Millard Odom

Sergeant Millard Odom served with King Company, Third Battalion, 2nd Marines.
He was killed in action at the battle of Tarawa on 20 November 1943.

Branch

Marine Corps Regular
Service Number 254722

Current Status

Accounted For
as of 20 August 2018

Recovery Organization

Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency
Read DPAA Press Release

History

Millard Odom was born in Batesville, Arkansas on 21 August 1917, the youngest of Guy and Monnie Odom’s three children. His father died in 1919; two years later, Monnie remarried to Andrew Septimus “Sep” Allen, and moved the family to Texas. Millard grew up in Collingsworth County, where he became a big brother to three half-siblings, one of whom died in infancy.

Millard was nineteen years old and living in Washington state when he decided to enlist in the Marine Corps. He completed his boot training at MCRD San Diego, and after completing additional training at the post’s Sea School, joined the Marine Detachment aboard the fleet battleship USS Mississippi in November, 1936. He would spend more than a year cruising up and down the west coast, and earned his first promotion to Private First Class on February 1938. The following month had an interesting temporary assignment as an orderly for the Surgeon General, US Navy, aboard the USS New Mexico.

With that one exception, the “Ole Miss” was Odom’s home until 29 July 1939. On that date he traded sea duty for shore duty at the Naval Ammunition Depot in Puget Sound, Washington. This was an easy duty station, and Odom passed another year in uniform without any serious incidents or mishaps. With his twenty-third birthday – and the end of his hitch – fast approaching, Odom volunteered to extend his enlistment by another two years. He was rewarded with a promotion to corporal, and a reassignment to Company B, First Battalion, 8th Marines in San Diego.

Odom was on duty in San Diego when he heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor. He had recently joined the headquarters company of the Second Marine Division, and probably expected to ship overseas to fight the Japanese at a moment’s notice. However, it would be yet another year before he left California. Finally, in the spring of 1943, Odom boarded a transport ship bound for Australia. His unit, the 11th Replacement Battalion, was slated to help rebuild infantry units shattered in the fighting for Guadalcanal.

On 6 April 1943, Sergeant Odom reported to Company K, Third Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment. He was designated as a squad leader in the Third Platoon, under 2Lt. James L. “Jim” Fawcett, a “mustang” who had been promoted up through the ranks. While some of Odom’s men were green replacements, like PFC Bernard Zerr, a number were probably veterans of Guadalcanal. In the months of training that followed, Odom got to know each of his men well, and practiced the skills he would need to lead them into combat – something he had prepared for, but never experienced, during seven years in uniform.

Millard Odom would get only one chance to demonstrate his combat leadership on 20 November 1943. His squad was loaded into an LVT along with Lieutenant Fawcett’s command group, and churned into Red Beach One in the wake of one of their sister platoons. Fawcett saw the LVT directly ahead “disappear in an immense cloud of smoke and steel splinters” just seconds before their vehicle lurched ashore. The lieutenant led a handful of men out to the left of the burning amphibious vehicle. Odom and five riflemen jumped out to the right, cutting themselves off from the rest of their platoon. The little group managed to make it to the questionable cover of the sea wall.

PFC Zerr daringly poked his head over the wall, looking for friendly and enemy forces alike, and provided a “running commentary” on the action to his buddies. At one point, he directed a question to Sergeant Odom. “Odom was kneeling less than a yard away with his head resting on a log in the seawall,” records historian Eric Hammel in Bloody Tarawa. “Zerr asked his question twice, but got no reply. Odom, whose starched green dungaree shirt sported a neat little hole an inch or two below the left armpit, had taken a round through the heart.” Odom may even have been hit twice – his USMC casualty card records he suffered a gunshot wound in the neck. Marine Corps Graves Registration reported his burial in the East Division Cemetery, Row C, Grave 25.

In May of 1946, members of the 604th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company arrived on Betio to exhume remains from the old Marine cemeteries. They began with “Cemetery 33” – a reconstructed version of East Division Cemetery – and found to their disgust that the grave markers were all memorials. Very few of the remains they found had any means of identification. Neither the 604th nor the Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu were able to identify Sergeant Odom, and in 1949 he was declared non-recoverable.

Many decades later, on 27 February 2017 the remains of “Betio X-273” were exhumed from Plot F, Grave 1222, National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. X-273 had been recovered from Cemetery 11, and was described as “an average-sized well muscled man of about 25 – 28 years of age” with “rather full cheek bone regions” and a prominent chin, who “probably walked with his toes pointed outwards.” He still had the remnants of a pair of rough leather boondockers. Using modern forensic methods including DNA comparison, the DPAA was able to identify Sergeant Millard Odom, and he was officially accounted for on 20 August 2018 – one day before his 101st birthday.

Millard Odom was buried in Miramar National Cemetery on 20 November 2018.

Decorations

Purple Heart

For wounds resulting in his death, 20 November 1943.

Next Of Kin Address

Address of mother, Mrs. Monnie M. Allen.

Location Of Loss

Sergeant Odom was killed along the seawall on the Beach Red One sector.