Wesley Lee Kroenung, Jr.
Staff Sergeant Wesley L. “Whitey” Kroenung, Jr. served with Headquarters Company, V Amphibious Corps.
He was killed in action at the battle of Tarawa on 20 November 1943.
Branch
Marine Corps Regular
Service Number 820197
Current Status
Accounted For
as of 16 April 2019
Recovery Organization
Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency
Read DPAA Press Release
History
Wesley Lee Kroenung, Junior, was born to Ella and Wesley (Sr). Kroenung on 24 May 1918. He spent his early years in St. Louis, Missouri, growing up with his younger sister Marjorie Mae.
The elder Wesley was a billing clerk with an artistic side; during the 1920s, he put aside his clerk’s ledger and started picking up advertising gigs. Following Ella’s death from acute lobar pneumonia in 1928, Wesley Senior remarried (a woman named Ruth, last name unknown) and moved his family over to Kansas City, taking a permanent job with The General Outdoor Advertising Company. Work sent him to California, and by 1936 Wesley Senior was a permanent resident of Los Angeles. The two Kroenung children wound up living with their grandparents in East St. Louis.[1]
The elder Wesley was a billing clerk with an artistic side; during the 1920s, he put aside his clerk’s ledger and started picking up advertising gigs. Following Ella’s death from acute lobar pneumonia in 1928, Wesley Senior remarried (a woman named Ruth, last name unknown) and moved his family over to Kansas City, taking a permanent job with The General Outdoor Advertising Company. Work sent him to California, and by 1936 Wesley Senior was a permanent resident of Los Angeles. The two Kroenung children wound up living with their grandparents in East St. Louis.[1]
Wesley Junior probably exhibited some of his father’s artistic inclinations as a boy; he might have picked up a camera as a teenager. Unfortunately not much information is available about his school years. He did eventually move out to California to join his father, but instead of following in Senior’s advertising footsteps, Junior went to work for Lockheed. Specifically, he was employed by Tom Triplett and Victor Barton, pioneering metallurgists who developed an X-ray machine for detecting flaws in airframes.(2)
When he registered for Selective Service in 1940, Wesley might have banked on the thought that he was working in an essential wartime industry, and his chances of being called up were slim.
In early 1943, however, Kroenung received his induction notice. He reported as ordered, and entered the Marine Corps on 13 February. Kroenung completed boot camp in early April and was immediately assigned to duty with Headquarters Company, Amphibious Corps, Pacific Fleet. He was rated as a rifle sharpshooter, but the Corps was more interested in another kind of shooting: Private Kroenung’s first mission was to Camp Pendleton to take photographs.
The popular success of John Ford’s The Battle of Midway – an exciting documentary film shot during the battle – was not lost on the Corps; nor was the public interest in photographs and stories emanating from the Solomon Islands. A dedicated combat correspondents program was launched in 1942; by 1943, the Marines were making strides into training their own photographers and motion cameramen. In the summer of 1943, a number of talented photographers were selected for training at the Academy for Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; “Whitey” Kroenung – so called for his shock of platinum blonde hair – was among them. He traded in the drab classrooms of Pendleton for the Taft Building on Hollywood & Vine, home of many major film studios. He learned to compose shots, handle cameras, and tell a story that would align with the Corps’ public relations needs. In August of 1943, Kroenung made the meteoric jump in rank from private to staff sergeant; that October, he joined Headquarters Company, V Amphibious Corps as a public relations cameraman.
At the beginning of November, Staff Sergeant Kroenung received a set of secret orders. He joined Captain Eugene McNerney, First Lieutenant John Popham, and PFC Harry Jackson en route to Pearl Harbor, where they boarded a PBY Catalina flying boat, and set off across the Pacific. They were headed for New Zealand, where the 2nd Marine Division was busily preparing for an amphibious invasion in the Gilbert Islands. The Division had its own photographic section headed by TSgt. Norm Hatch; Kroenung’s small unit would act as observers for VAC. Jackson remembered conversing with Lt. Colonel Evans Carlson, the famous Raider officer, during the three day voyage.[3]
The Catalina arrived at Efate in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) on 8 November 1943. As they touched down, Kroenung might have seen the invasion fleet carrying the 2nd Marine Division steaming out of Havannah Harbor. The assault Marines had one final rehearsal before going into combat; the VAC contingent probably spent their few days ashore finalizing their own mission plans. Kroenung may have shot some footage of the base while Jackson, a talented artist, probably searched for some sketch inspiration. By 12 October, they were aboard the USS Monrovia along with Brigadier General Leo Hermle’s command group and Landing Team 3/8 – the Third Battalion, 8th Marines.
The Monrovia arrived off the coast of Betio, in the Tarawa atoll, early in the morning of 20 November 1943. Her troops were intended as a floating reserve to be called in if the situation required; the Navy had promised to “obliterate” the tiny island, and the men joked that they would only need to their shovels to bury all the enemy corpses. The biggest drama of the early morning occurred when a Marine set off a demolition grenade, injuring eight men in a troop compartment. Sporadic Japanese shells sent up splashes near the transports, temporarily chasing the ships from their loading area, but by 0730 the Monrovia had all her boats in the water and the Marines were beginning to board.[4] Wesley Kroenung and Harry Jackson, loaded down with cameras, film, and sketch pads, were among them.
H-Hour was set for 0910; the first waves hit the beach a few minutes later, and the carnage began.
After an hour of circling in the choppy seas, the LCVPs holding 3/8th Marines and the small contingent of VAC men were ordered up to the line of departure off Beach Red 3. A sister battalion, 2/8th Marines, had established a toehold and needed reinforcements. The flat-bottomed boats gunned their engines – and one by one slammed to a stop, grounded on Betio’s coral reef, hundreds of yards from shore. The water was too shallow. A few tracked LVTs that had survived the first wave motored out to pick up a handful of men, but most of the boats simply dropped their ramps. Obediently, the Marines rushed out and into the water.
“Unfortunately, the water was deep, well over a man’s head in places, and some of the Marines, loaded with equipment, drowned,” relates the Marine Corps’ monograph of the battle. “The men scattered upon leaving the boats and deployed in a wide formation. Then the enemy opened up with 40-mm. machine-gun and mortar fire, causing heavy casualties and scattering the formation. Out of the first wave about 100 got ashore and paused to reorganize.”[5]
On the right of the line (the western edge of Red 3), a long pier extended out to the coral reef. The Marines who landed here were somewhat more fortunate: they could cling to the side of the pier and make their way ashore with some protection, holding their weapons above their heads and out of the water. Jackson and Kroenung, however, did not have this option. They had to keep their cameras and papers dry – ruining them with salt water would erase their purpose for being on Betio at all. So Jackson climbed up the ramp onto the pier itself, with Kroenung close behind.
As they made their way towards the island, the Marines witnessed the aftermath of the first close combat of the battle. The pier had been assaulted and taken by a scout/sniper unit in the minutes before H-Hour, and casualties from both sides lay dead or groaning along its length. “Everyone who wasn’t dead was wounded, once, twice, three times,” Jackson remembered. “There was 85 percent mortality on that pier. Guys were calling for their mates. Cries of the wounded everywhere: ‘Corpsman, Corpsman.'” The shock must have been extreme, especially to inexperienced Marines like Jackson and Kroenung. Just two weeks ago, they’d been in Honolulu; now they were at the end of the world.
At the end of the pier, a low barricade of single palm logs provided the only cover. Jackson dove for its limited safety as a Japanese mortar barrage landed.
Whitey, he was platinum blonde, and his hair stuck straight up like a porcupine's. He had no face, no face at all. The whole skull opened up, and I could see right into the goddamn – like half a melon – and of course his helmet was blown off and just that white hair sticking up off the top of this goddamn opened-up melon. That was Whitey.
Wesley Kroenung probably never shot a single frame on Betio. The mortar blast, mercifully, caused instantaneous death. Harry Jackson lay still, blearily witnessing the destruction of the Third Battalion, 8th Marines. “I watched the landing boats get hit dead center and blown up and watched the men jump into the water. I watched them wade into point-blank fire…. A lot of men fell into potholes in that red water and drowned…. That water was red. It was absolutely red. All around the pier and clean to the beach the water was red from all that blood.”[6]
Harry Jackson survived his wounds and even returned to record scenes of combat in the Marshall Islands and on Saipan. However, his experiences on Betio left him prone to intense bouts of depression, bad temper, splitting headaches and epileptic seizures. Jackson would become the youngest combat artist in Marine Corps history, and after the war went on to have a long and colorful career as an accomplished artist. He never forgot the sight of “Whitey” Kroenung on the Betio pier. In 1985, Jackson depicted his friend in an untitled notebook sketch; in 2002, he created Salvatur Mundi Crucified in Betio Amnion.[7]
Marine burial parties began working on the pier as soon as the beaches were reasonably safe. The fierce equatorial heat sped up the decomposition process; thousands of American and Japanese bodies sent up an ungodly smell, and the very air seemed unhealthy. For reasons of convenience and speed, multiple small cemeteries sprang up across Betio, concentrated in the areas where the fighting had been heaviest. As they worked, casualty reports of tragic length were generated, including as much burial information as was possible.
A Marine Corps casualty card indicates that Staff Sergeant Wesley Lee Kroenung, Jr., lost his life to “gunshot wounds” at Betio and was buried in “Grave #2, Row A, 2nd Marine Division Cemetery #4, Tarawa, Gilbert Islands.” In the months after the battle, Navy garrison troops took down the original cemetery markers in favor of memorial graves. A marker for Kroenung was emplaced in Cemetery 33, Grave 16, Row 2, Plot 13.
Although the 604th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company was provided with Kroenung’s vital information – including a dental chart showing very distinctive teeth – they could not identify any of the remains they found as “Whitey.” Nor could the Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu. He was declared permanently non-recoverable in 1949.
On 7 November 2016, the DPAA ordered the disinterment of Grave #836, Plot E in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. The man buried there – known only as X-103 – was an unidentified victim of the battle of Tarawa, originally buried in “Cemetery 26” near Beach Red 2 and the central pier. Specialists attempting to identify him in the 1940s had been stymied by the poor condition of the remains – particularly the skull, which was “fragmentary” and missing most of its teeth. They did note, however, finding some remnants of hair – light brown, fine, and wavy.
Using modern anthropological methods and mtDNA analysis, the DPAA was able to match X-103 with the name of Wesley Kroenung. He was officially accounted for on 16 April 2019.
Staff Sergeant Wesley Lee Kroenung, Jr., was buried in Miramar National Cemetery on 14 August 2019.
(2) Triplett and Barton received some press notice for examining Amelia Earhardt’s plane with their patented machine in 1937.
(3) Larry Pointer and Donald Goddard, Harry Jackson (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1981), 34.
(4) USS Monrovia, “Action Report: Operation ‘GALVANIC,’ 3 December 1943.
(5) Capt. James R. Stockman, USMC, The Battle for Tarawa (Washington: HQ, US Marine Corps, 1947), 18.
(6) Pointer and Goddard, Harry Jackson, 35-36.
(7) Margaret Matray, “Artist started out sketching war,” The Casper Star-Tribune 8 November 2010, online edition.
Decorations
Purple Heart
For wounds resulting in his death, 20 November 1943.
Next Of Kin Address
Address of father, Mr. Wesley L. Kroenung, Sr.
Location Of Loss
Staff Sergeant Kroenung was killed on the pier at Betio.
What a revelation, Wesley was my husband’s cousin, {Richard L. Parker}. Separated by distance, they were not
given the opportunity to really bond. Cousin Wesley was a sort of legend for those of us in IL. Not being a computer
pro, I attempted to learn more, starting with “They Drew Fire” after reading Robert Sherrod, reading everything about
Harry Jackson. In DC I visited the Marine Museum on the chance of seeing the famous painting, Salvator Mundi, but
it was not on view at that time. Later, I learned of the epic attempts to recover our heroes……then I let it rest there….
Today I had the need to open my sketchy notes and found this amazing link. I will let surviving two cousins know this
remarkable chapter.
Ms. Doris Parker:
My father was the Lieutenant John Popham referred to in the article about your husband’s cousin, Sgt. Wesley Kroenung. My father participated in several island assaults after Tarawa, reuniting with Harry Jackson on Saipan and finishing at Okinawa. He stayed in the Marine Reserves after the war, and retired as a Colonel. He died in 1999. So I grew up in a Marine household and became one myself. My father did not like to talk about the war much. He had to be prodded and even then did not expound much about events. But when I was a child he did tell me about the Marines landing at Tarawa as an example of the horrors of war and specifically mentioned the death of Sgt. Kroenung as an example. He was nearby when it happened, described the events almost exactly as Harry Jackson did in this article, and even mentioned why they called him “Whitey”……. that “his hair was so blonde it was almost white”. I have always remembered Sgt. Whitey Kroenung’s name and associated him with Tarawa since that time. I am 72 now. My father told me about Tarawa when I was probably 9 or 10. It has been over 60 years that I have known the name of “Sgt. Whitey Kroenung” and how he was killed at Tarawa. So, in a way, he was sort of a legend to me as well.
Sincerely,
John Popham IV
John Popham lV
Thank you for your kind response, as you can see, I am lagging in my followup research.
Considering the condition of one’s remains, it is a miracle of dedication that Wesley has found his way home.
It is good to know he is no longer known only by his name on the wall in Hawaii, Courts of of the Missing,
Court 4, Honolulu Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. Now he rests under a headstone in Miramar National
Cemetery. This story definitely left an impression with that young boy 60 years ago. And so John, Thank you for
Your service. We are a proud Navy family.
Sincerely,
Doris Parker
I recently recovered (salvaged) an riginal LCVP (Higgins boat) that was used in the invasion of Tarawa. It was assigned to the Monrovia and according to a crew report disembarked Marines at near the pier and sank there (recovered later). It was boat number 31-17. If it shows up in pictures during anyone’s research I would appreciate being informed.
James, how did you recover it? Do you have any photos?
I would like to find out if I am somehow related to this person. My family started out in Chesterfield Mo and there is an historic cemetery there that has Kroenungs going be back to the early 1800’s. Please let me know if you have any more information on Wesleys ancestry.