US Navy Pilot Carl Willard Hallen was born in Waukegan, Illinois on February 19, 1916, the son of Walter W. Hallen (1885-) and Sirie Hallen (1896-). The family made their home in Waukegan, Illinois while his father supported the family in 1920 as a machinist for an electric company and by 1930 as a truck driver for the Co-Op Trading Company (dairy).
As the war in Europe raged on, many Americans felt it was only a matter of time that the U.S. would be drawn into the fighting. Therefore, many young men and women began to drift toward military enlistment as a possible career. And of course, flying at any time was a dangerous profession but during wartime it becomes increasingly more perilous. Sadly, one adopted Pensacolian never made it to the battles of World War II. After college, Carl Willard Hallen enlisted in the US Navy on April 15, 1941, and entered flight school in Long Beach, California. He completed his flight training and received his wings of gold in 1942 in Corpus Christi, Texas. Further training placed him in the pilot’s seat of a Navy Dauntless dive bomber where he became so efficient that the Navy made him an instructor and transferred him to Pasco, Washington where he was put to work teaching new pilots. But even instructors needed combat experience so many of their best bomber pilots were sent to the Pacific as the war entered its bloodiest stage. To this end he was transferred to the naval air station in Maui, Hawaii for orientation training before boarding the carrier USS Essex.
But on the morning of July 1, 1944, he and his bombing squadron were participating in a simulated pre-dawn attack on an American carrier sailing in Hawaiian waters. When the squadron entered a heavy rain squall somehow Hallen lost visual contact with his flight and got separated from the others. He was never heard from again. When he failed to return, the entire squadron searched for two days, but failed to find the least bit of wreckage on the ocean’s surface. They did find however a floating oil slick, which was all that marked the he and his gunner's final resting place.
Lt. Hallen became an adopted Pensacolian when he married Miss Mary Elizabeth “Liz” Thweatt on August 29, 1942, in Franklin, WA. She was born on March 11, 1923, in Hazelhurst, Mississippi, the daughter of Navy Commander Troy Nicolas Thweatt Sr. and Mary Holliday. Ironically, Mary’s father was a Navy pilot who had been licensed by none other than the great aviation pioneer Orville Wright of the famous “Wright Brothers.” Her brother Lt. Troy Jr. (Pensacola High School Class of 1938) was also a Navy pilot with both men serving alongside Hallen in the Pacific. After he disappeared, Elizabeth was notified at her home at 1508 East Jackson Street, Pensacola that her husband was missing and now presumed dead. She received a warm letter from his squadron commander, Pensacolian LCdr Robert Emmett Riera (Later Rear Admiral and Navy Cross Winner, Pensacola High Class of 1929) assuring her that the squadron had done everything in their power to find her husband, but all to no avail.
Elizabeth would eventually remarry in 1947 to another Navy pilot, Vincent Joseph Anania (1920-2008), from the state of Pennsylvania and an Annapolis graduate from the class of 1945. When her second husband retired from the Navy, they settled in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where she would pass away in Pensacola on January 25, 2012. In a strange twist of fate, her daughter Mary Elizabeth Anania became the wife of the controversial presidential candidate and US Senator John Reid Edwards. She would pass away herself two years before her mother on December 7, 2010.
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