With the assistance of a private group, the American military has brought the bodies of 36 World War II soldiers back to the United States after decades stranded out in the Pacific. To mark their return, a ceremony was conducted to honor the soldiers on Sunday in Pearl Harbor.
The U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) teamed up with History Flight to retrieve the remains of the marines from the distant Tarawa atoll. History Flight is a non-governmental organization committed to locating and recovering the bodies of dead American soldiers overseas and then returning them to their families.
Members of History Flight have begun the identification of the dead soldiers, while officials from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency have been tasked with completing the process. Once all of the remains have been properly identified, the USMC said it will return the bodies to their surviving family members.
In 1943, around 990 American soldiers and 30 sailors perished during the World War II skirmish known as the Battle of Tarawa.
The battle was marked by some of the bloodiest scenes in the war, which saw American soldiers shot down by machine gun fire from the Japanese after their boats became entrenched on the reef by the low tide. Those who were able to reach the shore had to face vicious hand-to-hand fights against the Japanese defenders.
Out of the 3,500 soldiers from Japan who defended the atoll, only 17 made it out alive. Of the 1,200 Koreans kept on the island as slave laborers, just 129 survived after the battle.
The U.S. government decided to immediately bury the thousands of dead bodies left on the remote atoll, but the graves were eventually displaced after the Navy constructed a landing strip to be used for assault on neighboring areas as part of the military's island-hopping strategy on the way to Tokyo.
There are still 520 American servicemen whose remains have yet to be recovered from the Tarawa battle.
According to History Flight, one of the 36 bodies recovered from the Pacific atoll was of 1st Lt. Alexander J. Bonnyman, Jr., a marine who was given the Medal of Honor award posthumously.
USMC commandant Gen. Joseph Dunford said he is pleased that the remains of the American soldiers have been recovered from Tarawa, the location of one of the fiercest conflicts in the history of the Marine Corps.
