Raymond Clark Snapp

Raymond Snapp was born in Illinois Bend, Texas, on 8 September 1919. He was the second of Travis and Frances Victoria  (Brawner) Snapp’s five children, and spent his youth in small towns across north Texas, including Petersburg, Sudan, Littlefield, and Bonita.

Very little is known about Ray’s early life; his father died of heart failure in 1937, and Ray decided to head to California. When he registered for Selective Service in 1941, Ray was living at the Seneca Hotel in San Francisco and working at a cannery.

On 9 October 1941, Ray Snapp enlisted in the Marine Corps from a recruiting office in Modesto, California. He was sworn in the next day, and within hours was on his way to San Diego for boot camp. Immediately after earning his Eagle, Globe, and Anchor, Private Snapp was assigned to Fox Company, Second Battalion, 8th Marines – the unit that would be his home for the rest of his life.

Snapp was on duty in California when he learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Events unfolded rapidly: by 5 January 1942, his regiment was sea and bound for Tutuila, American Samoa. Snapp would spend several months on garrison duty, preparing to repel an expected Japanese attack that never came. During this time, he was promoted to Private First Class.

In late October 1942, the 8th Marines sailed for the Solomon Islands and joined the battle for Guadalcanal on 4 November 1942. PFC Snapp quickly learned how dangerous the Japanese fighting man could be: on 23 November, his battalion attacked well-emplaced fortifications along a ridge and suffered heavy casualties. Snapp was felled by mortar shrapnel in his groin and rushed back to a hospital near Henderson Field. The following day, he and several buddies were evacuated by plane to Cub One Hospital at Espiritu Santo. Snapp’s wounds were serious, and he spent several months recovering at “Santo.”

PFC Snapp re-joined Fox Company in New Zealand. During the spring and summer of 1943, the 8th Marines rested and re-trained at Camp Paekakariki outside of Wellington. As a combat veteran with scars and a Purple Heart medal, Snapp could command the respect of replacement troops fresh from the States. In July, he received a promotion to corporal, which likely put him in charge of a fire team of three other Marines. When he wasn’t in camp or in training, Snapp was likely enjoying the sights and scenes of Wellington on liberty.

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.

Corporal Snapp 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. Snapp 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 Raymond Snapp in Cemetery 11  (Plot 5, Row 3, Grave 3) 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 Corporal Raymond Snapp.

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-275” was exhumed from Section E, Grave 733, and sent to a forensic laboratory for analysis. This unknown was originally recovered from “Cemetery 11“ – formerly “West Division Cemetery” on the “bird’s beak” promontory of Betio. While investigators in the 1940s could piece together a detailed description of what he might have looked like in life, they were unable to reach any definite conclusions about his identity.

Modern technology, including advanced dental and anthropological analysis, and the comparison of chest radiographs, solved the mystery. X-275 was Raymond Clark Snapp. How he came to be buried in the West Division Cemetery – essentially on the opposite side of the island from where he landed – will probably never be known for certain.

Raymond Snapp was officially identified on 15 June 2017. His remains were returned to his closest living relative for final burial in Northwest Louisiana Veterans Cemetery.

CENOTAPHS
Honolulu Memorial, Tablets of the Missing

FINAL BURIAL
Northwest Louisiana Veterans Cemetery, Keithville, Louisiana