Bones of My Grandfather

  Copyright © 2018 by Clay Bonnyman Evans

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Rain Saukas

  Cover photos courtesy of Clay Bonnyman Evans

  ISBN: 978-1-5107-3061-8

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3062-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  I’ve always wished to be laid when I died

  In a little churchyard on the green hillside.

  By my father’s grave, there let me be,

  O bury me not on the lone prairie.

  —“THE COWBOY’S LAMENT,” TRADITIONAL

  Death is only a state in which the others are left.

  Its reality explodes only in the living.

  —WILLIAM FAULKNER

  Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

  To my grandfather’s “three blondes,” who paid a bitter price:

  Frances Bonnyman Evans

  Alexandra Bonnyman Prejean

  Josephine “Tina” Bonnyman

  and

  To Mark Noah, the right man at the right time—just like Sandy

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: January 1944

  One: Unknown Hero

  Two: Unknown Island

  Three: Paradise Lost

  Four: Restless Spirit

  Five: Render Up the Bodies

  Six: First Landing

  Seven: Disillusionment and Doubt

  Eight: Rough and Ready

  Nine: Digging Deeper

  Ten: Proud to Claim the Title

  Eleven: Bitter Pills

  Twelve: Bone Show

  Thirteen: Inferno

  Fourteen: Kaleidoscope

  Fifteen: Requiem

  Sixteen: Seventy Years and Counting

  Seventeen: Left Behind

  Eighteen: Striking Gold

  Nineteen: Ripples

  Twenty: Tender Hands

  Twenty-One: Conspicuous Gallantry

  Twenty-Two: To Home Soil Waiting

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Works Consulted

  Endnotes

  Index

  Situation map of Betio island, Tarawa Atoll, Gilbert Islands at 6 p.m. November 22, 1943. The arrow indicates the location of the bunker where Sandy Bonnyman was killed earlier that day. US Marine Corps Historical Division.

  Schematic of “Bonnyman’s Bunker,” drawn December 12, 1943, following the battle. Julie Kunkel rendering; original, Marine Corps Combat Art Collection.

  PROLOGUE

  JANUARY 1944

  She was nine years old when the whispering began in late December 1943.

  Golden-haired, athletic, wary, and more than a little impetuous, Frances Bonnyman had attended five schools in the past year. She had liked Mrs. Turley’s one-room private academy in Santa Fe, where her family had been living since her father began operating a copper mine in 1938. She loved the exotic mélange of cultures—Spanish, Pueblo, Anglo—in the high-desert town at the foot of the pine-dark, sere Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where she attended Indian dances and picked up Spanish from neighborhood playmates.

  She didn’t see much of her mother Josephine, or Jo, but that was all right by her. She and her younger sister Tina were well cared for by the cook, Casamira, Sister Michelle, a nun hired by their grandmother to instruct them in the Catholic faith, and sometimes, the parents of friends and neighbors. Baby Alexandra, called Alix, was born in 1940 and had her own nurse, Miss Rosa Dee.

  Fran didn’t see a lot of her father, either. Tall, handsome Alexander Bonnyman, Jr.—known to all as Sandy—spent five or six days a week running the mine near Santa Rosa, more than a hundred miles of bad road distant, on the spare plains of eastern New Mexico. But he doted on his oldest daughter when he came home on weekends, holding her hand as they walked in to Sunday Mass at the soaring, ornate Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. Afterwards, they always went to the Capitol Pharmacy soda fountain for a chocolate shake or soda.

  Fran would never forget one Sunday in particular, as she watched her father pace the floor with intense agitation, the radio buzzing and crackling in the background with the frightening news that the Japanese Empire had attacked the United States at faraway Pearl Harbor. Seven months later, her father, thirty-two, would board a train to California as a private in the United States Marine Corps Reserve.

  Fran missed him and wrote him often on cream-colored stationery with the image of a small, smiling marine in dress blues on top: “When are you coming home? I wish I could see you now!”1 Sandy wrote to his “big girl” just as often, urging her to keep up her straight A’s, go to Communion every Sunday and confession at least every two weeks, be nice to her sisters, and help “Mommie” and Dee. He sent her dollar bills for doing chin-ups and improving her swimming skills.

  The summer of 1943, Jo left the girls in Knoxville to stay with their Granny and Grandfather Bonnyman. But at summer’s end, instead of taking them back to New Mexico, she enrolled Fran in school in Tennessee, left frail, sickly Tina in Knoxville, and moved with baby Alix and Dee to Mooney’s Cottages, a cluster of new, Key West-style bungalows on the beach in Fort Lauderdale. Jo returned in November to take Fran to Florida, leaving Tina with her grandparents.

  As Christmas approached, Fran was excited to hear hopeful chatter among the adults that her father might come home to visit. Her cousin Sandy, just six months older, had received a V-Mail in mid-December, postmarked November 16 and featuring a cartoon crocodile in a marine helmet proclaiming, “To you in the States from us in the South Pacific, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,” and the hand-written message, “To Sandy with wishes for the Best of Christmases from Uncle Sandy.” But Fran hadn’t had a letter in many weeks.

  What Fran, Jo, and her grandparents didn’t know was that Sandy had sailed from Wellington, New Zealand on November 1, arriving a week later at Mele Bay on the island of Efate in the Solomon Islands, where the Second Marine Division rehearsed amphibious landings in preparation for an assault on a remote coral atoll nobody had ever heard of. But by the end of the month the name would be splashed across front pages as the site of the bloodiest battle in Marine Corps history: Tarawa.

  The banner headline in the New York Times on November 25 read, “RUINED BERLIN AFIRE AFTER 2D BOMBING; U.S. PLANES SMASH AT TOULON AND SOFIA; 4 JAPANESE DESTROYERS SUNK IN BATTLE.” Below the fold, a three-paragraph notice reported that marine assault battalions had “conquered the west end of Betio Island, on Tarawa atoll,” under the headline, “WE WIN GILBERTS IN 76-HOUR BATTLE.”2

  Correspondent George F. Horne, whom the Times had sent to Honolulu after government news blackouts had rendered his previous beat covering shipping news on the New York waterfront obsolete, was unimpressed. The victory, he wrote, was “not of major no
r decisive character,” and his dispatch dripped with drollery: “Bemused mathematicians were uncertain today as to the time length of the Gilbert Island occupation. First it was 100 hours, but official rewriting now makes it 76 hours, although lesser statisticians wandering hereabouts with pencil and paper figure slightly more.”3

  The remote Gilbert Islands straddled the Pacific equator and had been under British control until the Japanese had arrived two days after Pearl Harbor. The place had hardly been mentioned in US papers until then, though the Times did run a small story in September reporting that American forces had conducted heavy bombing operations on Tarawa. And to many Americans, the foe in the Pacific, those funny little “yellow” men with buckteeth and thick, round spectacles, were a joke compared to the mighty mechanized armies of Nazi Germany. The press had convinced much of the public that the Japanese would be a pushover.

  “Early in the war our communiqués were giving the impression that we were bowling over the enemy every time our handful of bombers dropped a few pitiful tons from 30,000 feet,” wrote Time-Life war correspondent Robert Sherrod. The stories “gave the impression that any American could lick twenty Japs.” But the men doing the fighting knew the brutal reality, even if censors prevented them from writing home about it. As one sergeant gloomily observed, “The war being written about in the newspapers must be a different war than we see.”4

  But within days, eyewitness accounts from Sherrod and other intrepid journalists who had gone ashore with the marines had replaced the dismissive dispatches of stateside press conference attendees.

  “The battle for Betio, the fiercest, bloodiest and most ruthless I have seen in the two years of the Pacific war, showed how long, hard, and costly that war will be. As it was, we won by the narrowest of margins,” wrote a correspondent for the London Daily Express.5

  “Guadalcanal,” one “black-faced, red-eyed” private told a correspondent, “was a picnic compared with this.”6

  News of the battle inspired the Times to editorialize, “This makes the war against the Japanese a war of extermination in which there is virtually no quarter.”7

  Then, in early December, President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the distribution of film footage from the battle, including dead marines sprawled on the beach and bobbing in the lagoon (some images deemed “too grim” were voluntarily censored by newsreel companies8). “Bloody Tarawa,” as it was dubbed by the press, shocked millions of Americans out of their racially tinged fantasies that victory over the Japanese would be a cakewalk. And where Horne had seen insignificance, Sherrod sensed history: “Last week some 2,000 or 3,000 United States Marines, most of them now dead or wounded, gave the nation a name to stand beside those of Concord Bridge, the Bonhomme Richard, the Alamo, and Little Bighorn, and Belleau Wood. The name was Tarawa.”9

  At Bonniefield, the elegant, Italianate mansion on Kingston Pike in west Knoxville, Fran’s grandparents, Alexander and Frances Bonnyman, anxiously scanned the papers and listened to the radio for information about the brutal Gilberts campaign. Some reports had put the casualty rate as high as ninety percent and their son Sandy had almost certainly been in on the fighting.

  Alex Bonnyman, the well-connected founder and president of the booming Blue Diamond Coal Company, began making inquiries and ordered a fleet of secretaries to work their contacts for any news of his firstborn son. On December 20, one young woman received an encouraging letter from a friend working in the Department of the Navy in Washington, D.C.

  “I went downstairs and looked up [sic] and Sandy is in the clear,” the Navy man reported. “I then went to the ‘Officers’ Records’ and found what I surmised: had he been hurt, unless there is some recent change I did not find (and don’t think there is), the telegram or letter [announcing his death] would have gone to 570 Garcia Street, Sta. [Santa] Fe.”10

  “We haven’t heard directly from Sandy since the Gilbert Islands attack,” Alex Bonnyman told a friend, “but we did hear indirectly that he was safely out.”11

  If anyone was capable of surviving such furious fighting, it was Sandy. He was tough, smart, strong, and resourceful. And in his thirty-three years he had reveled in every kind of danger and adventure with almost boyish glee.

  But official news from the Pacific was still cloaked in censorship, and disturbing rumors reached the family. On December 21, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported that local Marine Pfc. Jimmy Simpson, “who was with Bonneyman’s [sic] ‘outfit’ . . . lost a good friend . . . [who] was reported killed in the battle for Tarawa island in the Marshall archipelago [sic], but the report lacked official confirmation.”12 Though unsettling, the story was so riddled with error it left plenty of room for doubt.

  But the Navy man’s sleuthing, so heartening to the family, turned out to be no more reliable: Jo Bonnyman had left Santa Fe permanently but neglected to inform the Marine Corps. And so the telegram sent by Marine Corps Commandant Lt. Gen. Thomas Holcomb on December 23 bounced back from Santa Fe as undeliverable. The marines next addressed it to non-existent “Knoxville, Kentucky.” On the third try it reached the Bonnymans in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Jo received it in Fort Lauderdale on December 29.13

  “DEEPLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR HUSBAND FIRST LIEUTENANT ALEXANDER BONNYMAN JR USMCR WAS KILLED IN ACTION. IN THE PERFORMANCE OF HIS DUTY AND IN THE SERVICE OF HIS COUNTRY TO PREVENT POSSIBLE AID TO OUR ENEMIES PLEASE DO NOT DIVULGE THE NAME OF HIS SHIP OF STATION PRESENT SITUATION NECESSITATES INTERMENT TEMPORARILY IN THE LOCALITY WHERE THE DEATH OCCURRED AND YOU WILL BE NOTIFIED ACCORDINGLY PLEASE ACCEPT MY HEARTFELT SYMPATHY.” 14

  That’s when “three days of whispering” began, Fran Bonnyman Evans now recalls. Her mother was on the telephone all the time, speaking with a hushed urgency, behind closed doors. Something bad had happened to her father, Fran was sure, but nobody would tell her anything. To her dismay, her father’s best friend and business partner, Jimmie Russell, had arrived from Santa Fe, suitcase in hand. And it was Jimmie who finally called the little girl to stand before him, straight as the little marine on her stationery, while her mother hovered behind him.

  “Your father won’t be coming back,” he said. “He’s been killed.”

  It was all he said.

  Fran knew better than to cry. Her mother, looking elegant in her usual stark, red lipstick, auburn hair tightly curled and coiffed like a movie star’s, began to chatter. Jo and Jimmie excitedly told Fran about the deep-sea fishing trip they’d planned for her, how wonderful it would be, on and on, her hands fluttering like birds’ wings. But the little girl didn’t want to go fishing. She knew they were just trying to distract her.

  Her mother never spoke about Sandy again, as if he’d never existed at all. Everyone in Fran’s world would soon draw a curtain of silence around the subject—except for Granny. So nine-year-old Fran was left to ponder the terrible news alone. The tall, kind, handsome father whose hand she had so proudly held as they walked into church was gone. Already her memories were blurring around the edges.

  Sandy’s “three blondes,” as he lovingly described them to fellow marines, would soon be broken apart and grow into adulthood knowing as little about their father, how he lived, how he died, as the rest of the world. Their grandparents would dote on them and provide for them into adulthood and beyond, with money, travel, and blue-chip social standing, but still they could not deflect the terrible consequences of losing their father.

  Riven by grief, bound by the stoicism expected of their social milieu, Alex and Frances Bonnyman set about in their own ways to preserve their lost son for posterity.

  Driven by guilt over his conflicted relationship with his eldest son, Alex channeled his grief into action. Using the influence he had gained as one of the South’s most successful coal magnates, he began pulling strings at the highest levels of the military and government in a quest to learn everything he could about his son’s death and, more importantly, bring his body home for burial.

  But Alex would die a decade later, heartbroken
and lost in a wilderness of conflicting official explanations about the whereabouts of Sandy’s remains. His younger son Gordon, who had suffered his own wounds fighting in Burma, would take up the search, pursuing even the thinnest of leads for decades, haunted by the loss of the brother he so deeply loved and admired. Yet by the dawn of the next century it seemed that Sandy Bonnyman would ultimately be “buried at sea”—the epitaph carved on the family tombstone—as rising sea levels threatened to inundate the tiny coral spit where he’d fallen.

  Sandy’s mother, Frances Berry Bonnyman, had always favored the strapping, handsome, sometimes impetuous son who lovingly called her Mumsie, shielding him from his stern Scottish father, quietly enabling his adventurous spirit, and sometimes covering for his mistakes. In losing him, she lost much of her joy in life; she gave away her jewelry, stopped traveling,15 and began to suffer from illness. But she took control of her son’s legacy, polishing up his many virtues—courage, charisma, deep faith, an unquenchable embrace of life—while sanding away rough edges, presenting him as the kind of hero the world expected. Jo Bonnyman would later rue that in death Sandy had become “an absolutely perfect, and eternal, Sir Galahad.”16

  But there was solace, too: Sandy Bonnyman would be awarded the nation’s highest military recognition, the Medal of Honor (sometimes referred to as the Congressional Medal of Honor) and his singular actions in the Battle of Tarawa on November 22, 1943, would earn him an enduring place in Marine Corps lore. Generations of marines, historians, and civilians would continue to speak his name with awe and reverence many decades later, and it would be bestowed upon a ship, a bridge, streets, and even a bowling alley. And long after they had forgotten all but the haziest tales of the great battle that freed them from the Japanese, poverty-stricken people living amid the environmental degradation and decaying relics of 21st-century Tarawa would still remember the name of the hero Bonnyman and tell their own versions of his mythic feat.

  Yet the battle of Tarawa, so shocking and momentous in 1943, is hardly remembered by most twenty-first-century Americans, most of whom know only a handful of shorthand signifiers of the terrible Pacific war—Pearl Harbor, Iwo Jima, Hiroshima. Meanwhile, memories of Sandy Bonnyman have been replaced by the legend of 1st Lt. Alexander Bonnyman, Jr. and, unbeknownst to my family, my grandfather’s body remained hidden in the sepulchral sands of Tarawa. We didn’t know him any better than the rest of the world.