Robert Junior Carter

Robert was born in Brawley, California on 22 June 1924. He was the oldest child of Robert Samson “Sam” Carter and Trilbia Vivian Carpenter, and was called “Pete” by friends and family. The family moved several times in Pete’s first few years, and grew quickly: JD Carter was born in Oklahoma in 1926, and Mary Louise arrived in Oregon in 1928. By 1930 – just before the birth of Marquita Carter – the family settled in Le Flore, Oklahoma, to live with Trilbia’s parents.


A terrible tragedy struck the Carters in 1931. Five-year-old JD and two-year-old Mary Louise died within a month of each other. After burying their little children in Rose Hill Cemetery, Sam and Trilbia left Oklahoma for good. They settled in Corvallis, Oregon, to raise the rest of their family.

Pete Carter grew up in Corvallis and attended the local high school. He was a well-built youth – at eighteen, he stood five feet ten inches tall and weighed 160 pounds – with brown eyes and black hair calling out the Choctaw blood he inherited from his father’s side. After leaving school, Pete went to work at Camp Adair, a newly-built Army cantonment where divisions trained for overseas deployment.

Carter registered for Selective Service in June of 1942, when he turned eighteen years old. He was called up six months later – but instead of joining the soldiers at Camp Adair, Carter opted for the Marine Corps. He was officially inducted on 29 January 1943, and sent to San Diego for boot camp.


Private Carter completed his training in April 1943; after the customary spell of mess duty, he was assigned to Camp Pendleton for additional instruction as a carpenter. This failed to pan out, and ultimately Carter was posted to the 26th Replacement Draft and sent overseas. He arrived in New Zealand in the fall of 1943, and on 10 October joined George Company, Second Battalion, 8th Marines at Camp Paekakariki outside of Wellington.


He would have precious little time to experience the exotic sights of New Zealand, train with his new outfit, or even get to bond with his fellow George Company Marines. Just a few weeks after Carter arrived, 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.

PFC Robert Junior Carter was last seen alive during the landing operation. When he failed to return to his company after the battle, he was reported as missing in action – in the chaos of combat, he effectively disappeared. No survivors were able to confirm his death, nor could eyewitnesses to his burial be found. In March of 1944, he was officially declared dead: it seemed the only logical conclusion.

In 1944, Navy toops garrisoning Betio embarked on a program of “beautification” which involved tearing down many of the original Marine Corps burial grounds in favor of formal cemeteries. While the memorials were built atop, or at least near, to the original graves, no effort was expended to move the bodies. As a result, the memorial marker with Robert Carter’s name – located in Cemetery 33, Plot 14, Row 1, Grave 11 – was not indicative of his actual resting place. This was known to, but not fully appreciated by, the 604th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company, which arrived on Betio in 1946 to exhume the battle casualties. They discovered that Carter’s marker, like many others, stood atop empty sand. As a result, hundreds of battle casualties were either unidentified or missed completely, and were declared permanently non-recoverable in 1949.

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, hoped to find one of the missing mass graves near Red 3 – a place called “Cemetery 27” by the Navy;  “8th Marines Cemetery #2” or “Division Cemetery 3” by the Marines. Some forty men were reportedly buried in the area – some identified by name, others unknown. Postwar attempts to find the grave had failed; a large marker commemorated the fallen, but no bodies were buried nearby.

The History Flight team started their operations near the spot where PFC Herman Sturmer‘s remains were found in 2011. They soon discovered an original “burial feature” containing the remains of several men wearing Marine Corps boondockers. At the end of this row was the partial skeleton of a man with his entrenching tool still strapped to his back and a USMC ring on his finger.

Author Clay Bonnyman Evans, who was on hand to witness the discovery of the main Cemetery 27 trench, noted that archaeologist Kristen Baker was able to “provisionally identify” this man as Pete Carter based on dental comparisons and artifacts alone. An earlier dig by JPAC had missed Carter by inches; the hand stretched towards the filled-in trench “almost like he was reaching out.”

After seventy years, the mystery of Robert Carter’s burial was solved. At some point after the battle, he was buried in a small grave alongside five other Marines several yards south of the Cemetery 27 site. The exact circumstances of his death will never be known, nor will the full story of how he came to be buried where he was – but on 10 November 2015, Carter was officially accounted for and removed from the list of the missing.


The following July, Carter’s remains were returned to his family for burial. Four of his siblings survived to see him brought back for burial in Arlington National Cemetery.

CENOTAPHS
Honolulu Memorial, Tablets of the Missing

FINAL BURIAL
Arlington National Cemetery