Edwin William Jordan

Edwin Jordan was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on 13 October 1926. He grew up in Spring Hill with his parents, Arthur and Margaret (Himmelrich) Jordan, and siblings Arthur and Hester.

Little is publicly known about Edwin’s life before the war. He lost an infant brother in 1929, and his mother to the effects of an operation in July of 1941. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, Edwin was a student at Pittsburgh’s Perry High School.

Edwin enlisted on 2 November 1942; he was barely sixteen years old, well below the minimum age for the Marine Corps. He was able to pass as old enough, however – and, according to family sources, had some help from his father who provided a false date of birth.

After completing boot training with the Seventeenth Separate Recruit Battalion at New River, North Carolina, Private Jordan was assigned to the 5th Replacement Battalion for deployment overseas. On 5 April 1943, he joined Company F, Second Battalion, 8th Marines at their camp near Paekakariki, New Zealand. The months that followed were filled with training exercises, endurance marches, and liberties in nearby towns, where locals made the Marines feel right at home.

In late October 1943, Private Jordan’s company boarded a transport ship for the most extensive amphibious exercises they’d experienced to date. They would be aboard for nearly a month, with only a brief stopover at Efate in the New Hebrides group. While at sea, the men were informed that they were taking place in an operation codenamed GALVANIC; their objective, codenamed HELEN, was a small bird-shaped island whose real name was Betio.

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.

Seventeen-year-old Private Jordan died on the very first day of his very first battle. He was reported only as killed in action by gunshot wounds; no other details of his fate were ever made known.

While Private Jordan’s death was confirmed by company officers, his burial place was not known A memorial marker bearing his name was eventually placed in Cemetery 33 (Plot 8, Row 2, Grave 10), but the location of his body remained 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 those so designated was Edwin Jordan.

More than seventy years passed before the next clues to Jordan’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.

DPAA scientists used dental, anthropological and chest radiograph comparison analysis, as well as circumstantial and material evidence, in their attempts to identify the remains. One set solved the decades-long mystery of what became of Edwin Jordan. He had been buried in the East Division Cemetery as an unknown in 1943 – coincidentally, not far from his memorial marker in Cemetery 33.

Jordan was officially identified on 27 September 2017, and returned to his family for burial the following Spring.

CENOTAPHS
Honolulu Memorial, Tablets of the Missing

FINAL BURIAL
Arlington National Cemetery