Albert Strange

Albert Richard Strange was born in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, on 2 October 1925. He was the youngest child of Walter and Myrtle (Davis) Strange and grew up in Edmonson County with his older sister Eva Marie. A brother, Adams Strange, died in infancy before Albert was born.

At some point in the early 1930s, the Strange parents split up and remarried (to Rova and Mills Meredith, respectively). Walter, Rova, and Albert left Mammoth Cave for Pekin, Illinois, and settled at 218 Cooper Street sometime prior to 1935. Albert finished grammar school in Pekin and spent two years at vocational school focusing on mechanical studies – wood and metal fabrication, machine shop, and drawing. He left school in 1942 to join his father loading railroad cars at the Corn Products Refining Company. In his spare time, he played sports – especially football – and enjoyed hunting with his rifle and shotgun.

Albert volunteered for Marine Corps service on 25 February 1943. From Chicago, he was sent to San Diego for boot camp; although barely eighteen years old, he impressed his drill instructors during the rigorous training. Private Strange hoped to put his mechanical interests to use as a tanker, but when he shot 310 on the rifle range – an expert rating – he was chosen for extra training as a scout/sniper.

Over the next several weeks at Green’s Farm, a remote training facility at Camp Elliott, Private Strange honed his skills in the field. In addition to marksmanship tips from some of the top shooters in the Corps, the trainees learned “the technique of scouting and sniping… self-reliance and combat initiative [and] the knack of jungle fighting.” The basic course ran five weeks; the top performers were given an additional three weeks with a Raider training unit at Camp Pendleton. Strange was evidently one of these; his service record book notes that he “satisfactorily completed” the eight-week course in July 1943 and received a promotion to Private First Class.

According to Frank X. Tolbert, the scout/sniper graduates were trained to work in groups of three – a shooter, a spotter, and a spare. “Three graduates are allocated to a company, but they are not attached to any platoons or squads,” he wrote in the October 1943 issue of Leatherneck Magazine. “They work unattached at their specialties as the company commanders see fit to use them. They operate in pairs, one man equipped with an ’03 rifle with telescope sights and the other man having an M1… The third member… is ready in the event one member of a team becomes a casualty or is replaced….” Unfortunately, it is not known who PFC Strange’s chosen teammates were – nor if he was appropriately allocated when he joined Easy Company, Second Battalion, 8th Marines at Camp Paekakariki in the summer of 1943.

While stationed in New Zealand, Strange embarked on yet another round of training. This time, however, the tactics were more advanced, the exercises more realistic, and his instructors combat veterans of Guadalcanal. In October, the 8th Marines boarded transports at Wellington for a final round of training exercises. When the ships headed out to sea instead of returning to town, the Marines aboard began to realize that the rumors were true: they were bound for combat.

The amphibious assault on Betio, Tarawa atoll – Operation GALVANIC – commenced on 20 November 1943. The Second Battalion 8th Marines was given the job of assaulting the easternmost of three landing beaches – “Red 3” – and, once ashore, moving inland to quickly secure the airfield that covered much of the tiny island’s surface. A heavy and morale-boosting naval bombardment convinced many Marines that the task would be a simple one, and spirits were high at 0900 when their amphibious tractors started paddling for the beach.

The Japanese were quick to recover. Shells began bursting over the LVTs. “As the tractors neared the shore the air filled with the smoke and fragments of shells fired from 3-inch guns,” notes A Brief History of the 8th Marines. “Fortunately, casualties had been light on the way to the beach, but once the men dismounted and struggled to get beyond the beach, battle losses increased dramatically.” Most of the beach defenses were still intact, and these were supported by row after row of pillboxes, rifle pits, and machine gun nests.

The Second Battalion, and then the Third Battalion, tried in vain to break through the Japanese defenses, suffering heavy casualties in every attempt. By evening, they were barely clinging to a sliver of beachhead, and the shocked survivors dug in among the bodies of the dead.

In the chaos and confusion of battle, many men seemingly disappeared, never to be heard from again. Such was the case with PFC Albert Strange. He was last seen during the landing operation; when the battle ended, he could not be located on the island, in a ship’s sick bay, or any known hospital. Military authorities ultimately concluded that he had been killed in action effective 20 November 1943.

A marker with Albert Strange’s name was placed in one of Betio’s memorial cemeteries (Cemetery 33, Plot 3, Row 3, Grave 12) – but this was acknowledged to be only commemorative. His real burial site was a mystery.

When the 604th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company arrived on Betio to exhume the wartime dead, they discovered the true scope of the Navy’s reconstruction project. The memorial cemeteries had little or no correlation to original burial sites, so finding remains was a challenge in itself; those they did manage to find were extremely difficult to identify. After months of effort, the 604th recovered fewer than half of the bodies they hoped to find. Hundreds of men were declared permanently non-recoverable. Among them was Albert Strange.

More than seventy years passed before the next clues to Albert’s whereabouts came to light. In November 2015, archaeologists from non-profit group History Flight surveyed the former site of Betio’s East Division Cemetery. A subsequent dig unearthed a trove of artifacts and human remains left behind by the 604th QMGRC. A follow-up expedition in 2017 retrieved still more; all were handed over to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

In September 2017, after comparing dental and chest radiograph analysis as well as circumstantial and physical evidence, the remains of Albert Strange were officially identified; he was accounted for on 6 October. In 1943, his body had been collected and brought to the largest cemetery on Betio for burial as an unknown. Coincidentally, his grave was not far from his memorial marker in Cemetery 33.

Albert was brought back to his native Kentucky for burial. His half-sister, Patsy Meredith Thompson, and three nieces welcomed him home.

CENOTAPHS
Honolulu Memorial, Tablets of the Missing

FINAL BURIAL
Cave City Cemetery, Barren County, Kentucky