George Stanley Bussa

George Bussa was born in Chicago, Illinois on 15 September 1914. He grew up in the Windy City with his parents, Andrew and Clara (Patt) Bussa, and younger siblings Andrew Junior, Harry, William, and Evelyn. Little information is available about his early years; he attended school through the eighth grade, and may have planned to join his father in the expressman’s trade.

Instead, George joined the Marine Corps.

Nineteen-year-old Bussa enlisted in Chicago on 7 August 1934, and was shipped off to Parris Island the very same day. Recruit instruction lasted just four weeks: by mid-September, Private Bussa was serving with Fox Company, 5th Marines at Quantico, Virginia. He would grow very familiar indeed with this setting: with few exceptions, it would be his home for the next four years. While he did get to experience a taste of life on foreign shores – for example the Fleet Landing Exercise (FLEX-2) that took him to Culebra, Vieques, Puerto Rico, and St. Thomas – most of Bussa’s first hitch was quiet and unremarkable, and almost exclusively spent with F/2/5. He climbed to corporal before his enlistment expired in August 1938.

Bussa agreed to stay on the rolls of the inactive reserve; he held the rank of sergeant but was not expected to attend drills. He settled in West Virginia for a while; on the 1940 Census, he is listed as a lodger with the George Neuhardt family in Elm Grove, and employed as a clerk at their grocery store.

In the spring of 1941, Bussa was recalled to active duty and sent to California for service with Company K, 8th Marines. This was an important event for George Bussa: he met Helen Lenore Walsh, a Kansas-born teacher working at a Los Angeles public school. The two were married on Christmas Day, 1941, as Bussa’s regiment was making ready to deploy overseas.

The 8th Marines sailed for Samoa in the first week of January 1942. They would spend several months garrisoning the island, preparing to repel an expected Japanese attack that never came. During his stay in Samoa, George Bussa was promoted to the rank of platoon sergeant, serving as second in command of one of King Company’s three rifle platoons. Shortly before leaving for combat, Bussa became a father: Jerilyn Ann Bussa was born on 9 September 1942.

In late October 1942, the 8th Marines sailed for the Solomon Islands and joined the battle for Guadalcanal on 4 November 1942. Bussa quickly established himself as a competent and effective combat leader. When illness placed his officer hors de combat, Bussa took command of the platoon, served with distinction in operations near Point Cruz, and “at all times fought bravely.” in the words of a subsequent Silver Star Medal citation.

Against heavy opposition, the men under his leadership destroyed three enemy machine guns and other weapons. He accompanied the Company Commander and the Demolitions Officer into the enemy lines to locate targets. With the fire of his platoon, he covered the demolition party while enemy positions were destroyed.

In February 1943, the 8th Marines regiment sailed from Guadalcanal to New Zealand and encamped outside of Wellington for a much-needed period of rest and reorganization. Promotions were announced; George Bussa became Gunnery Sergeant Bussa effective 1 April 1942 and was recommended for a field commission. On 19 July, he accepted his appointment to the rank of Second Lieutenant – becoming a “mustang,” an officer promoted up from the ranks. As was customary, the new lieutenant was transferred to a new company; Bussa became a platoon leader in Fox Company, Second Battalion, 8th Marines.

That October – almost exactly a year since they departed from Samoa for Guadalcanal – the 8th Marines boarded transports at Wellington for a final round of training exercises. When the ships headed out to sea instead of returning to town, the Marines aboard began to realize that the rumors were true: they were bound for combat once again.

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.

Lieutenant Bussa got the Second Platoon ashore in relatively good shape: they were “understrength, but available” on the afternoon of 20 November when orders came to assault a big bombproof structure near the Burns-Philp wharf. “If Bussa succeeded, other Marines could be thrown in to consolidate the gains,” writes historian Eric Hammel in Bloody Tarawa. “Bussa was going to make for the northern entrance to the bombproof… Japanese machine guns atop the bombproof had an unobstructed field of fire and could easily hit Bussa’s platoon as it moved into the open, but the gunners could be kept down by mortar fire.”

Unfortunately, the Japanese vastly outnumbered Bussa’s platoon – perhaps 200 defenders against two Marine squads. They were hit hard from the jump. “The platoon had to move the full length of the northern side of the mound, and it was subjected to intense fire from within,” continues Hammel. “Several men actually reached the entrance, but it was even more strongly defended than the route to it. The survivors recoiled in the face of mounting opposition and pulled back to their starting point, leaving George Bussa and half his Marines dead in the beaten zone.”

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. George Bussa was one of the last men buried here in “Division Cemetery 3.”

His death sent a shockwave through his comrades and his family. PFC Edward J. Zito survived the attack on the blockhouse; when he returned to the beach and learned “my friend Lt. George Bussa was shot dead [it] just about finished me.” Back in California, Helen and Jerilyn accepted George’s Silver Star Medal in a military review at Fort MacArthur. Jerliyn never had the chance to meet her father.

Bussa’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 very end of the trench extended underneath one of the shipyard’s main buildings. After a painstaking operation that involved raising the building on hydraulic stilts, the final six graves were finally revealed. Excavations were finally completed in 2016. In all, the remains of 46 men were recovered by History Flight and turned over to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency for forensic analysis.

George Bussa was the last man buried in the original trench, and the last to be recovered. Laboratory work including dental and anthropological analysis, plus mtDNA comparison, finally solved the mystery of his remains. He was officially identified on 4 April 2017, and returned to his family for burial later that year.

His daughter Jerilyn was present for the ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.

CENOTAPHS
Honolulu Memorial, Tablets of the Missing

FINAL BURIAL
Arlington National Cemetery