Ray James

Ray James was born at Sylvarena, Mississippi, on 15 October 1922. He came from a large family – Luther and Sallie (Huff) James raised twelve children – and Ray was the youngest but two. Of all his siblings, he was particularly close to one: his identical twin brother, Roy. The boys were so similar that they could easily pass for each other – a trick of which they were very fond. Ray spent his entire childhood in Sylvarena. Life revolved around the family farm, school – most James children attended through high school – and the occasional social event in Bay Springs.

In June of 1942, Ray and Roy became eligible for Selective Service. Rather than wait to be called up – and risk being separated – the twins decided to volunteer together.

The brothers James enlisted in the Marine Corps on 3 December 1942 and were soon on their way to San Diego for boot camp. They did well at their training (evidently refraining from pulling the “twin trick” on a drill instructor) and in January 1943 were accepted to Parachute Training School at Camp Gillespie. Neither one managed to complete this challenging task: Roy dropped out when an injury sent him to the hospital in April 1943, and Ray washed out the following month. This event marked the last time the brothers would serve together.

Ray James spent a short while as a tank trainee before landing at the Camp Elliott infantry school. That summer, both Roy and Ray sailed for New Zealand as members of replacement battalions (the 22nd and 24th, respectively) and upon arrival were assigned to the Second Marine Division. Roy became an artilleryman with Battery A, 10th Marines, while Ray joined an infantry outfit: Fox Company, Second Battalion, 8th Marines. He embarked on yet another round of training – but this time the tactics were more advanced, the exercises more realistic, and his instructors combat veterans of Guadalcanal.

In October 1943, 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.

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.

Ray James was one of the hundreds who fell on the battle’s first day. No eyewitness accounts of his final moments are known to exist, nor was an official cause of death ever reported; he was simply “killed in action.”

Nor was there any concrete information regarding the disposition of his remains. James was reportedly interred in the “Division Cemetery, Tarawa” – but there were several “Division Cemeteries,” and this information was seemingly applied as a catch-all for any Marine whose body was not identifiable.

In 1944, Seabees from the Tarawa garrison force rebuilt the old Marine cemeteries into beautified memorials. They put a marker for Ray James in Cemetery 11  (Plot 2, Row 1, Grave 2) but this was purely commemorative; his real burial place was entirely unknown.

The 604th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company arrived at Betio in 1946 and set to work exhuming the memorial cemeteries built on top of the original burial grounds. Identification of remains was a serious challenge, and hundreds of men were declared non-recoverable in 1949. Among them was PFC Ray James.

Remains that were recovered but not identified were buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. Many decades later,  a DPAA directive ordered renewed efforts to discover their names. “Betio Unknown X-163” was exhumed from Section E, Grave 638, and sent to a forensic laboratory for analysis. This unknown was originally recovered from “Cemetery 33“ – formerly “East Division Cemetery” near the airfield, once the largest burial ground on Betio.

While X-163 had stumped investigators in the 1940s, modern technology – including advanced dental and anthropological analysis, and the comparison of chest radiographs – solved the mystery. After his death in battle, Ray James had been brought to the East Division Cemetery for burial as an unknown. After three different forensic examinations in three different times, he was finally matched to X-163 on 7 June 2017.

CENOTAPHS
Honolulu Memorial, Tablets of the Missing

FINAL BURIAL
Bethany Cemetery, Sylvarena, Mississippi

Roy James spent the rest of the war with A/1/10th Marines and returned home in 1945. According to family lore, Roy learned of Ray’s death when an F/2/8 Marine stopped him and said “I thought you’d been killed.” That unknown Marine witnessed Ray’s death on Tarawa. Roy died of cancer in 1966, at the age of 43,