Reported Burials
1943
Remains Recovered
1946
Remains Recovered
2019
Unaccounted For
2021
The First Battalion, 6th Marines arrived on Betio in rubber boats and under the cover of darkness on 21 November 1943. As the Division reserve for Operation GALVANIC, they were spared the frontal assaults on the heavily defended Red Beaches. Instead, they were tapped to stage what amounted to an amphibious flanking maneuver on Green Beach, the westernmost point of Betio. The waters were known to be mined, but 1/6 had special training in the use of rubber boats which could easily navigate the Japanese obstacles. Their approach was not without danger: two LVTs hauling supplies and medical personnel hit mines and exploded, dealing 1/6 its first casualties of the operation. However, most of the Marines reached shore unscathed. Their sister battalion, 3/6, came ashore the following morning.
Early on 22 November, 1/6 attacked along Betio’s southern coastline – much to the relief of the 2nd and 8th Marines, who had been flinging themselves frontally against strong Japanese defenses for two days. Moving in a column of companies, they assaulted position after position and by noon made considerable progress along the island. Heat, casualties, and Japanese desperation slowed the battalion in the afternoon, and by early evening they were about even with the turning circle at the eastern end of the runway. Here they stopped to set up defensive positions. This was a prudent move: the Japanese counterattacked no less than three times that night. First Sergeant Louis Michelony of D/1/6, a career Marine, described the fighting as “one of the roughest, toughest battles ever. It was a son-of-a-gun! I mean, they threw everything at us!”
Private Wayland Stevens, also of D/1/6, described the hell that befell his friends:
We all hit the deck and started for cover. At that time, Baumbach was killed, and at the same time Drumheiser was killed. John Gillen set up his gun and after firing a few bursts he was also killed and one of the other fellows took over, and he was wounded and had to leave and then I moved over and took over.
At that time, I saw on the side of the bunker one of the squads trying to set up their gun and after a few seconds I saw one of the boys go down by machine gun fire, and later learned it was the boy Hatch. At this time I was relieved of the gun and sent to help another squad.
Similar scenes were repeated up and down the line all night as the Japanese staged an all-out banzai attack that nearly broke the Marine line. The morning light showed several hundred Japanese troops – most of Betio’s last defenders – lying dead on the sand in front of 1/6. In turn, the Marines suffered several dozen casualties including about thirty killed in action – most from Able and Baker Companies. As Third Battalion, 6th Marines passed through to complete the conquest of Betio, First Battalion steeled their nerves for the unpleasant duty of collecting the dead.
I told each platoon they would have to send so many men to pick up Japanese and Marines. Where we were, there was no graveyard. There was a big tank trap, so we laid Japanese down on one side of the tank trap, and on the other side, we laid Marines down. In order to be able to stand this, we had gotten parachutes, torn the silk off, and made masks. The smell was sickening, just terrible! There were four men with a poncho, and they would pick up a dead man (or part of a man)….
When we got to [Lieutenant] Fricks I took my mess gear out, and I carved his name and officer number and rank on it, and I put “KIA 23 November 1943.” We didn’t have crosses then.
When we identified and buried a man, we took a dog tag off of him, put one on his toe, and we didn’t know what to do with the other dog tag. So finally, we found out that we had to give them to the chaplain…. We marked the man, if he had a toe, by putting the dog tag on his right toe. In some cases, we just put them around their neck…. See, these were things that they hadn’t told us before the battle.
Private Stevens was on one of those burial parties. “I assisted in the digging of the graves,” he wrote in 1948. “We dug the graves just about four feet deep and before burying any of the boys we searched them for their personal effects and also to make sure they had identification tags. We found ourselves some trash wood that we inserted into the ground and then…. scratched in the names of the dead boys on the mess gear and hung this equipment over the board [marker]…. One of the identification tags we left on the body and the other tag we just loosely hung over the top of the board.” Stevens recalled burying his friends Baumbach, Hill, Drumheiser, Gillen, and Hatch – plus, he thought, Private Jacob Cruz – all together.
However, Stevens also knew that finding his friends would be difficult. He joined the Navy when his Marine enlistment ended, and his post-war travels included a stop at Betio. When he visited the old battlefield, “we could find no markers or signs of Jimmie [Hatch] or the others” because “the Navy went in and moved the crosses without moving the bodies.”
Conflicts & Discrepancies
• John Langan and Homer Miller were not on the original burial list for Row D, but were recovered from that location in 2019. It is presumed that they were the two men buried as unknowns in 1943.
• Manuel Nunes was the only man from the original burial list recovered by the 604th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company. It is not known if he was found in an isolated grave, or possibly in Row B of Cemetery 33 which was being excavated at the time of his identification.
While the 6th Marines called their large trench burial “Gilbert Islands Cemetery,” the 2nd Marine Division’s Graves Registration Section came up with the name “East Division Cemetery, Row D.” This designation was problematic in that it tied the row, both administratively and contextually, with Rows A, B, and C of the East Division Cemetery. Photographs of East Division clearly show the first three rows; as far as is known, “D” was never photographed.
For reasons long since forgotten, Row D never received the “reconstruction and beautification” of other burial grounds. Like Cemetery C, it was obliterated to make way for base construction – the needs of the men and machines operating from Hawkins Field outweighed the importance of maintaining another of Betio’s many cemeteries. The Seabees who worked on the beautification project in early 1944 had access to a list of Marine Corps casualties, and made sure that every man from Row D had an individual cross set up in the new “Cemetery 33” that stood along the main runway of Hawkins Field. However, the original location was never marked on any maps.
When the 604th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company arrived on Betio in 1946 to exhume the remains of wartime dead, they quickly found that most of the surviving markers had no bodies buried beneath. They spent weeks working on Cemetery 33 alone, eventually locating Rows A through C and most (but not all) of the men buried therein. While there are no specific references in their operation report or unit journal, it is likely that they made a cursory search for “Row D” in the general vicinity of the other three rows. To their chagrin, however, they came up almost entirely empty handed. By the end of the operation, they could cross only one name off the Row D list – PFC Manuel Nunes – and this may have been the result of a typographical error.
Nunes belonged to M/3/8th Marines, not the 6th Marines, and was killed in action they day before the charge that killed most of the Marines who wound up in Row D. It would be unusual (though not impossible) for him to be buried in this specific location. Furthermore, while surviving records don’t indicate where exactly Nunes’ remains were found, his report of interment shows that he was buried in Lone Palm Cemetery on 22 March 1946 – around the time the 604th was working on Row B.
Nor is Nunes the only such puzzle. While “Row D” was not marked in any way, one of Betio’s numerous “isolated graves” did bear the name of a Marine interred there. Cemetery 35 was a lone marker commemorating “J. B. Morris.” The only Tarawa fatality by that name, Sergeant Jerome Bernard Morris, served with B/1/6th Marines and was buried in Row D, #7. The isolated marker sat to the west of Cemetery 33 near an aircraft maintenance workshop. Names for isolated graves were not chosen at random, but it is no longer known why Morris had this individual isolated marker – especially as he was later found to be in Row D after all.
Finally, PFC Clarence Ell Drumheiser was accounted for in April 2018. Drumheiser was one of the Marines buried by Wayland Stevens – yet his body wound up in East Division Cemetery proper (Row B, Grave 18). Like Morris’ marker, the full story of how Drumheiser wound up buried separately from his buddies will probably never be known. Unfortunately, while the 604th QMGRC located his body, they were unable to identify the young Marine from California – and his family had to suffer just the same when he was declared non-recoverable. Drumheiser finally made it back to the United States for burial almost 75 years after he died on Betio.
Although “Row D” was effectively erased from the surface of Betio, original records left a few breadcrumbs that hinted at the original location. Accounts from veterans like Lewis Michelony and Wayland Stevens provided some clues – for example, Michelony’s recollection of burying the dead in a tank trap and Stevens’ hand-drawn map. The area where the 6th Marines fought their desperate battle on the night of 22 November is well-known; the cemetery, therefore, had to be in the general vicinity. And, while no plot charts or diagrams of “Row D” are known to exist, the 6th Marines included map coordinates on some casualty reports. The reference to “KH 283072 D-2 Map 14Oct43” appears on casualty cards and muster rolls for eight Marines who fell on 22 November 1943. Unfortuantely the KH grid system is unique to a very specific set of maps created just prior to and after the battle for Betio (the “D-2,” or intelligence, map was used for pre-invasion planning) and is not easily replicated – but a rough estimate placed “KH 238072” as some distance to the west of Cemetery 33. And, while the coordinates alone were not entirely useful, the casualty card for PFC Charles Donald Miller listed both the map coordinates and “East Division Cemetery, Row D, Grave 11.” This was enough to suggest a correlation.
The non-profit group History Flight began searching for the East Division/Cemetery 33 in 2009 and conducted several archaeological digs in the area. Several sets of human remains were recovered and subsequently identified, but none matched personnel reported buried in “Row D.” This cumulative work supported the theory that “Row D” was not, in fact, part of Cemetery 33 but instead a separate burial feature. Continued investigation, including geo-spatial analysis using the “KH” gridding and surveys with ground-penetrating radar, led to the discovery of a new trench some distance to the west of Cemetery 33.
History Flight archaeologists began excavating this new trench in March of 2019, and found American remains in short order. In May, the first two identifications – Private Channing R. Whitaker and PFC Kenneth W. Likens – were announced by the DPAA. “Row D” had officially been found. In just over two years, the remains of all thirty men reported buried there, plus two unknowns (PFC John P. Langan and Private Howard E. Miller) have been accounted for.
However, of the eight Marines whose casualty reports included the KH grid coordinates, three – Charles Miller and Howard Miller – have been found. Five others are still on the missing list. They may be in a laboratory pending final identification, or they may still lie on Betio awaiting another archaeological expedition.
