George Frank Patrick

George Patrick was born in Golden, Texas on 13 February 1921. He was the last of six children born to James and Martha (Champion) Patrick, and grew up on farmsteads in Wood and Hopkins Counties. Few other details about his youth are readily available.

By 1940, the older Patrick children had all married and left the farm. James and Martha gave up rural life and moved to Dallas, the better to see daughter Ruth and their grandchildren. George joined them in Dallas; after leaving school, he took a job with the Texas Automatic Pipe Fitting (Sprinkler) Company.

George registered for Selective Service in February 1942, just a few days after his twenty-first birthday. He was not in a particular hurry to enlist, but evidently preferred the notion of volunteering to the prospect of being drafted. On 30 September 1942, he entered a Dallas recruiting station and enlisted in the Marine Corps.

After completing boot camp at MCRD San Diego, Private Patrick served briefly with the Special Weapons Group, 12th Defense Battalion – but when that unit deployed to Hawaii, he was left behind for additional infantry training at Camp Elliott. He finally left the United States with the 11th Replacement Draft, and arrived in New Zealand in the spring of 1943. On 6 April, he became a member of Dog Company, First Battalion, 8th Marines.

Dog Company was a heavy weapons outfit specializing in the use of water-cooled machine guns and 81mm mortars to support infantry operations. While Private Patrick’s exact duties with Dog Company aren’t known, his previous experience in Special Weapons indicates he may have been trained in the use of a heavy machine gun. No matter his specialty, Patrick had plenty of opportunities to practice in New Zealand. An intense training regimen helped to integrate replacements like Private Patrick with veterans of the Guadalcanal campaign. In addition to the trials of the training field, the Marines also bonded on liberty calls in Wellington.

In late October 1943, Patrick and his company boarded a transport at Wellington docks. After a few days of complicated amphibious training exercises, they sailed for the open sea and joined a fleet bound for the Gilbert Islands. Operation GALVANIC was underway.

At midday on 20 November 1943, BLT 1-8 climbed over the sides of their transport ships and boarded LCVPs in Tarawa lagoon. They anticipated imminent landing orders, but due to the desperate situation on the beach were held offshore in their little boats, bobbing in the waves for the rest of the day and a very long night. Early on 21 November, they were ordered to land on Betio’s Beach Red 2.

At 0615, the first waves of 1-8 rushed down the ramps and into the breaking surf on a coral reef some 500 yards from shore. Although friendly troops held the water’s edge, they “immediately came under heavy machine gun fire from both flanks.” The battalion was decimated on the long walk to shore. An action report penned by the 8th Marines noted that “many of the casualties resulted from drowning, due to the heavy packs and equipment men attempted to take across the submerged fringing reef.”

The Dog Company Marines, many of them weighed down by crew-serviced weapons and heavy ammunition, were especially hard-hit. One of those who fell early in the action was Private George Patrick. Shrapnel wounds ended his life at Betio at the age of twenty-two.

(The battalion suffered so many casualties that record keepers got confused; many Marines, including Patrick, were erroneously entered as killed or missing as of 20 November – a day before the battalion went into action.)

George Patrick was one of only three Dog Company Marines buried in a marked and identified grave on Betio – which should have been a help to post-war efforts to recover his body. However, record confusion struck again, and Patrick was reportedly buried in two different locations: Grave 103, Row C, Division Cemetery #1, or Grave 27, Row A, East Division Cemetery.

The 604th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company arrived at Betio in 1946 and set to work exhuming the memorial cemeteries built on top of the original burial grounds. Identification of remains was a serious challenge, and hundreds of men were declared non-recoverable in 1949. Among them was Private George Patrick.

Decades later, a DPAA directive led to the exhumation of unidentified remains in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. Using modern identification methods, the remains of X-100 were positively associated with George Patrick. He had been buried in “Division Cemetery 1” after the battle, recovered in 1946 but not identified, and lay in Plot E, Grave 410 of the “Punchbowl” for nearly seventy years.

George Patrick was formally accounted for on 8 September 2017 and returned to his family for burial.

CENOTAPHS
Honolulu Memorial, Tablets of the Missing

FINAL BURIAL
Restland Memorial Park, Dallas, Texas