We had been on the island for about an hour when we found the first skeleton. It was a pile of yellow bones tucked inside a cardboard box. Mark Noah squatted down for a look. He is a stocky man of 48, with a light buzz of blond hair and the wind-beaten eyes of a lifelong outdoorsman. Since 2008, he has been traveling to the tiny Pacific atoll of Tarawa to search for the remains of more than 500 Marines who died there in World War II. Sometimes locals dig up their bones and leave them in his storage locker.
From Linda Welty
Manley Forrest Winkley, a Marine lost in the Battle of Tarawa.
Noah reached into the box and pushed aside a fragment of cranium to remove a curved metal plate. "Wow," he muttered. "Clearly a World War II burial with the helmet." He passed it to the man crouching next to him, Bill Belcher, and added, "It looks American."
Belcher nodded. "That's what I thought when I saw it." He laid the piece back in the box and picked up two sections of jawbone with the teeth still attached. They fit together into a complete lower mandible, which Belcher held close to his glasses, squinting. Noah pulled another hunk of metal from the box. "And this is a hand grenade," he said. He shook his head and smiled. It was all pretty normal on Tarawa.
This week marks the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Tarawa. It was a fight that lasted only three days, but they were among the bloodiest in 20th-century American history. By the time the battle ended, more than 1,100 U.S. Marines lay dead on the sandy earth and churning water.
By themselves, the islands held little value to the Japanese or the American government. They were situated about halfway between Pearl Harbor and the Philippines and were barely large enough to hold an airfield. But they served as an essential steppingstone across the Pacific: If American bombers wanted to reach Japan, they would need an air base in the Mariana Islands; to capture the Marianas, they would first need the Marshall Islands; and for the Marshalls, they needed Tarawa. To fortify the atoll, the Japanese sent in 3,800 imperial troops, along with 1,200 enslaved Korean laborers to be thrust onto the front lines. They spent a year building concrete bunkers and planting massive cannons along the beaches. The leader of the Japanese garrison, Rear Adm. Keiji Shibazaki, predicted that it would take "one million men, one hundred years" to seize the islands.
American commanders selected the Second Marine Division for the job. In the fall of 1943, they boarded a convoy of battleships and destroyers, which the legendary war correspondent Robert Sherrod described as "the largest force the Pacific has seen." Sherrod climbed aboard. As they drew close to Tarawa, he watched the ships unload 2,000 tons of explosive shells while American planes laid another 900 tons of bombs across the islands. It was, Maj. Gen. Julian Smith wrote, "the greatest concentration of aerial bombardment and naval gunfire in the history of warfare." Into this inferno, the Second Marines disembarked. They descended into amphibious landing vehicles and raced toward the beach, but the tide was out, and the water was too shallow for their boats. The Marines found themselves stranded on reefs, hundreds of yards offshore, wading through waist-high water as Japanese gunners mowed them down. Those lucky enough to reach the shore crawled through a maze of corpses. "No one who has not been there," Sherrod wrote, "can imagine the overwhelming, inhuman smell of 5,000 dead who are piled and scattered in an area of less than one square mile."
After their victory, the Marines set about burying the dead. They wrapped the bodies in ponchos and folded them into shallow graves. Then they moved on, and military construction crews came in to raze the island flat. They expanded the airfield and built a network of roads and offices. By the time an excavation team arrived in 1946 to exhume and identify the dead — part of a global campaign to recognize the fallen — no one could remember where they were. Investigators spent three months searching, but they found only half the Marines. Today, 471 of the Tarawa Marines are buried by name in American cemeteries. Another 104 have been laid to rest in "unknown" graves at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii.
And the rest — perhaps as many as 520 Marines — are still on, or near, Tarawa.
Wil S. Hylton is a contributing writer. His most recent article was about the artist James Turrell. This article was adapted from "Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II," just published by Riverhead Books.
Editor: Joel Lovell
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