US returns to Tarawa to search for remains of Marines killed in pivotal World War II battle

Published August 28, 2010 |

Associated Press

HONOLULU - The Battle of Tarawa was one of the first U.S. amphibious campaigns of World War II. It was also one of the most ferocious.

Thousands of Marines charged the beach, only to be mowed down by Japanese machine gun fire when their boats got stuck on the coral reef. Hundreds of Marines died, and thousands more were injured in just three days of fighting.

Sixty-seven years later, the U.S. military is back on the tiny Pacific atoll just 80 miles north of the equator to search for the remains of Marines who never made it home.

An 11-person team from the Hawaii-based Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command could find a couple hundred Marines during the largest mission of its kind at Tarawa, said JPAC spokesman Army Maj. Ramon Osorio. They're surveying six sites at spots ranging from people's front yards to a cemetery.

They're expected back in Hawaii in late September, though the team could extend its stay if needed. "There's not a place we will not go looking when it comes to finding our guys," Osorio said. "There's just so many families still waiting for the final word on what took place."

In November 1943, Tarawa was a heavily defended Japanese outpost halfway between Hawaii and Australia. Today it's a densely populated part of Kiribati, a poor nation of 33 coral atolls straddling the equator.

Tarawa is a string of narrow islets curved around an aquamarine lagoon. At the far southern end lies Betio -- just 2.5 miles long and 700 yards wide-- where the Marines came ashore. After the battle, the Navy buried the bodies it found. But many of those grave sites have since been moved, complicating JPAC's search.

The military has surveyed Tarawa sites since the war ended but not on the scale of the current mission.

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