The remains of an Anaconda man have been positively identified nearly 75 years after he was killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor.
71-year-old Trudy Ritz wasn’t even born when her Uncle Lewis Stockdale was killed, but the Oregon woman clearly remembers her grandmother’s profound grief over the loss of her only son.
"So I’d never met the gentleman, but I was certainly brought up with a great many feelings of the loss. We thought about it quite often and said our prayers and cried our tears.”
Stockdale was trapped below decks when the USS Oklahoma was bombed, torpedoed and rolled over. The bodies of all the dead were mixed together underwater. Decomposition had set in by the time they were recovered.
Stockdale’s remains were among five of his fellow shipmates from the Oklahoma that were positively identified this week.
Ritz says her uncle’s remains will be interred in a marked grave at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, in Honolulu.