US searching for remains of WWII Marines on Tarawa

— 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.

Osorio said devices like ground penetrating radar, which can detect anomalies in the soil, have helped JPAC find likely burial sites. The military also has technology to identify remains - like DNA analysis - that it lacked in past decades.

One spot JPAC surveyed this month is in front of a woman's home. Osorio, who returned to Hawaii from Tarawa last week, said the JPAC team had to temporarily replant papaya trees while excavating her entire front yard. They put everything back when they were done, and bought her a few more fruit trees to boot.

It's challenging to work in the heat, but Osorio said the team gets a shot of energy whenever they find remains or other evidence.

"They get pretty motivated when they know that potentially they're closer to closing the books on a family's situation," Osorio said.

Even so, it's likely to be months or years before JPAC finishes the painstaking process of matching the bodies it's retrieved with DNA samples collected from relatives.

The battle and the search for Marines left behind has gained more attention recently because of the documentary "Return to Tarawa" broadcast on the Military Channel.

The long ago U.S. battle plan was to have 3,000 Marines on the beach in 30 minutes. Instead, the Americans took hours getting there, and paid dearly.


