John William MacDonald

John MacDonald was born in Somerville, Massachusetts, on 14 April 1924. Very little is known about his life before the war; he was the only child of John and Dorothy Helen (Cowan) MacDonald, and grew up in the town of Lynn. By 1940, the MacDonalds were living in a boarding house on Boston’s Botolph Street; John Senior worked as a meat salesman while Dorothy kept house and John Junior attended school.

Young John enlisted in the Marine Corps on 22 January 1942, at the age of seventeen. Four days later, he was on the opposite side of the country and sweating out his introduction to Marine life at Recruit Depot San Diego. After boot camp and a short spell of base guard duty, MacDonald was sent to Tutuila, American Samoa, to join Fox Company, Second Battalion, 8th Marines. MacDonald would spend several months on garrison duty, preparing to repel an expected Japanese attack that never came.

In late October 1942, the 8th Marines sailed for the Solomon Islands and joined the battle for Guadalcanal on 4 November 1942. Unfortunately, any stories of MacDonald’s experiences during the campaign have since been lost; he managed to survive nearly three months of combat without serious illness or injury, and in February 1943 sailed for New Zealand,

During the spring and summer of 1943, the 8th Marines rested and re-trained at Camp Paekakariki outside of Wellington. Despite his youth, Private MacDonald was a combat veteran and could command the respect of new Marines joining the company from the States. When he wasn’t in camp or in training, MacDonald was likely enjoying the sights and scenes of Wellington on liberty. His hoped-for promotion was slow to come, but in the late summer of 1943, MacDonald finally sewed on the stripe of a Private First Class.

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 John MacDonald. He was simply recorded as “killed in action” by “gunshot wounds” – no further specifics of his fate are known.

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. John MacDonald was one of the men buried here in “Division Cemetery 3.”

MacDonald’ 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. (For reasons that are no longer known, MacDonald’s name was omitted from this memorial plaque. He had an individual marker in Cemetery 33, Plot 4, Row 1, Grave 9.)

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 remains of 46 men were recovered by History Flight and turned over to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency for forensic analysis.

Laboratory work including dental and anthropological analysis, plus chest radiograph comparisons, solved the mystery. The original records were accurate: John MacDonald had been buried in the trench near the beach where he died. An official identification was made on 13 June 2016. Finding living relatives proved a challenge – John had been an only child, and his parents were long since dead – but genealogists prevailed, and MacDonald’s remains were at last returned to his family for burial in 2018.

CENOTAPHS
Honolulu Memorial, Tablets of the Missing

FINAL BURIAL
Massachusetts National Cemetery