The bodies of 36 US Marines found 70 years after death this month on Betio Island in Kiribati were all killed in WWII during the bloody Battle of Tarawa, and are going home now.
The young men “had an expectation that if they were to die in the line of duty defending their country they would be brought home,” said the director of History Flight, the charitable organization credited with locating the missing soldiers’ remains.
“That was a promise made 70 years ago that we felt should be kept," he told a reporter for Radio New Zealand.
None of those slain servicemen have been officially identified yet, but the charity is hopeful that the highly-decorated Lieutenant Alexander Bonnyman will be among the dead.
Bonnyman posthumously received a Medal of Honor for his brave conduct during Marine troops’ initial landing on Betio Island, and for his relentless assaults under fire which ultimately decimated the enemy but cost him his life.
If the fallen hero is one of the 36 US Marines found, Lt. Bonnyman will be sent back a full 70 years later to his Tennessee home for burial in the family plot next to both of his parents.
Over a thousand American soldiers perished in the effort to seize and secure the remote Pacific island in 1943; and several hundred more of their remains still lay in unmarked, shallow graves waiting to be exhumed and returned to their loved ones.
"There's a lot of work to be done on the island," admits History Flight's director, who has vowed to keep digging until all the US soldiers who sacrificed their lives in the gory Battle of Tarawa are unearthed from their makeshift graves and repatriated.
