WARREN, Ohio — Stanley Drwall of Thomas left the hills of West Virginia to serve his country. He joined the U.S. Navy June 10, 1936. He was stationed aboard the U.S.S. Oklahoma battleship that was docked at Pearl Harbor. And his last letter home, dated December 5, 1941, indicated he had six months left on his enlistment.
It was the last any of his family ever heard from him.
“In that letter he stated he was sending money home for my grandparents to buy everybody a Christmas present,” said Mary Ann Ryther, Drwall’s niece.
Sending home money was not uncommon for Drwall. When he was in high school, he would work in the coal mines after school to help supplement the family income, Ryther said.
Ryther lived with her grandparents and cherishes that last letter, which turned out to be the final connection for the family. She fought back tears to recall the final words her uncle wrote that day.
“In the last sentence in that letter, and this is hard for me to speak about, he said be sure to buy a present for Mary Ann and tell her it’s from ‘Uncle Santa.’ That was the last line in his letter dated December 5th, 1941,” Ryther shared with MetroNews from her home in Warren, Ohio.
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Two days after the letter was written, Drwall and 428 of his shipmates aboard the Oklahoma were killed when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and capsized the ship. The Navy notified his parents back in Thomas, West Virginia that Stanley was missing. It wouldn’t be until February of 1942 that they were certain of his fate.
“I was about four years old and sitting in the kitchen with my grandmother. She was in a chair close to me reading this letter. I didn’t know what it was at that time, but she was sitting there crying. It was a telegram which said her son was deceased. I had that in my head because my grandmother was crying,” Ryther explained.
That was the last word anyone had of Stanley Drwall. The Navy never notified the family about his body or if it had been recovered from the capsized ship.
Since then, a forensic mystery has gradually unfolded, with his family receiving some sense of conclusion this week.
It wasn’t until 2010 when Mary Ann received a call from a forensic genealogist contracted by the military that the family even knew there were remains to be recovered. It turned out the remains of her uncle and 428 others killed aboard the Oklahoma were collected when they righted the ship. Those remains were placed into coffins and buried at the Halawa and Nu’uanu Cemeteries in Hawaii.
In September 1947, tasked with recovering and identifying fallen U.S. personnel in the Pacific Theater, members of the American Graves Registration Service (AGRS) disinterred the remains of U.S. casualties from the two cemeteries and transferred them to the Central Identification Laboratory at Schofield Barracks.
The laboratory staff was only able to confirm the identifications of 35 men from the USS Oklahoma at that time. The AGRS subsequently buried the unidentified remains in 46 plots at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (NMCP), known as the Punchbowl, in Honolulu. In October 1949, a military board classified those who could not be identified as non-recoverable, including Drwall.
Then, between June and November 2015, DPAA personnel exhumed the USS Oklahoma Unknowns from the Punchbowl for analysis. To identify Drwall’s remains, scientists from DPAA used dental and anthropological analysis. Additionally, scientists from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System used mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y chromosome DNA (Y-STR) analysis.
“Twelve years ago I got a call from the genealogist and that’s the first time we knew anything about any remains,” Ryther said.
She submitted a DNA sample and other members of her family also submitted samples from both sides of Drwall’s family. A match was confirmed this past March.
On Wednesday, Stanley Drwall will be returned to the hills of West Virginia, 80 years after he was killed in service to his country.
“There is a gravesite that my grandparents purchased years and years ago, thinking he would be brought back. Of course he never was, but that’s the plot we’re going to be using,” Ryther explained.
Ryther said her grandparents forever struggled with the loss and not just for Stanley. A second of the family’s six children, Walter, was also killed in action when his ship was sunk in the North Atlantic. Stanley’s brother was a Seaman Second Class and on his first mission after graduation from boot camp at the Navy’s Great Lakes Naval Station. He was only 11 days past his 20th birthday. The family learned Walter’s body was lost at sea and would never be recovered.
There will be a graveside ceremony for Stanley Drwall in Thomas on Thursday at Mt. Calvary Cemetery. Drwall will be buried with full military honors and a host of family will be there from all over the nation.
“All of his nieces and nephews are still living and they’ll all be back here for the funeral. They’re coming from Denver, Arizona, New Jersey, and of course we still have some in Charleston too,” Ryther said.
The discovery of her uncle’s remains has become a mission for Ryther and her husband, Harold.
“When the Navy first called her in 2010, that was the first notification to the families that these bodies existed. These families, all 388 of them including my wife’s, spent their whole life thinking these bodies didn’t exist and were lost,” Harold Ryther said.
He and Mary Ann have been actively pressing the Navy to contact all of the families of the U.S. S. Oklahoma victims and obtain DNA to identify as many as possible and get them home.
“It’s not our job to find them and it’s not our job to do the DNA, but it is our job to make sure the government does their job,” he said.
Drwall’s name is recorded on the Courts of the Missing at the Punchbowl, along with the others who are missing from WWII. A rosette will be placed next to his name to indicate he has been accounted for. Since starting the project to identify remains, all but about 30 of the men killed on the Oklahoma have been identified.
Drwall’s remains will be claimed by the family at Pittsburgh International Airport and escorted by the Patriot Guard to the Hinkle-Fenner Funeral Home in Davis, W.Va., Wednesday evening. The graveside service with full military honors will be at 11 a.m. Thursday at the Mt. Calvary Cemetery in Thomas.