A sailor who served aboard the submarine USS Sailfish during World War II threw the ceremonial first pitch before the Los Angeles Dodgers’ 6-5 loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates Monday evening at Dodger Stadium.
William Dillion served in five major patrols in the Pacific War on the Sailfish, which earned nine battle stars. The Sargo-class submarine received the Presidential Unit Citation for outstanding performance on her 10th patrol, from November 1943-January 1944, which included sinking the Japanese Taiyo-class escort carrier Chuyo.
The Sailfish was originally named Squalus. As the Squalus, the submarine sank off the coast of New Hampshire during test dives in 1939, with 26 crew members drowning and the remaining 33 rescued.
The Sailfish was decommissioned on Oct. 27, 1945 and its hulk ]sold for scrapping. Its conning tower stands at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, where it was built, as a memorial to her lost crewmen.
Retired U.S. Army Col. Darryl Hensley, the director of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Junior ROTC program, will be honored at the Military Hero of the Game.
Hensley joined the Army in 1983, was deployed to Camp Casey in South Korea in 1984, to Afghanistan in 2003 and Iraq in 2009 and 2010. He was awarded the Bronze Star Medal.
Like for all Memorial Day games not in action at 3 p.m. local time, a moment of silence was observed before the national anthem. Games that were underway at 3 p.m. were paused for the National Moment of Remembrance, established in a bill signed into law in 2000 by then-President Bill Clinton.
The National Moment of Remembrance was first held on Memorial Day in 2000 under a proclamation by Clinton in an attempt “to reclaim Memorial Day as the noble event it was intended to be, to honor those who died in service to our nation.”
At all Memorial Day games, all on-field MLB personnel — players, managers, coaches and umpires — wore the traditional Memorial Day red poppy on the left side of their jerseys with “Lest We Forget” language connected.