Edwin Francis Benson

Born in Boston on 31 October 1921, Edwin grew up in West Newton. The house at 80 Eliot Street was also home to his parents, Edwin and Mary, and two older sisters, Mary Barbara and Marguerite. His father, a Harvard man, ran the English department at The Boston Latin School; accordingly, young Edwin was no slouch in academics, attending both St. John’s Prep in Danvers and the Newton High School, where he was a prominent figure on the track team.

However, instead of college, Edwin Benson decided on a military career. He joined the Marine Corps on 2 July 1940, at the age of eighteen, and was shipped off to Parris Island.

After boot camp, Private Benson was dispatched to a much more exotic climate – the city of Balboa, entrance to the famous Panama Canal and the site of a large Navy outpost. He was assigned to guard duty at the ammunition depot. The novelty of the post quickly wore off, and bored Marines got up to mischief with pranks like “posting an unauthorized notice on the Company bulletin board” and “creating a disturbance in the movie hall.” Punishments were strict; for the crime of “creating a disturbance,” Benson once spent five days in the brig on bread and water. Shortly after the war broke out, he was busted for possession of “intoxicating liquor” and lost his hard-won PFC stripe.

As the war expanded and it became clear that Panama would be a backwater, many garrison Marines began angling for ways to get into combat. Benson was one who volunteered to transfer, but the process of getting to the front was far more complicated than it seemed. First, he was sent back to Portsmouth, Virginia, then to New River, North Carolina to train with Company M of the newly-formed 23rd Marines. Benson’s thinning patience was evident in a string of minor disciplinary infractions, which never resulted in serious punishment but always kept him from regaining his PFC rating. At long last, he was transferred to the 13th Replacement Battalion, sailed across the Pacific, and joined Company L, Third Battalion, 2nd Marines on 10 July 1943.

On 20 November 1943, the Third Battalion 2nd Marines was assigned the task of spearheading the assault on Betio’s Red Beach One. They were subjected to devastating fire from the moment they crossed the island’s coral reef, and suffered heavy casualties while coming ashore and on the beach itself.

Private Benson’s L/3/2 landed as a reserve wave behind Item and King Companies, but also suffered catastrophic losses and managed to come in “slowly and very disorganized… driblets” as men made their way to shore as best they could. Twenty-six of their number were killed on 20 November alone.

One of those who fell was Private Benson. The 22-year-old Marine was shot in the head and killed somewhere in the vicinity of Red Beach One. His body was found and identified after the cataclysmic conflict, and he was reported as buried in Row B, Grave #27 of the East Division Cemetery.

Due to confusion over his status – some official reports noted that Edwin was “missing” rather than dead – the Benson family would not receive the sad news until February of 1944. Both Barbara and Marguerite would join the Navy and serve as WAVES for the rest of the war.

When Private Benson’s burial ground (re-designated as Cemetery 33) was exhumed by Graves Registration personnel in 1947, his remains were not among those identified. Nor could the technicians at the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii provide any further clues. He was declared non-recoverable in 1949.

It has since been learned that Edwin Benson’s remains were, in fact, exhumed by the 604th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company in March of 1946, but could not be identified by their technicians. He was designated as “X-155” and reinterred temporarily in the Lone Palm Cemetery, until the bodies of Betio’s dead could be sent back to Hawaii for final identification and disposition. There, too, X-155 defied identification, and was buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, Plot E Grave 232, as an unknown.

Private Benson’s remains were exhumed for a final time on 30 January 2017; he was officially accounted for on 24 June 2019.

CENOTAPHS
Honolulu Memorial, Tablets of the Missing
Calvary Cemetery and Mausoleum, Waltham, Massachusetts

FINAL BURIAL
Arlington National Cemetery