Tarawa Cemetery 22

The isolated grave of a single unknown individual, located inland from Beach Red One.

The 604th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company located this burial in 1946 and exhumed a single set of remains. They found no clues to the deceased man’s identity, and on 3 April 1946 buried “Betio X-230” in Lone Palm Cemetery, Plot 2 Row 10 Grave 3.

Anthropologists at the Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu examined X-230 in 1948, but while they were able to describe basic features – “a short young man of 22-24 years with average body build weighing 150-155 pounds” – they could not match him to a Tarawa casualty. X-230 was buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, Plot E Grave 735, and he is still unidentified today.