Larry Ronald Roberts

Larry Roberts was born in Grainfield, Kansas on 31 December 1924. He was the oldest of three children raised by Melvin and Lorieta Roberts, and spent his youth in Kansas and Illinois before the family settled in rural Faulkner County, Arkansas.

Little is known about Larry’s childhood. He turned seventeen shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and enlisted a few days after his birthday.

Larry Roberts enlisted from Little Rock, Arkansas on 10 January 1942. After completing boot camp in San Diego, he was shipped out to American Samoa and assigned to duty with the Second Defense Battalion. Roberts joined the crew of a 3-inch M3 anti-aircraft gun, and spent his days training for an anticipated Japanese attack.

The threat of invasion felt very real in the spring of 1942 – especially when news of Corregidor reached the garrison – but as the tide turned and America took an offensive role, the tension receded. Roberts would spend more than a year stationed in Samoa with little change to the daily routine. The garrison troops followed the news from the fighting front with interest, and many itched to get into action themselves. Only the occasional arrival of new faces broke the monotony – as in April 1943, when a sizable detachment of replacements joined the Defense Battalion ranks. Roberts might have met and befriended Private Ben H. Gore, a burly footballer from Kentucky, at around this time.

On 3 October 1943, Roberts, Gore, and a handful of other men transferred from the AA group to the Special Weapons group. One week later, they boarded the USS William P. Biddle and sailed for New Zealand to join up with the rest of the Second Marine Division. The Defense Battalion men participated in training exercises at Hawke’s Bay, spent a few days ashore in Wellington, and then re-boarded the Biddle. Their next landfall would be under fire.

The objective of Operation GALVANIC was to secure a tiny island called Betio (or Bititu), barely large enough to support an airstrip. Yet an airstrip it had – a vital one to both American and Japanese strategic aims. Once Marine assault units secured the island, the defense battalion personnel would come ashore to set up their heavier weapons, ready for any retaliatory Japanese bombing attacks.

It is not clear when PFC Roberts landed in Betio; he likely came ashore on 23 November as the Biddle completed offloading her embarked troops and cargo on that date – and landing Defense Battalion troops and equipment earlier would have placed them at unnecessary risk in the hellish assault on the tiny island. Regardless of the exact date, as soon as Gore arrived on Betio he would have set to work helping to emplace his battery’s weapons around the perimeter of the newly captured airfield.

While the Defense Battalion troops were trained to keep their eyes on the sky, they still had to be wary of threats on the ground. The Japanese garrison was largely wiped out in the Marine assault, but small groups of stragglers hid in bunkers or trenches and waited for a chance to strike at a high-value target. It appears that one such group attacked the Special Weapons Group on the morning of 25 November 1943. An exchange of grenades and rifle fire lasted several minutes; the Marines managed to fend off their attackers, but paid a price.

At 0710 hours, a rifle bullet struck PFC John T. O’Brien in the right arm. In the same moment, a grenade exploded beside PFC Ben Gore, inflicting fatal wounds. Fifteen minutes later, another rifle bullet killed PFC Larry R. Roberts.

While corpsmen fussed over O’Brien and sent him to the beach for evacuation, other Marines gathered the bodies of Gore and Roberts for burial. They chose a spot “near scene of death” and soon the two men were underground. Strangely, although the Second Defense Battalion would garrison Betio for several weeks, the graves of Gore and Roberts were left “unmarked” and “unnumbered.”

The news of Larry’s death arrived as a shock to his parents, and Lorieta vented her anguish in a long letter to President Roosevelt.

Dear Sir,

I feel like I just can’t be satisfied until I tell someone of the way I feel like I have been treated about my son, and I know of no one who would be any better to tell it to than you. He was enlisted in the U. S. Marines 2 years ago, the 10th of January this month. He never had a furlough once and never got a chance to tell us anything any time any more than he was allright and like the Marines. He never got a chance to have a picture made while in the Marines. Now he has been killed somewhere in the Southwest Pacific and we haven’t a picture of him while in the Marines. He was kept over there on some Islands and God only knows what he went thru. We never got a word from him from Sept. until the 7th of December when his last letter was stamped. He said he never had a chance to write home & was not in a position where he could & he wanted a furlough to come home so bad said he wanted to see us all so bad.

He would have been 19 years old if lived until his birthday the 31 of Dec. He was only 17 when he enlisted. I feel like he certainly done his part for our country and didn’t deserve to be treated the way he was. Then when he was killed we never got a telegram about him, not a word from the War Dept. or nothing, only a letter from the Navy Relief Society asking if we needed help, said he had lost his life. I do think I had a right to receive word the way other people did about him. We are sure he had been in several different battles in the Southwest Pacific, I sure do think we were treated mighty bad after losing him this way. And everyone that knows about it feels the same way.

It seems like no one knows how much he meant to us here at home. I don’t think there are many boys that did so much for our country, as young as he was he never complained about anything, always said he could take it. But it looks to me like no one there appreciated what he did for them and all of us. And I think someone in charge of them must have been a mighty poor officer to send those Marines in on that Island at Tarawa like they did. They surely didn’t use very good judgement. I would like to know if there is any way that I could get in touch with this commander or anyone I could correspond with that could tell me something about him or what happened.

We never heard a word about him except a letter like the Navy Society sends everyone except five little words extra (Our Son lost his life) was all. I would like to know more than that about it, if it is so. I heard a telegram and 2 other letters had been sent to our old address just like the one we got from the Navy Relief but I don’t know what became of them. I certainly never received them.

If there is anything you can do about it please let me know. I certainly would appreciate it much.

A marker with Larry Robert’s name eventually went up in Cemetery 11, Grave 1, Row 3, Plot 6, but this was only a memorial. Search efforts in the late 1940s failed to uncover any trace of his remains, and he was declared permanently non-recoverable in 1949.

In 2015, archaeologists from non-profit group History Flight located the site of Cemetery 27 – a mass burial site overlooked by the searches in 1946. Original records named 24 Marines buried in this cemetery, “plus sixteen unknowns.” The archaeologists uncovered two rows of bodies, for a total of 48 remains.

Buried side by side in the second row – just where they were laid in November 1943 – were the bodies of Larry Roberts and Ben Gore. Dental and DNA analysis confirmed Roberts’ identity, and he was officially accounted for on 4 January 2017.

CENOTAPHS
Honolulu Memorial, Tablets of the Missing

FINAL BURIAL
Arlington National Cemetery