Bones of My Grandfather Read online

  “Efforts to bring home the remains of more than five hundred U.S. service members killed in the World War II Battle of Tarawa received a boost from Congressman Dan Lipinski (IL-03) this week,” read a release posted on the Illinois Democrat’s website in June 2009. “Before the defense authorization bill passed the House of Representatives on Thursday, Lipinski succeeded in attaching an amendment that calls for the Defense Department to ‘recover, identify, and return remains of members of the Armed Forces from Tarawa.’”11

  Congress had become involved, Stevens noted on Tarawa Talk, thanks to the “ceaseless efforts to find the missing Marines” of the two civilians, Mark Noah and Bill Niven, working separately.12

  “As the area gets more populated, the chance to get this work done decreases,” declared Noah, whose non-profit organization, History Flight, Inc., had been conducting archival and field research in hopes of locating “the lost graves of Tarawa” since 2007.

  More than half a century after the US Army Graves Registration Service had quietly declared the remains of nearly half the marines and sailors killed in the battle to be “unrecoverable,” the case was about to be reopened. In December 2009, the defense department’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Agency (JPAC) in Honolulu announced that it would send an eleven-man archaeological team to Betio in August and September 2010 to excavate six locations identified by History Flight as potential gravesites. From the very beginning, the name of Alexander Bonnyman, Jr., the lone missing Medal of Honor recipient, was associated with the mission.

  “There is a possibility of recovering over two hundred marines, including that of Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Lt. Alexander Bonnyman, who were buried in shallow graves after one of the most horrific battles of WWII,” former Navy gunnery officer and Vietnam veteran Kurt Hiete of California announced in an email.13

  According to documents unearthed by History Flight, my grandfather was recorded as having been interred with thirty-nine other marines in a trench known as Cemetery 27, just one of scores of burial sites scattered across Betio, a spit of sand and coconut trees covering less than three-quarters of a square mile just a shade above the equator in the central Pacific. California-based Niven, a marine veteran and former commercial pilot, declared that he’d pinpointed the location of Cemetery 27, while Noah, himself a commercial pilot, had been scouring the north side of the islet using every available technology in his own efforts to find the trench.

  From the beginning, Mark Noah wanted just one thing: to locate, through whatever means, Tarawa’s missing and see them brought back home to their families for burial. He didn’t want glory, or credit; he just wanted to see the job done, and he was willing to do anything to assist. “We need to get the government out there and help them do their job,” he said in 2008.14

  Less than two years later, he would come to the conclusion that the government agencies tasked with recovering battlefield remains weren’t really interested in finding the lost graves of Tarawa, with or without his help.

  It wasn’t until my thirties that I found myself drawn back to my grandfather and the history of Tarawa. I finally read journalist Robert Sherrod’s short, gut-wrenching 1944 eyewitness account of the battle and Alexander’s meticulous 1995 rendering, and dug out the official marine histories from trunks in my mother’s basement. In 2003, my grandmother offered to help pay my way to visit the atoll with Valor Tours, a military-history excursion company out of Sausalito, California. Inclined toward more luxurious travel, she would never dream of going herself. But as the first Bonnyman to visit the place where the great family hero had sacrificed his life, I could be her proxy; she wanted me to go. Still deaf to her feelings about her father, I declined, protesting that such a short trip wasn’t worth the price.

  But seven years later, inspired by the news that my grandfather was still buried on the island and spurred by Mark Noah’s passion, I knew I had to go. As the only living grandson of Sandy Bonnyman (my brother had died in 1999 from cystic fibrosis), I had a persistent sense of guilt because I had not followed him into military service. Going to Tarawa was hardly the same thing, but it was an opportunity to give back to my grandfather in a small, belated way while representing my family.

  My mother connected me with Kurt Hiete, who had contacted her the year before seeking information about Sandy Bonnyman. The rangy, affable California Vietnam veteran had visited her in Boulder, politely prompting her to replace the crumbling, faded ribbon on Sandy’s Medal of Honor. Kurt enthusiastically urged me to go and spoke on my behalf to Johnie E. Webb, civilian deputy to the commander at JPAC. He also arranged for his American Legion post to make a donation for my travel expenses.

  From the moment I decided to go, I was consumed with taking up the role of paladin of my grandfather’s legacy. As a kind of penance for my long neglect, I embarked on a quest to exhume my grandfather’s life, and, if I were lucky, perhaps even his body. After all, if my family hadn’t even known he still lay sleeping beneath the sands of Tarawa, what else was I missing?

  I began my excavation with the insignificant atoll that had so briefly captured America’s imagination before sinking back into obscurity, lost and forgotten by almost everyone.

  TWO

  UNKNOWN ISLAND

  1000 BCE-2010 AD

  Although the seventy-six-hour struggle for Tarawa in 1943 was almost immediately christened the “bloodiest battle in Marine history,” it swiftly faded from the public imagination and was soon overtaken by other momentous events in the Pacific war.

  For Tarawa, obscurity was the normal state of affairs. Few newspapers bothered to mention that the remote Gilbert Islands were part of Japan’s massive December 1941 offensive, focusing instead on more strategically important attacks at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, and beyond. Even the marines of the Second Division would not hear of Tarawa until less than a week before they headed into the fiery maw of battle. Once they did, they made jokes, singing, “Tuh-RA-wa BOOM de-ay” in the hulls of transport ships and chuckling at the ridiculous name of the islet, “BEE-tee-oh.” Most just used Helen and Longsuit, the respective code names for Betio (pronounced BAY-so) and Tarawa (ta-DHA-wa, with a soft “r” and only the lightest emphasis on the middle syllable).

  But the humble Gilberts had a long, if mostly uneventful, history before World War II. The islands, which today span both the equator and the International Date Line, were once volcanic cones created by submarine eruptions millennia ago. The broad fringing reef surrounding Betio today was built during a prehistoric formation during a period of high seas some twelve thousand years ago.1 The chain that would come to be known as the Gilberts comprise sixteen atolls and 117 separate islands spanning millions of square kilometers of ocean. Today Tarawa is one of the most remote locations in the Pacific, situated one degree north of the equator, 2,390 miles northeast of Brisbane, Australia, and 2,394 miles southwest of Hawaii. Travel straight north, you won’t strike land until Siberia; south, it’s Antarctica.

  Tarawa was probably first settled about three thousand years ago by Southeast Asian people who canoed from the Caroline Islands some two thousand miles across open ocean.2 The inhabitants developed a Micronesian dialect and told the story of how Nareau the spider named the sky “Karawa,” the ocean “Marawa,” and the land between, “Tarawa.”3

  A Portuguese ship searching for Terra Australis, the fabled southern continent, brought the first recorded Western explorers to the area in 1606. British Captain Thomas Gilbert first mapped the wedge-like Tarawa Atoll in 1788, but the surrounding islands weren’t named in his honor until 1820, curiously, by a Russian admiral.4 The first American ship, the USS Peacock, visited in 1828, and in 1856 the Rev. Hiram Bingham sailed from Boston on a mission to convert the islanders to Christianity.5

  The British hoisted the Union Jack over Tarawa in 1892 and eventually annexed the islands in 1915 to facilitate the extraction of phosphates—fossilized bird dung useful in making fertilizer and detergents—from other islan
ds in the region. Germans arrived to export dried coconut and the United States and Britain bickered about air- and sea-lane rights, but to Western eyes, Tarawa was just a sleepy backwater of the British Empire.6

  Then, following its defeat in World War I, Germany ceded control of its Pacific colonies, including Micronesia—the Caroline, Marianas, and Marshall islands—to the burgeoning Japanese empire. By 1940, Japanese residents outnumbered natives on those islands by seventy thousand to fifty thousand.7 Partially in reaction to sleights, real and perceived, by the United States, Britain, and Australia, Japan withdrew from the soon-to-be-defunct League of Nations and began flexing its muscles across Asia and the Pacific. Japan invaded China in 1937 and in 1940 occupied northern Indochina with the acquiescence of the French colonial government. On June 27, 1941, Japan announced its plans for a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, which was to include Australia, Burma, India, Malaya, New Guinea, New Zealand, and Thailand, spurring immediate embargoes on Japanese goods by the US and Britain. On July 16, following a military takeover of the government, General Hideki Tojo became Prime Minister. Sensing imminent war, many Europeans, Australians, and New Zealanders began to leave Tarawa over the coming months and Britain started evacuating residents to Australia.

  On December 10, 1941, just two days (accounting for the International Date Line) after shocking the world with its bold attacks on Pearl Harbor and British and Dutch colonies in Asia, two Japanese warships anchored in Tarawa’s lagoon. Two hundred rikusentai—Japan’s marines—went ashore and ordered the Western population off the atoll, allowing only the nuns at the Our Lady of the Sacred Heart convent on Bairiki and twenty-two British and New Zealand coastwatchers to remain.

  The “Commander of Japanese Squadron” nailed up a declaration outside the post office on Betio: “The Empire of Japan declared war on America Britain and Dutch Indies to break down these hostilities on Dec. 8th and Japanese Naval Forces have occupied Gilbert Islands to day in the morning. It is our duty to secure the military supremacy in to our hands but we have never enmity for the Gilbert people. According the peoples to do the peaceful conduct will be protected sufficiently, but if you will do hostile acts or do not submit my order, you will be punished with heavy penalties.”8

  But the Gilberts’ new rulers paid little heed to Tarawa for many months, instead focusing their efforts on building an airstrip for weather monitoring planes on Butaritari island some 150 miles north. The Americans did not view the islands as strategically important, and with the exception of a single carrier-based bombing raid in February 1942, ignored them.9

  All that would go by the wayside on August 17, 1942, when 220 men from Col. Evans Carlson’s 2nd Marine Raider Battalion attacked Butaritari in an attempt to divert Japanese resources away from the invasion of Guadalcanal, launched ten days earlier. The assault was a minor disaster, as the Japanese drove the marines back into the sea, leaving nine behind to be captured and later beheaded. Worse, the attack convinced Japanese Fleet Adm. Isoroku Yamamato that the Gilberts might be more important to Japanese war aims than previously assumed, and he issued orders to reinforce, fortify, and build an airstrip on Betio, the western terminus of Tarawa Atoll.

  Under the direction of Rear Admiral Tomanari Saichiro, a skilled engineer, Japanese troops, with the help of several hundred Korean forced laborers and Gilbertese men pressed into service, were soon hard at work. They built dozens of steel-reinforced concrete bunkers and pillboxes—some with three-and-a-half-foot-thick walls, standing fifteen or twenty feet high, and covered with tons of sand, coconut logs, and railroad ties, making them both less visible and more impervious to American bombers. They built twenty gun mounts around the island’s perimeter and armed them with ten 75mm mountain guns, six 70mm cannon, and nine 37mm field artillery pieces. They also brought in four hulking 8-inch guns and placed them on Betio’s south- and west-facing beaches; three still stand today (though long rumored to be booty from the capture of Singapore in 1942, the Japanese actually purchased them from the British in 1905).

  They brought in nine light tanks and countless anti-aircraft and -boat guns, and studded the island with machine-gun positions, creating interlocking fields of fire that left virtually no inch of the coastline open to assault.

  To thwart amphibious attack, Japanese forces strung miles of heavy barbed wire around Betio, placed giant blocks of concrete across the reef, and built a three-foot high coconut-log seawall, to block passage of tanks and transports.10 When the work was mostly done in May, the Sasebo 7th Special Navy Landing Force joined the Yokosuka 6th Special Landing Force on Betio, swelling the garrison to nearly five thousand men.11

  Built in response to Carlson’s small raid on Makin, this massive fortification of Betio would become one of three main factors contributing to merciless carnage some six months later.

  When the First Marine Division stormed the beaches of the mosquito-choked jungle island of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands on August 7, 1942, Americans back home desperately needed a glimmer of hope. There hadn’t been a lot of good news from the Pacific since Pearl Harbor.

  On March 11, despite previous assurances that things were going well, Gen. Douglas MacArthur abandoned the island of Corregidor in the dead of night under orders from President Roosevelt, fleeing before a Japanese onslaught that would soon overrun the Philippines and lead to the horrific Bataan Death March. The supremely confident forces of the Japanese Empire had swept across the southwest Pacific and appeared poised to drive into Australia, exposed when most of its troops had been commandeered for the British fight against the Axis powers in North Africa. The Japanese already had taken Manila, the Dutch East Indies, North Borneo, New Britain, and British-held Singapore, once thought invincible, with relative ease. And while it didn’t amount to much, a Japanese submarine had even surfaced off Santa Barbara, California to shell an oil refinery, raising the specter of an invasion of the continental United States.

  There were, to be sure, a few heartening glimmers. Though of little strategic value, the daring B-25 raids on Tokyo on April 8, 1942, led by Col. James Doolittle, showed the enemy that America could, and would, fight for its life. And in June, US and British sea forces fended off Japan’s attack on Midway Island, thanks in part to the work of American code breakers. Still, the losses continued to pile up, as the Japanese took Burma in May and claimed the southern end of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands in June. By July they had also landed in northern New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, threatening to cut off Australia and New Zealand from the United States.

  On the American side, a tug-of-war between Navy Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, commander of the Pacific Fleet, and the Army’s Gen. Douglas MacArthur had resulted in a dual strategy for retaking the Pacific. MacArthur favored going straight to the Philippines after retaking New Guinea. Nimitz advocated using amphibious marine assaults to take objectives in an “island-hopping” campaign that would allow the Navy to construct airfields ever closer to the Japanese home islands and ramp up bombing raids. In the end, advisors to President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill endorsed a pincers strategy, with MacArthur “leapfrogging” in the western theater and Nimitz island-hopping across the central Pacific.

  American military planners had expected war with Japan as far back as 1920 and my grandfather had not been far behind: “Everyone thought I was crazy to say in 1932 that such an insignificant people would dare tackle the mighty United States,” he wrote his mother.12 The US military had devised a plan to defend the Central Pacific by 1930, but, assuming the British would defend the seemingly inconsequential Gilbert Islands, had left them out of the equation.13

  It wasn’t until August 1942 that the US First Marine Division stormed ashore at Tulagi and Guadalcanal. It was the first crucial step in Nimitz’s and MacArthur’s campaign to take back the Pacific by picking off enemy strongholds and moving north until American bombers could easily attack the Japanese home islands. Following more than six months of grueling close combat, the Secon
d Marine Division was sent in to mop up on Guadalcanal in February 1943.

  But where to next? American military planners insisted that any assault have land-based air support.14 The Marianas, Carolines, and Marshalls were too far afield, but heavy bombers could reach the Gilberts from US bases in the Ellice Islands, eight hundred miles to the southwest. And now that Betio had become a fortress, it threatened to sever traffic between Hawaii and Australia and might be used to thwart an attack on the Marshalls.

  There was one more crucial incentive to take Tarawa: In order to reach Tokyo, the Navy and marines believed they would have to master the art of conducting full-scale amphibious assaults on heavily defended beaches. With its broad, fringing reef and flat, sandy beaches, Betio looked like the ideal laboratory to test battle plans, strategy, and technology.

  Amphibious warfare traces its roots to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks; the Persian Empire used ships to land ground troops at the battle of Marathon in 490 BCE. But the first full-scale amphibious assault of the modern era, at Gallipoli on the Turkish coast in 1915, became a bloody rout now synonymous with slaughter, resulting in nearly 188,000 Allied casualties. There was widespread belief among military planners after that battle that amphibious warfare could never succeed against modern defenses.

  The outlier was the US Marine Corps. In 1921, convinced that the United States would one day have to fight a naval battle with Japan in the Pacific, Marine Maj. Earl Hancock “Pete” Ellis asked permission to conduct undercover reconnaissance in the Marshall and Caroline islands. Ellis returned and wrote “Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia,” which became the foundation for marine amphibious warfare in World War II. He determined that success would depend on fast-moving waves of landing vehicles, both naval and air bombing support, and nimble assault teams armed with machine guns, light artillery, light tanks, and combat engineers to demolish beach defenses with explosives and fire.15