James Ottis Whitehurst

James Ottis (or Otis) Whitehurst was born in Blakely, Georgia, on 11 January 1923. His family – parents Benjamin and Mary, plus eldest sister Edith – were Alabama residents; James spent his youth in Houston County near the Florida/Georgia state lines. Two more Whitehursts, Edna and Edward, arrived in the years that followed – but Mary died in 1927 due to complications from childbirth. Benjamin eventually remarried Lucy Mae Prevatt, and the family lived on a rented farm in Cowarts, between Dothan and Ashford.

James was educated in Ashford and finished two years at the local high school. In May of 1941, he learned of a temporary recruiting station at the Dothan post office. The eighteen-year-old went to town, spoke to Sergeant R. M. Henry, and signed up for a four-year hitch in the regular Marine Corps.

From Dothan, James traveled to Birmingham where his enlistment was made official on 20 May 1941. He was soon on his way to boot camp at San Diego, where he learned the rigors of Marine Corps life and showed some skill with rifles, pistols, and bayonets. By fall, Private Whitehurst was at Camp Elliott serving with HQ Company, Second Marine Division. He hoped to avail himself of some special training opportunities; the Dothan Eagle reported that Whitehurst “enrolled with Marine Corps schools to study cabinet making.”

The attack on Pearl Harbor, naturally, put any extra training on hold. Whitehurst was transferred to a rifle outfit – Easy Company, Second Battalion, 8th Marines – and by 6 January 1942 was sailing for overseas duty at Tutuila, American Samoa.There, he would spend several months on garrison duty, preparing to repel an expected Japanese attack that never came.

In late October, the 8th Marines sailed for the Solomon Islands and joined the battle for Guadalcanal on 4 November 1942. Unfortunately, any stories of Whitehurst’s experiences during the campaign have since been lost – he was fortunate to survive three months of combat without serious injury.

During the spring and summer of 1943, the 8th Marines rested and re-trained in New Zealand. Like many of his fellow combat veterans, Whitehurst spent several stretches in sick bays and field hospitals – likely the result of a tropical disease contracted on Guadalcanal. He spent the rest of his time training hard, and enjoying his precious liberty time in Wellington.

That October – almost exactly a year since they departed  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.

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 PFC Whitehurst. He was reported as killed in action by gunshot wounds; no other details were known. So confused and chaotic was the battlefield that Whitehurst’s burial location was not even known for certain.

In 1944, a memorial bearing his name was placed in Cemetery 33 (Plot 15, Row 1, Grave 15) by well-meaning Navy Seabees – but his real burial place was a complete mystery. In 1949, Whitehurst was declared permanently non-recoverable.

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, hoped to find one of the missing mass graves near Red 3 – a place called “Cemetery 27” by the Navy;  “8th Marines Cemetery #2” or “Division Cemetery 3” by the Marines. Some forty men were reportedly buried in the area – some identified by name, others unknown. Postwar attempts to find the grave had failed; a large marker commemorated the fallen, but no bodies were buried nearby.

The original burial trench was found beneath a parking lot – quite some distance from the memorial location. As the dig progressed, body after body emerged from the hard-packed sand. Many still had identifiable personal effects: one man, designated “Individual 36” had a dog tag bearing the name of “J O WHITEHURST.”

History Flight had not set out specifically to find James Whitehurst – but they solved a decades-old mystery. The identification tag and a near-perfect dental match solidified his identification; a DNA sample from a nephew confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt. Whitehurst was officially accounted for on 4 January 2017, and returned to his family in Alabama for burial.

CENOTAPHS
Honolulu Memorial, Tablets of the Missing

FINAL BURIAL
Cowarts Cemetery, Cowarts, Alabama