LOCAL SOLDIER KILLED AT PEARL HARBOR IDENTIFIED

March 2019
By: Melissa Steininger- Spectrum News

The remains of an American sailor from the Capital Region killed during the attack on Pearl Harbor have been identified.

Navy Ensign Charles M. Stern Jr. of Albany was identified by the Defense POW-MIA Accounting Agency as one of the previously unknown victims of the Dec. 7, 1941, surprise attack.

Stern enlisted in the Navy when the world's landscape just about to shift. Stern was assigned to the USS Oklahoma, which sustained multiple torpedo hits during the fight and capsized, resulting in the deaths of 429 crewmen. Stern's nephew says the sailor was supposed to go on leave that day.

"On Pearl Harbor day, he was supposed to go on leave at 8 [a.m.], and the attacks took place just before 7 a.m.," said nephew Charles Stern III.

Stern's wife could hear the bombs from miles away.

"When she first heard the bombing, she thought it was just target practice," Stern's nephew said.

Stern was among hundreds of sailors who were unable to be identified shortly after the war. He was buried, along with the other unidentified in the Honolulu "PunchBowl."

In 2015, the Department of Defense issued a new policy designed to identify the unidentified soldiers from the Oklahoma, and Stern was officially accounted for last September. He was 26 when he died.

His nephew currently lives in Albany. He says his family received the call late last year.

"When they started analyzing the remains, they found many different identities all intermingled, so they had to separate them out bone by bone and identify which ones went together," Charles said.

Stern's nephew says it has brought his family peace, and he hopes it will bring other families across the country the same.

Stern Jr. will be buried next to his parents, as his mother bought a plot hoping one day he would return home. He will be laid to rest in the Capital Region this summer.

Full story available on the Spectrum News website.

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