Fred Evert Freet

Fred Freet was born in Gary, Indiana on 28 June 1925. He was the second of three sons born to Carl and Lucy Belle Hale, and was descended from the Native American Miami Tribe of Indiana on his mother’s side. Life at home was not always easy – Carl and Lucy divorced, and the Freet boys were raised by their grandparents – but Fred could always call on his brothers, Ray and William, to go fishing or hunting around the Hale family farm.

All three Freet boys would serve in World War II: Ray in the Army, William in the Navy, and Fred in the Marine Corps.

On 8 September 1942, Fred Freet traveled to Indianapolis and enlisted in the Marines. After completing boot camp in San Diego, he was assigned to the 8th Replacement Battalion and sent overseas to join I Marine Amphibious Corp (IMAC) in New Caledonia. His next stop was New Zealand, and duty with Fox Company, Second Battalion, 8th Marines.

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. Unfortunately, any details of Freet’s time spent in New Zealand have long since been lost.

In late October 1943, Private Freet’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 the rumors were true: they were headed for combat in the Gilbert Islands.

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.


One of those who fell on the first day was Private Freet. He was simply recorded as “killed in action” by “gunshot wounds” – no further specifics of his fate are known.

It took two days for the dead men on Beach Red 3 to be buried. A long trench was bulldozed near the pier, and more than forty Marines were carried over and laid down under their ponchos. Fred Freet was one of the first men buried here in “Division Cemetery 3.”

Freet’s burial ground was “beautified” by Navy garrison troops in 1944 and renamed Cemetery 27. A single large cross was put up and the names of the fallen were painted on a plaque nearby. When the 604th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company arrived to exhume the battle casualties in 1946, however, they found not a trace of any remains beneath the monument – nor anywhere nearby. After days of searching in vain, they gave up and declared the 40 men permanently nonrecoverable.

In 2015, the non-profit group History Flight conducted an archaeological dig at a shipyard on Betio. This expedition, the result of years of research and data supplied by GPR and a cadaver dog, found the original burial trench beneath a parking lot – quite some distance from the memorial location. The remains of 46 men were recovered by History Flight and turned over to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency for forensic analysis.

Laboratory work including dental and anthropological analysis, plus chest radiograph comparison, solved the mystery of Fred Freet’s fate. The original records were accurate: he had been buried in the trench near the beach where he died. An official identification was made on 6 August 2018, and Freet’s remains were returned to his family for burial.

CENOTAPHS
Honolulu Memorial, Tablets of the Missing

FINAL BURIAL
Marion National Cemetery, Marion, Indiana