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The Curious Case Of Gavutu's Grave 13
What became of Bobby Lee Liston after his burial on a tiny island in the Solomons?
The chaplain mopped his brow and hoped to God he was doing everything right.
Warren (he went by “W.”) Wyeth Willard was a Princeton-taught professional theologian and a newly minted combat veteran. When he joined the Naval service in 1941, he scarcely imagined he would soon be splashing ashore on a small South Pacific island armed with his Gideon New Testament and a knapsack full of Valencia oranges.
Yet here he was on the tenth day of August, 1942, standing outside a commandeered Lever Brothers plantation store and directing the establishment of the first American cemetery in the Solomon Islands as occasional rifle fire and explosive charges cracked and rumbled in the background.[1]
Over the past 48 hours, Chaplain Willard witnessed more suffering and death than he had experienced in his thirty-seven years. The battle for Gavutu was well into its second day when Willard came ashore with the Third Battalion, 2nd Marines, and the Lever Brothers plantation store was full of wounded and dying Paramarines. “According to Navy regulations,” Willard recalled, “the chaplain’s battle station was in the sickbay with the doctors.”[2] He hastened to assist by washing dirty faces and hands, bringing water to the thirsty, and handing out orange slices. Now and then, bullets punched through the metal roof with a startling ping, to be answered by a rattling fusillade from Marine machine guns stationed on the second floor.[3]
Through the window, Willard could see the neighboring island of Tanambogo with “the Jap flag still flying defiantly on the hilltop.” Two lighters, carrying a pair of tanks commanded by men Willard knew personally, roared away from the Lever’s store wharf and deposited their armored cargo on the Tanambogo beach. Later, Willard would remove the bodies of his friends from their charred and disabled machines. He watched in fascinated horror as a Marine company attacked along the causeway connecting the islands. “In the face of stiff enemy fire, the men moved forward,” he marveled. “They stooped over quite low as they ran into the thick of the fighting. Not a man wavered! Manu fell dead or wounded during the battle.” A worrisome rumor reached Lever’s Store that Item Company “was being wiped out, that even the captain [William G. Tinsley] himself was wounded.”[4]
These rumors proved to be “exaggerated,” but that night, the aid station saw an influx of terribly wounded men from Tanambogo. Willard woke the exhausted doctors and, as the booming of naval guns competed with the rattle of rain on the metal roof, continued to wash hands and faces as shattered young men wept, slept, and died.[5]
By morning on 10 August, the two little islands were secure enough that the exhausted chaplain could turn his thoughts from ministering to the wounded to “the grim task of caring for the dead.” Willard had once worked as a mortician in Barnstable, Massachusetts, but Gavutu was a far cry from the cool confines of a funeral home. “In tropical countries, decomposition takes place much more rapidly,” he noted. “A strong, foul odor was noticeable around the rendezvous of the dead.” As the only chaplain on Gavutu, Willard was responsible for choosing the cemetery site and organizing the burial. Volunteers were secured to clear a small, flat area near the Levers Store – convenient to the aid station where many bodies already awaited burial – and to dig the graves..
The sun grew hot in the skies above and scorched the earth beneath. The men’s dungarees became wringing wet. As soon as eight or ten graves were dug, we would lay down the bodies of our fallen comrades. There were no caskets, no flowers, none of the niceties which had always been necessities at home. Some of the members of the working party fainted because of the heat or the sight of the bloody and stiffened bodies of their friends. And then I would have to recruit other volunteers, or else from time to time I would help lower the remains into their final resting place.
The working parties seemed to melt away. Sporadic fighting was still taking place on both islands. The sound of the shovels blended with the sound of rifle fire.[6]
Other volunteers recorded the names of the dead, retrieved identification and personal effects, and made a map of the cemetery. Only the first grave was an unknown warrior, a pair of dismembered legs which Willard himself carried from the Tanambogo waters. It took hours to complete the work, but near evening a neat plot of 52 marked graves lay before the assembled mourners.
Willard began his service with “I am the resurrection and the life” and read the names of the fallen.
Woods, Crane, Brule, Hetzel [sic], Williams, Murray, Remenaric, Weisbrod, Mack, Walker, Kuper, Liston, Kennedy, Hirshberg, Grady, Johns, DeMatteis, Brzukaski [sic], Hennessey, Walton, Pumroy, Vincent, Driscoll, Campbell, Kiser, Mason, Sweeney, Keig, Kootlas, Jensen, Young, Knutson, Kachinski, Wilson.
“There were many others,” he continued. “It seemed as though all America was represented there in that little city of the dead.”[7] With three volleys and a rendition of Taps, the service came to an end.
Chaplain Willard and his assistants had done their best while creating the first of many temporary American cemeteries in the South Pacific.[8] But several years later, when other men came to account for their work and bring Gavutu’s war dead home, they found that one had vanished – as if he’d never been buried at all.
Private Robert Lee Liston breathed his last on the rain-soaked, blood-puddled floor of the aid station.
“Bobby Lee” Liston was born in South Fork, Colorado, on 16 June 1924. The backstory to his short life is a complicated knot to unravel. His mother, Martha Arzellia (Hawkins) Backlund, was once married to J. William Backlund, a Swedish blacksmith who worked for the railway. To this union was born Henry “Hank” Backlund, Robert’s older half-brother. How the marriage ended, and who fathered the Liston boys – “Bobby” born in 1924 and Fred in 1931 – is unfortunately obscure. Arzellia would keep her married name of Backlund until she died.
Bobby grew up, in part, in Santa Fe. He attended Harrington Junior High; his classmates regarded him as “one of the most popular of the student body,” and a good student to boot. A bit taller than average and with a muscular build, Bobby was also well-regarded as a fledgling footballer and was likely looking forward to playing on a high school team.[9] However, he finished only a single year before Pearl Harbor thrust the country into war. When brother Hank joined the Marine Corps in December 1941, Bobby decided to follow suit. He was still only seventeen and needed his mother’s permission to enlist. With Arzellia’s blessing, Bobby Liston joined the Marines at New Orleans, Louisiana, on 13 January 1942 and was soon on his way to boot camp in San Diego.[10]
Just short of eight months later, Private Liston climbed down a cargo net slung over the USS President Adams and stepped into a waiting Higgins boat for the hour-long to Gavutu. Like Chaplain Willard, he splashed ashore and confronted the sights and sounds and smells of a battle in full swing. However, while Willard went about comforting the wounded and dying, Bobby Liston and I/3/2nd Marines stalked around Gavutu, hunting Japanese holdouts on the slopes of Hill 148. Eventually, the sniper fire from Tanambogo grew to more than a nuisance level, and orders arrived to take the island by sea. It was not the first such plan, and Liston may have heard rumors about the bloody outcome of the earlier attempt staged by B/1/2 on the previous night.
Item Company assembled back at Lever’s Store on the afternoon of 8 August. They watched the two tanks embark in the lighters, and watched ships and planes plaster tiny Tanambogo until “the island changed from green to red.”[11] They re-boarded their Higgins boats and shoved off. As they rounded Gaomi Island, Japanese snipers shot from three directions. Some ran down open ramps when they reached the shore while others jumped over the sides and waded ashore. Ahead of them were the two disabled tanks and a small detachment of Marine infantry. Captain Tinsley’s men began to fall, but he divided his platoons and sent them to envelop Tanambogo’s lonely hill. The fighting was a grim foretaste of what was to follow in the next three years of island combat, but the Marines eventually prevailed and met at the top of the hill.
At some point in the conquest, Private Bobby Liston was hit in the spine – a bullet, shrapnel, or both; the damage was too great to determine a clear culprit. He hung on through the evening and finally died at 1230 in the morning on 9 August 1942.
The telegram never reached his mother. After moving from Santa Fe to Los Angeles – closer to her sons in the service – Arzellia was stricken with a severe illness that sent her to the hospital. Hank Backlund took charge of her mail; when the Western Union telegram arrived, he hid the news “because of the serious nature of her illness.” Arzellia succumbed in October 1942, at the age of 38. She never knew that Bobby was gone.
Hank deployed to the Pacific in November 1942 and returned on Christmas Day, 1945, as the decorated Sergeant Backlund. A Silver Star ribbon sat on his right chest, just below a pair of jump wings and a campaign ribbon with three stars signifying combat on Bougainville, Vella Lavella, and Iwo Jima.[12] He wanted to put the war behind him and begin his new life as a college student and a father, so he settled his late brother’s affairs with the help of his grandmother, who had custody of young Fred Liston. As the primary next of kin, he would have been responsible for arranging Bobby’s final burial.[13]
Except nobody knew where Bobby Liston’s body was.
By all accounts, Private Liston occupied Grave Number 13 on Gavutu.
This location appears on his death certificate, his unit’s muster rolls, and a casualty card on file with the Marine Corps. Chaplain Willard wrote it in his diary, where he kept meticulous casualty records. “R. L. Liston” was painted on a white cross over the grave itself.
During the war years, garrison troops maintained and beautified the little cemetery. Stone borders and live plants marked individual plots, and a neat walkway led between the rows. An archway and a sign welcomed visitors to the “United States Marine and Navy Cemetery” and admonished sightseers to “keep to path.” The cemetery was convenient to the pier and the boat pool; a supply yard soon sprung up, and the graves were protected in part by a wall of shipping crates.
The cemetery existed until September 1945, when the war ended, and the consolidation plan went into effect.
Views of the Gavutu cemetery, 1943 – 1944. Photographs courtesy of Peter Flahavin.
Moving remains between cemeteries – or between islands, or between groups of islands – was a massive undertaking, and Guadalcanal’s main cemetery was a busy place in the days immediately after the Japanese surrender. With the war finally over, the long-standing Navy policy to temporarily inter the dead in the combat theater ended.[14] Cemeteries scattered across the Pacific prepared for consolidation, with Guadalcanal as the Solomon Islands’ designated collection point. Ships arrived bearing bodies from Banika in the Russell Islands, Espiritu Santo, Efate, and other smaller islands – including Gavutu and Tulagi, just a few miles away.
Theoretically, each set of remains traveled with paperwork, giving personal information about the deceased and whence they came. With bodies arriving by the hundreds, Guadalcanal’s Graves Registration personnel had little choice but to trust their distant colleagues’ record-keeping abilities. They added another Report of Interment with the location of each man’s new temporary grave. This paper trail was intended to prevent mistakes as box after box of bones arrived, went through processing, and was trucked to the cemetery. And, on the whole, the system worked well.
Inevitably, though, some fell through the cracks. Fifty-one of the Gavutu burials were duly reported and reburied in the Guadalcanal cemetery – even the unknown Marine from Grave #1. But no known records indicate the arrival of Private Liston’s body from Gavutu. Nor is there any indication of what became of the remains buried in Grave #13.
We don’t know who exactly discovered the discrepancy, but it first came to light in late 1947. At this point, a Graves Registration platoon was searching for lost and isolated graves in the Solomon Islands, and the 9105th Technical Services Unit was methodically exhuming the Guadalcanal cemetery for a final time. Trained technicians were now on hand to examine remains in detail, search for identification among the bones, and check names against a master list of the dead. It was almost certainly during this process that Liston’s absence came to light. In January 1948, the Quartermaster Corps issued a Form 371 (“Data On Remains Not Yet Recovered Or Identified”) for Private Liston.
In February 1949, Graves Registration returned to the Solomon Islands to walk the old battlegrounds one last time. A search team contacted the local District Officer, Mr. Hughes, who assured the Americans that all remains were removed from Gavutu in 1949. His assistant, Mr. A. P. Peebles, dutifully led a trip to the site of the old cemetery. “The cemetery was found to be overgrown with underbrush from 6 to 10 feet tall,” remarked the commanding officer, Lt. Col. F. R. Bryan. “The graves appeared to have been dug up.” Mr. Peebles gathered all the islanders who had helped exhume remains from Gavutu in 1945, and all told the same tale: “all remains had been removed from the island by the American forces prior to leaving.” This conversation satisfied Colonel Bryan without the need to break out the shovels. He decided that Liston’s remains were no longer on Gavutu. Based on his recommendation, the case was closed in May.[15]
Simultaneously, a separate military entity was settling Bobby Liston’s accounts with Sergeant Hank Backlund. Under normal circumstances, the news of a non-recoverable serviceman would trigger an official letter to the next of kin, with a copy placed in the deceased’s record book. However, no such message appears in Liston’s paperwork. It may have been lost, or never filed, or never sent. Like so many other aspects of the Liston case, the paper trail is incomplete.
How could a body vanish in the short voyage between two well-marked, well-traveled cemeteries?
It seems incredible that there could be no record of Bobby Liston’s final disposition, when every other grave in the Gavutu cemetery was successfully relocated to Guadalcanal.
Photographs of the Gavutu cemetery show a nicely tended, plainly marked plot, established very close to living and working spaces. While wooden grave markers could become damaged or illegible over time, it seems highly unlikely that Liston’s marker would have fallen into such disrepair – especially when the rest of the cemetery was well maintained. One hopes this careful attention – along with the fact that all markers had numbers – would negate the possibility of laborers overlooking Liston’s grave during exhumation in 1945. The same photographs, however, show that Grave #13 was at the end of a row, that spacing between the graves was at times irregular, and that rows were of different lengths. Therefore, there is an outside possibility that Grave #13 remains untouched, and Liston is still on Gavutu.
In an intriguing twist, the same photograph from 1944 shows at least one grave out of numerical order. Grave #39 (Pvt. Leo M. Gagnon) appears sandwiched between #10 (PFC Gerald D. Mack) and #11 (PlSgt. Russell Walker). The reasons for this are unknown, especially as there is a large gap between Grave #38 (PFC Lawton Crumpler) and Grave #40 (Pvt. Russell L. Miller). Assuming that all other graves are in numerical order, Liston’s Grave #13 is the fourteenth grave in the row. While likely just an anomaly, such a discrepancy could potentially result in clerical dismay. Still, the obliteration of a single grave would be highly unusual – especially in a well-visited cemetery of relatively small size, with dedicated caretakers who would remember the location of each grave.
It is also possible to rule out Liston as the unknown Marine buried in Grave #1. According to Chaplain Willard, that individual was only a pair of legs with no means of identification. Liston was known by name at burial; at some point, somebody collected his belongings or visually identified his body.[16] Furthermore, while Liston’s wounds were severe, they would not be enough to cause such catastrophic damage.
A simple clerical error may be the culprit. Burial records from the main Guadalcanal cemetery indicate that bodies from all over the Solomon Islands were processed simultaneously; there are few clusters of casualties from Tulagi, say, or Gavutu – all are mixed up by branch, date of death, and location of burial. A simple mistake by an overworked clerk – perhaps writing “Tulagi” instead of “Gavutu” for example – would be enough to compromise the paper trail.
And then there are potential problems with the names on the graves themselves. The Guadalcanal GRS men relied on these names to be accurate; they were not searching for identification tags among the musty remains. However, some markers were undoubtedly wrong – and one of those markers was in the Gavutu cemetery.
Grave #36 bore the name “J. H. Dudenski.” This individual was exhumed from Gavutu, brought to Guadalcanal, and reburied in Plot F, Row 199, Grave #1 on 18 September 1945. The same clerical checks that uncovered Liston’s absence revealed no such person as “J. H. Dudenski” on casualty lists – or, for that matter, in the armed forces. The body was quickly re-designated as X-324.[17]
How did the name Dudenski appear on a grave marker – and persist through the years? One possible theory involves a Paramarine private named John Michael Dudenake. Young Dudenake, a runner for Company B of the First Parachute Battalion, hopped out of his landing craft during the initial landings on Gavutu and was immediately shot in the throat. He was the second man ashore, and his entire platoon had to step over his prostrate form on their way into combat. Dudenake was still alive and conscious enough to hear an officer say, “He’s dead.” Fortunately, two men spotted signs of life and hauled Dudenake back onto the Higgins boat. Several weeks later, while recuperating in New Zealand, Dudenake learned that he was officially killed in action – and his parents in Pocatello, Idaho, had received a telegram stating as much. The Paramarine survived, returned to the United States (he called his father, who “fainted when he heard my voice”) and even went back to active duty.[18]
The Marine buried in Grave #36 may have been misidentified as Dudenake by one of the Paramarines who saw him fall gravely wounded. As Chaplain Willard mentioned, decomposition in the tropics is very rapid, and many Paramarines who fell on 7 August 1942 were in poor condition by their burial on 10 August. Corporal Daniel Mulcare described collecting the bodies on Gavutu as “the most horrible experience he would ever know,” and recalled pulling dead Marines by their webbing to keep from touching the putrefying remains of his friends. Many Paramarines shipped out for combat without identification tags, which made recognition by physical characteristics all the more critical.[19] Finally, the parachutists departed Gavutu before the actual burials took place. They left their collected dead along with a written list of names compiled by a pharmacist’s mate. Poor handwriting or a simple misunderstanding could have swapped “Dudenake” for “Dudenski,” and inadvertently erased the real identity.
Of course, John Dudenake was not among the dead – and it is not clear who was in his place.
The appearance of a body without a name and a name without a body inevitably invites a final question:
could “Dudenski” really be Bobby Liston?
A few factors lend plausibility to this scenario. We know that the Marine from Grave 36 was misidentified, probably as John Dudenake, on 10 August 1942. We also know that the condition of the bodies was poor due to the effects of battle and the natural decomposition process. Mistaking Liston for Dudenake is also within the realm of possibility. Both were football players of a similar build; they also bore a passing resemblance about the face and eyes. In life, friends could make an easy distinction; after a few days of decomposition, the possibility of a graveside mistake increases.[20] The Paramarines were on Tulagi when “Dudenski” was committed to the earth; likewise, most of Liston’s buddies in I/3/2 were still on Tanambogo. A mistaken identity would be hard for strangers to notice, let alone correct, especially as dog tags and personal effects were removed from the corpses.
Imagine a scene outside the Lever plantation store. Stretcher teams arrive from all over Gavutu and Tanambogo, depositing bodies outside the aid station. Hospital orderlies are tending to the bodies of those who died under medical care. A Paramarine spots a corpse who resembles his buddy Dudenake, who he saw badly wounded a few days ago, and tells the pharmacist’s mate that Dudenake is among the dead. Meanwhile, Bobby Liston’s name and information are taken down by one of the hospital orderlies. Both names are given to the chaplain. Willard, who is having a hard time finding volunteers to dig graves and handle bodies, manages a small team of clerks who are wholly unfamiliar with the proper process of recording burial information. In the process, Dudenake becomes Dudenski, and the wrong name is applied to the wrong body.
This situation, while hypothetical, may be supported by physical evidence. A glance at the physical characteristics of Liston and X-324 reveals some vital similarities. Dr. Mildred Trotter, an anthropologist at the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, described X-324 as:
…a tall man 21 to 23 years of age (based on dental condition) of average muscularity weighing between 160 and 165 lbs. The skull is ovoid in shape. The vault is average height. The forehead is sloping. The backhead is rounded. The palate is deep and U shaped. The mandible is average in structure with a slight gonial flare. The chin is deep and rounded slightly protruding with narrow bilaterial eminences and gives the appearance of having been a cleft chin.[21]
In life, Dr. Trotter estimated, X-324 stood 70.75 inches and weighed 160-165 pounds. According to his service records, the eighteen-year-old Liston was 70 inches tall and weighed 164 pounds. Physically, the two men are similar. Dental records might provide additional clues – X-324 has a distinctive gutta-percha filling – but, of course, Liston’s dental work in his file is incomplete.
This theory is not without its flaws and does not account for the numerous primary sources that place Liston in Grave #13. Without an exhumation report for #13, we don’t know who or what lay beneath the “R. L. Liston” marker. However, because there are so few unaccounted from the battle of Gavutu-Tanambogo, it is not impossible to believe that Bobby Liston is buried in Honolulu under an unknown marker, waiting for a DNA test that could restore his identity after all these years.[22]
Footnotes
[1] Burial information for individuals killed at Gavutu-Tanambogo ranges between 7 August and 10 August. However, any dates earlier than 9 August are impractical as heavy combat was still going on across the islands. In his memoir The Leathernecks Come Through, Willard declines to give a specific date but specifies touring the battlefield and beginning burial work on “Monday,” which would be 10 August. Due to the amount of work involved, is probable that some preparations were made on 9 August, while the actual committal of remains occurred on 10 August. For purposes of this article, Monday is considered to be the correct date.
[2] W. Wyeth Willard, The Leathernecks Come Through (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1944), 25.
[3] Ibid., 23.
[4] In Willard’s memoir, the implication seems to be that he watched I/3/2 attack across the causeway. In fact, K/3/2 drew this task, while I/3/2 landed in boats along with the two tanks. Captain Tinsley’s company did suffer the lion’s share of the casualties in the fight for Tanambogo.
[5] Willard, 25-26.
[6] Ibid., 30.
[7] Willard’s memoir misspells the names of PFC Grover A. Heltzen and Cpl. Leo P. Brzulchaski.
[8] G. D. Marston, “There’ve Been Some Changes Made,” Leatherneck vol. 28, Issue 4 (April 1945), 21.
[9] “Liston Student At Harrington,” The Santa Fe New Mexican, 15 October 1942.
[10] Like so many other facets of Liston’s life before the war, his appearance at a recruiting station in Louisiana is unusual and unexplained.
[11] Office of Naval Intelligence, Solomon Islands Campaign I: The Landing In The Solomons, 7-8 August 1942 (Publications Branch, Office of Naval Intelligence, 1943), 68.
[12] Beatrice Stahl, “Just A Year Ago Men Fought, Died On Bloody Iwo,” The Daily Oklahoman (Oklahoma City, OK) 3 March 1946. Hank Backlund served overseas with the 2nd Parachute Battalion and later transferred to the 28th Marines. He earned the Silver Star on Iwo Jima for extinguishing an ammunition fire that threated the crew of his halftrack.
[13] Robert Lee Liston, Official Military Personnel File (OMPF), Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General, Washington National Records Center, Suitland, MD. The grandmother, Mrs. Frances Wright, was legal guardian for Fred Liston following Arzellia’s death.
[14] This policy was enforced at the outset of the war. Shipping remains back to the United States was deemed impractical when military supplies and living personnel needed all available cargo space.
[15] Robert Lee Liston, Individual Deceased Personnel File (IDPF), Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General, Washington National Records Center, Suitland, MD.
[16] This body, designated as X-257, is now buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.
[17] “Unknown X-324, Solomon Islands, Guadalcanal,” Washington National Records Center, Suitland, MD.
[18] “Soldier Left For Dead Plays Football Today,” The Burlington Free Press, 16 September 1943.
[19] James F. Christ, Battalion of the Damned: The 1st Marine Parachute Battalion at Gavutu and Bloody Ridge (Annapoils: Naval Institute Press, 2007), 24.
[20] A skeletal diagram of X-324 indicates extensive damage to the man’s face, although it is not known if this was perimortem or postmortem trauma.
[21] Unknown X-234.
[22] From Gavutu, Cpl. Raymond L. Bray (B/1st Paramarines) and Privates William A. James, William H. Pollock, and Merlyn L. Thompson (M/3/2) are unaccounted for. All four were killed by American dive bombers mistakenly targeting their positions; no identifiable remains were found. From Tanambogo, in addition to Liston, is PFC Gerald W. Stetzer (D/1/2nd Marines) who died in the first amphibious landing on the island. Stetzer died of wounds aboard the USS Neville at 1700 hours on 7 August 1942 and was reportedly sent ashore to Tulagi for burial.