Pearl Harbor casualty buried Thursday
Nearly 80 years after he was killed during World War II, Earl Maurice Ellis was laid to rest Thursday at Ocean View Cemetery in Eureka beside his twin sister, Pearl Bernice Ellis Kitchens.
Ellis, 23, of Hope, Arkansas, was recently identified by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. He was aboard the USS Oklahoma on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Ellis, who served aboard the ship as a radioman 3rd class, was accounted for on Dec. 22, 2020, the agency said in a statement.
Lorin Mayo, a relative of Ellis, said her family was “absolutely astounded” when his remains were identified.
“After all those years, we’ve just known this man, Uncle Earl, as bigger than life,” Mayo told the Times-standard. “The people killed on the USS Oklahoma were basically buried in mass graves because there was no way
to identify people at the time. We’re fortunate he was identified.”
In 2015, the DPAA received authorization to exhume and re-examine unknown remains using advances in forensic techniques, such as dental analysis.
“Two of my husband’s distant cousins gave their DNA and he was a match,” she said. “It really shocked us to find out about the amount of him that was still intact because many times the Navy told us that they typically find a minimum number of bones or just enough to identify the person. We were grateful that he held together as well as he had.”
Shortly after the initial attacks on Pearl Harbor, Ellis’ ship capsized and 429 crewmen were killed. The deaths on the USS Oklahoma are considered the second-biggest loss of lives in the Pearl Harbor attack, according to the National Park Service.
“We didn’t realize the magnitude of this recovery mission that the Navy had taken on,” Mayo said. “They have been incredible. Everything has been very well planned, very well organized, we have been supported. They’ve provided a support person where we are here in Texas and we’re going to have a support person out in California. It’s quite a mission and that’s the way they think of it, as a mission.”
Ellis was born in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, on Aug. 20, 1918, and made his way to Arkansas before joining the Navy.
Shortly after the Great Depression had come to an end, Mayo said a couple of Ellis’ relatives traveled to California to find work.
“Everything that was a result of the depression was still happening, the poverty and the lack of work,” she said. “A couple of the brothers in the Ellis family had come to Eureka to work in the timber industry and when they got out there, they got jobs and they wrote back home to Arkansas and said they had found work. So, several people from the Ellis side sort of did a sojourn out to Northern California and they settled there, including Earl’s twin sister who died in 1996.”
Ellis will be buried beside his sister in the Ocean View Cemetery in Eureka on Thursday.