Archie William Newell

Archie Newell was born in Faith, South Dakota, on 3 June 1921. Faith was very much a frontier town, built at the end of a railway line and surrounded by prairie, and life was far from easy with harsh winters and dry summers. At some point in the 1920s the Newell parents, Arthur and Thresia, moved their family to the small city of Lemmons near the North Dakota border; Arthur supported the family by working as a filling station mechanic. They suffered through the Depression and the Dust Bowl with their neighbors, but fate seemed determined to deal the Newells a heavy hand. Of their eight children, only three – Archie, Laura, and Joyce – lived past the age of seven.

Few documents survive to outline Archie’s early days, and one can only imagine the effect of losing so many siblings at such a young age. According to the 1940 census, he attended school through the seventh grade and found work with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). He later enrolled in the National Youth Administration (NYA) to take welding classes. When the United States entered World War II, Archie was living in Brown County, South Dakota; when he registered for Selective Service, he gave his address as 224 5th Avenue Southwest, Aberdeen.

Archie enlisted at Minneapolis, Minnesota on 8 May 1942 and was soon on his way to San Diego for boot camp. After completing his initial training, the newly minted Private Newell was assigned duty with the Company D, Third Tank Battalion at Camp Pendleton. With his training as a welder, he may have held a role in the repair shop.

In approximately six months of duty with the Third Tanks, Newell never advanced beyond the rank of private – possibly the result of brushes with military discipline. In January 1943, he was transferred to the newly forming First Corps Tank Battalion and wound up in Charlie Company. His specialty was not recorded on unit muster rolls, but veteran Ed Gazel recalled that Private Newell was a “reconnaissance man” not permanently assigned to a tank crew. In combat, he would help guide the M4A2 tanks and spot targets; if a crewman became a casualty, Newell could serve as a replacement. Gazel related that “anybody that didn’t know any better [without a specialized background] became reconnaissance men,” but Newell’s prior assignment – Company D, Third Tanks – was a scout company, and he may have had particular training in this area. The Recon platoon was equipped with jeeps and halftracks, but in combat they were also expected to operate on foot.

On 19 July 1943, the First Corps Tank Battalion embarked aboard the SS John McLean at San Diego and departed for overseas duty. They arrived in New Caledonia after a month at sea and took up residence at Camp Magenta, where conditions were primitive to say the least. Charlie Company’s stay would be relatively brief: on 27 September, they were officially detached from their parent unit for duty with the 2nd Tank Battalion.

For the next two months, Newell – still a private – spent more time aboard ship than ashore. His company sailed to New Zealand, but never unloaded; at most, Newell spent one night ashore before his ship sailed back to New Caledonia. On 4 November he boarded the USS Ashland, a purpose-built amphibious assault ship capable of transporting tanks to battle. After a hasty (and ultimately unhelpful) rehearsal at Efate, the Ashland joined a convoy of transports en route to the Gilbert Islands.

Only then did Private Newell learn his destination: the island of Betio (codenamed HELEN) in the Tarawa atoll.

Private Newell’s job for the morning of 20 November 1943 sounded appalling at the best – and suicidal at the worst. The Recon Guides were given floats to use as channel markers; they would wade through the water towards the landing beaches searching for deep holes that might drown a tank. If they ran out of markers, they would direct traffic by hand.

The Guides were supposed to start at Beach Red One and then work their way east through the water to the other beaches – an impossible task. As it turned out, they were all but massacred in the water. One of the survivors, Melvin Swango, related:

There were about twenty of us, all in one Higgins boat. By the time we hit the edge of the reef the machine gun fire was so intense it was tearing through the bulkheads of the Higgins boat. I would guess that maybe five or six of the men fell to the deck there, either killed or wounded.

They landed us right at the edge of the reef and we started wading in…. We spread out in a single line, spacing ourselves as far apart as possible while still being able to see any crater that might appear between us. Whenever we found a crater, one man would stand there to wave the tanks around it…. Our tanks were watching for us as they ploughed through the water.

Machine gun fire was so intense it was like raindrops in the water all around us. Each time I looked around, there would be fewer of us. A man would simply sink beneath the water, and that would be the end of him. I only know of three of us who survived.

– from Tanks In Hell: A Marine Corps Tank Company on Tarawa by Oscar E. Gilbert and Romain Canisere

Private Archie Newell was one of the men killed in the water. He was initially reported as missing in action; in March of 1944, “evidence of death” was received by the Marine Corps Casualty Division, and Newell’s paperwork was updated to reflect killed in action by gunshot wounds.


However, the evidence of death did not include evidence of his body being recovered. While a memorial marker for Private Newell was placed in Cemetery 33, Plot 2, Row 2, Grave 6, his real burial place was not known. After the war, Newell was declared permanently non-recoverable.

When the 604th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company arrived to exhume the Betio cemeteries in 1946, they experienced untold difficulties – first in locating the original graves, and then identifying the remains they found. Several hundred individual bodies were reinterred in Lone Palm Cemetery as unknowns, with rudimentary information and tooth charts pending further examination at the Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu. Among them was “Betio Unknown X-44,” exhumed from Cemetery 26.

Anthropologists at CILH attempted to resolve X-44 in 1948. While they were able to reconstruct the shattered skull to the point where a physical description was possible – and picked out an extra left arm that did not belong – they too were unable to conclusively match X-44 to any known casualty. The following year, X-44 was quietly buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific Plot E, Grave 738.

At long last, in 2015, the DPAA ordered the exhumation of Tarawa unknowns in Honolulu. X-44 returned to the lab once again; this time, thanks to advances in DNA technology, a name and a face could be put to the remains. Archie William Newell was officially identified on 19 June 2017, and returned to his family for final burial.

CENOTAPHS
Honolulu Memorial, Tablets of the Missing

FINAL BURIAL
Arlington National Cemetery