Perhaps it is the wind caressing the wheat fields, resembling ocean waves or just a love of adventure that draws North Dakotans to a life at sea. One of these was Edward Henry Allen, born at Pekin on March 2, 1908. Choosing to join the Navy, Ensign Allen graduated from the Naval Academy in 1931 and in the mid-1930's he became part of the developing field of Naval aviation.
In early1942, the war in the South Pacific was going decidedly in favor of the Japanese. While the 164th North Dakota National Guard, as part of the Americal Division, was training on New Caledonia for the invasion of Guadacanal, the US Navy, with Lt. Allen aboard the aircraft carrier Lexington was steaming to that area to block an attempted Japanese invasion. On February 20, 1942, Lt. Allen won the Navy Cross for engaging enemy aircraft near Rabaul. In May, when the Japanese buildup for the invasion of New Guinea was detected, the Lexington sailed to the Coral Sea along with the carrier Yorktown. On this date, May 7, 1942, Lt. Edward H. Allen left the flight deck of the Lexington on his final flight and was shot down while on a scouting mission. He was awarded a Gold Star, in lieu of a second Navy Cross for the action in which he lost his life. On May 8th, his ship, the Lexington, hit by both bombs and torpedoes, was abandoned and destroyed to prevent capture, but the Battle of the Coral Sea, despite significant losses, resulted in repulsing the invasion and achieved a strategic victory.

But the name Edward H. Allen would live on in the Navy. On October 7, 1943 a ship was launched in the Boston Navy Yard. A Destroyer Escort, it was commissioned the Edward H. Allen after the North Dakota pilot. Although it never saw combat, it served as a training vessel for the crews of other destroyer escorts until the end of the war when it was decommissioned in 1946.
Re-commissioned in 1951, it was serving in the North Atlantic when the luxury liners, the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm, collided on July 25, 1956. Ordered to the scene of the disaster, the Destroyer Allen was able to rescue the captain and seventy-six members of the crew, before the Andrea Doria sank. Eventually decommissioned again in 1959 and placed on reserve, it was sold in February of 1974.

Edward Henry Allen was one of a number of North Dakota sailors honored with a ship named after them, which is not a bad record for a landlocked state containing the geographical center of North America.

By Jim Davis

Register of Ships from the US Navy, 1775-1990, by K. Jack Bauer and Stephen Roberts,
Correspondence with Bill Gonyo, NavSource.org.

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