US Army reclaims its "fallen" from Hall mass grave

By Michael Field

It is not the kind of thing anybody forgets. Burying 20 battered and blasted young American bodies, watched over by hostile and suspicious enemy soldiers.

Sixty years later, when the US Army returned to Butaritari, Kiribati’s northern most atoll, that same man was still there.

And he was able to lead them to within five metres of a mass grave containing 19 or 20 American bodies. One of them might be a local person.

Still missing are 10 or 11 bodies and the suspicion is that the Japanese beheaded them on Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands.

They were all members of the 2nd Raider Battalion led by Lieutenant Colonel Evans F Carlson who planned the attack on what was then Makin, part of the Gilbert Islands. His deputy was the then president’s son Major James Roosevelt.

Two companies of “Carlson’s Raiders” were landed from two submarines on August 16, 1942. A sergeant, Clyde Thomason, was killed and later became the first enlisted Marine of the war to win the Medal of Honour, posthumously. After killing around 80 Japanese, the Marines left in disarray and only when they got back to Hawaii did they realise 30 men were missing.

Of that, they believed 18 were killed in battle. After the war, inquiries established

that nine men surrendered on August 30 and were taken to Kwajalein.

At the time of the raid. New Zealand had a network of 17 Post Office radio operators and unarmed soldiers on nearby atolls as coast watchers. As a result of the raid, the Japanese then seized Tarawa, to the South, and captured the New Zealanders.

On October 15, 1942, the New Zealanders and five others including Englishmen and a Fijian national, were beheaded.

The nine Americans who had surrendered on Butaritari were, next day, executed on Kwajalein. Both islands were under the same joint Japanese commander and were the only Allied prisoners in the region at the time.

Colonel David Pagano of the US Army’s Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii said that they first went looking for bodies in Butaritari in May last year. The old man was crucial to their exploration but it was only in December when they finally located them.

Remains were removed intact and a Hercules with a Color Guard flew in to fly the bodies to Hawaii.

“This ceremony was also accompanied by an unexpected tribute from the old Butaritari man who began to sing the Marine Corp Hymn as the remains were being loaded onto the aircraft.”

Identification would take up to a year, primarily using the dental records every soldier had.

Pagano said their search would now move to Kwajalein, which is a vast US Army ballistic missile testing base.

“We have not located the ones who are believed to have died on Kwajalein,”

Pagano said. “We need to find good reliable witnesses who will lead us to where they are buried. We just know of the story and we know of the trace of what presumably happened. We have yet to get a witness to tell us where they were buried or if they were buried.”

A Marshallese man, Lejjena Lokot, reputedly witnessed the executions but he is now dead.

The men were American heroes.

“They gave up their lives for the country and they deserve to be bought back to America for proper resting and burial ...

“The pain felt by families, whether it is World War Two losses or Korea, whether it is Vietnam, is very real and when they first hear the news it’s just as if a family member died yesterday or today.

“There is a deep void in families’ minds and a deep void in veterans minds and there is a commitment on our organisation to today’s service members that if, god forbid, that they should fall, their country will bring them home.” ■