paul Heintz, education director AMMA at 808-485-2744 or send an e-mail to paul_heintz@arizonamemorial.org.