Harold Patrick Hannon

Harold Hannon was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania on 19 October 1915. His parents, Albert and Catherine “Kate” Kerrigan Hannon, raised nine children (Harold was their fourth) on Luzerne Street, supported by Albert’s labor in the West Pennsylvania coal fields. As a boy, Harold was obsessed – and very good – at tiddlywinks; he was known around Bellvue as “Tidley,” a nickname that would stick for most of his life.

Tidley Hannon attended Scranton schools through eleventh grade, and served for a year and a half in the Pennsylvania National Guard. He joined his father and older brother at Scranton Coal for a time; in 1940, he moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut to work for Columbia Records. The following year, he took a job as a tool setter for Remington Arms.

Although he registered for Selective Service while living in Connecticut, Hannon returned to his home state when he decided to enlist. He volunteered for the Marine Corps Reserve in Philadelphia on 3 June 1942, and was soon on his way to Parris Island.

Hannon spent several weeks in South Carolina learning the trade of a Marine Corps private. Although no great shakes as a rifleman by Marine standards, he was skilled with other weapons – particularly hand grenades and bayonets. Instead of shipping out to a combat unit, Private Hannon was assigned to duty at the Naval Operating Base in Norfolk, Virginia.

After barely a month aboard, Private Hannon departed for authorized liberty – and failed to return by 0600 on Monday morning. Word of his disappearance reached the Norfolk authorities, including Army military policeman William Hannon, Tidley’s younger brother. William tracked down and confronted Tidley in the line of duty; after an earnest conversation, Tidley turned himself in and received the light sentence of a $45 fine. The following month, another misadventure on liberty landed Tidley in the Newport News hospital with a scalp wound caused by an upset woman armed with a Pepsi bottle. Tidley, who was slightly intoxicated and “very talkative,” received several stitches. The very next morning, he received transfer orders to Camp Elliott, California.

Despite these brushes with discipline, Hannon was promoted to Private First Class in November 1942. He sailed from California with the 6th Replacement Draft on 3 December 1942 and endured a long voyage aboard the MV Bloemfontein before alighting in Noumea, New Caledonia. Hannon spent Christmas and New Years undergoing final infantry training, and in February 1943 arrived in New Zealand where he was assigned to Easy Company, Second Battalion, 8th Marines. He would spend the next several months training with this veteran unit at Camp Paekakariki. Although he was older than many in Easy Company – and was considered an untried replacement by Guadalcanal veterans – Hannon grew friendly and familiar with the men in his squad. Soon they, too, were calling him “Tidley Hannon.”

In October 1943, 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.

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.

Only two LVTs managed to breach the sea wall and crawl a short distance inland before letting their Marines out to fight. PFC Harold Thoreson’s 13-man squad was aboard on of these vehicles. As the Easy Company men jumped over the high sides of the tractor, they scattered for any available cover.

“Three of us stayed together,” Thoreson recalled in 2006. “The guy next to me was named Tidley Hannon. I don’t remember where he was from. We found a shell hole and jumped in – then Tidley was shot in the head.”

The third Marine saw Tidley convulsing and snapped, “Kid, quit shaking!”

“He was shaking because he was dying,” Thoreson concluded. The two survivors ran back to the safety of the sea wall, leaving Tidley Hannon’s body in the shell hole.

“To say your son was killed under enemy gunfire in our recent operation is not enough, for Private Hannon was one of my best men,” wrote Captain Robert Rogers. “He was well-liked and well thought of in our organization. The highest compliment paid a Marine is to say his job was well done, and his was, even though it meant giving his life for what we believe in – freedom.”

Hannon’s battalion muster roll noted that he was “buried, grave unknown” in the days after the battle. No specifics as to date or location were ever known for certain. In 1944, Navy Seabees tasked with “beautifying” Betio’s many small cemeteries put up a marker in Cemetery 33 (Plot 13, Row 2, Grave 8) – but while this white cross bore Hannon’s name, it was only a memorial.

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 them was Tidley Hannon.

More than seventy years passed before the next clues to Tidley’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 left behind by the 604th QMGRC. All human remains were turned over to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency in 2017, and submitted for laboratory analysis.

Later that year, after comparing family DNA samples as well as circumstantial and physical evidence, the remains of Harold Patrick Hannon were officially identified and accounted for. In 1943, his body had been collected and brought to the largest cemetery on Betio for burial as an unknown. Coincidentally, his grave was not far from his memorial marker in Cemetery 33.

Tidley Hannon finally returned to Scranton in January 2018. Members of his family were on hand to witness his final burial in Cathedral Cemetery.

CENOTAPHS
Honolulu Memorial, Tablets of the Missing

FINAL BURIAL
Cathedral Cemetery, Scranton, Pennsylvania