Punchbowl cemetery was awash in more than 35,000 small and large American flags Monday as Memorial Day and the sacrifices made by American service members across the decades were observed amid a series of auspicious anniversaries coming closely together.

The National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific — its full name — opened 70 years ago this July and now has over 61,000 in-ground burials and cremated remains, according to officials.

Mayor Kirk Caldwell noted that the D-Day invasion occurred 75 years ago on June 6, 1944, and that Nov. 11 was the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I.

“For me it’s more about peace than war,” Caldwell told more than 750 people in attendance. “It’s about people who fought for peace — and not for war.”

Caldwell pointed out that famed World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle is buried between two “unknowns” at Punchbowl, and Air Force pilot and astronaut Ellison Onizuka, who died in the space shuttle Challenger explosion, is nearby.

Caldwell invoked Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address during the Civil War in which the president noted the sacrifice, saying, “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

Unlike previous ceremonies, where those attending faced the statue of Lady Columbia, this year’s ceremony was organized with visitors facing toward the tens of thousands of service members laid to rest in the memorial cemetery.

The 70th Annual Mayor’s Memorial Day Ceremony also included Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson, who came from Washington, D.C., for the event with wife Dana, who is from Hilo, Caldwell said.

Richardson said the day was dedicated in honor of those heroes who fought and died in every major conflict in America’s history.

“And I can think of no more appropriate, more beautiful, more peaceful, more dignified place than here where we are now,” he said.

Richardson discussed three stories of honor and courage with Hawaii ties, including the service of Pyle, a Navy veteran, as well as that of Navy Chief Edwin Hill, who was on the USS Nevada on Dec. 7, 1941, and Capt. William Callahan, the skipper of the battleship USS Missouri late in the war.

Pyle, killed by a sniper’s bullet, wrote ahead of the war’s end that America won for many reasons, but Richardson quoted Pyle as saying, “We did not win it because destiny created us better than all other peoples, and I hope that in victory we are more grateful than proud.”

The United States, Richardson said, is a nation not bound by generations of deep cultural history, but by a set of ideas — including that all men are created equal.

Hill dived off the Nevada to get it unmoored in the Pearl Harbor attack, and dived back into the harbor to rejoin his ship — eventually getting blown off the ship and killed.

Callahan, meanwhile, gave a dignified military burial to a young Japanese Zero kamikaze pilot who crashed into the battleship Missouri late in the war.

David Sakai, 71, an Air Force veteran who served in Thailand during the Vietnam War, came out “to remember those who have gone before us.”

“I had a clean uniform, three hots (meals) and a cot, hot shower, a cup of coffee and an air-conditioned office,” he said. “So therefore, my heart and my highest regards are with the grunts.”

Charles Lindberg, 88, served in the Army in Korea and in Vietnam. “I’m a veteran. I’ve got to honor my comrades and those that we lost,” he said.