AUGUSTA, Maine — Military funerals are solemn occasions, but family smiled at times on Tuesday as they laid their loved one to rest.
It was a day 80 years in the making.
Ensign Stanley Allen, born in Bethel, served in the Navy on the battleship USS Oklahoma. Allen was killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and was one of 429 sailors whose bodies were trapped when the ship capsized. Some were identified in the years after, but in 2015, the Navy set out to identify the others. Allen was a DNA match to relatives in 2021.
The Navy notified the family, paid for funeral and travel expenses, and invited them to pay respects as Allen was finally laid to rest at the Maine Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Augusta. Rear Admiral Mike Brown came from the Pentagon to preside over the funeral.
"This is absolutely a joyous moment," Brown said of the rare circumstances. "It’s meaningful and solemn but, more than anything, the citizens of Maine now have one of their heroes back on Maine soil. And we should all be celebrating that."
Allen flew a Curtiss SOC Seagull floatplane, which was launched off of the deck of the Oklahoma. Brown said it was a remarkable assignment, and a rare one, as each battleship carried only two Seagulls and used them for scouting and spotting for the ship's massive guns.
Brown handed a folded American flag—removed from atop Allen's casket—to Allen Gelwick, a cousin. After the ceremony, Gelwick remarked at a lengthy history of military service in the family, but said they all had a new bar to reach.
"I don’t know if all of you, or anybody else, if you’d like to be shot off a ship with a 30-foot catapult and reach 80 miles an hour within half a second; but he clearly had some guts," Gelwick smirked.
32 sailors who died in the attack on the USS Oklahoma are still unidentified. The Navy has committed to identifying them all.
