Pacific Magazine > Magazine > March 1, 2001

World War II

Marines Come Home 58 Years Later

U.S. Goes Extra Mile To Find MIA's

By MICHAEL FIELD

Mason Yarbrough came home finally, 58 years after his death. They had kept a place for him and in December they re-interred him beside his parents in a snow-covered Missouri grave. Since his violent death as a US marine corporal, Yarbrough had lain in an unmarked grave, one of 19, on Butaritari Atoll in Kiribati.

He had been one the 220 members of "Carlson's Raiders" who on August 16, 1942, had landed on what was then known as Makin Island and attacked the Japanese outpost. Only when it was over, and the Raiders had returned in disarray aboard two submarines to Hawaii, did they realize that 30 men were missing. After the war inquiries established that nine men surrendered on August 30 and were taken to Kwajalein, in the Marshall Islands, and executed.

Digging at Butaritari: Remains of U.S. Marines discovered in village area.

The 19 bodies were lost to the Americans, although 82-year-old Bureimoa Tokarei knew where the graves were. As a teenager the Japanese had made him help dig their graves. In 1999, he led a Hawaii-based Army Central Identification Laboratory team to the graves that included Yarbrough and Sergeant Clyde Thomason, the first enlisted Marine in World War II to win the Congressional Medal of Honor.

The story not only recalls a dramatic commando raid of the war but illustrates the dramatic extent of US efforts to bring their war dead home. In this particular case it radically contrasts to the Commonwealth approach for in the same area 17 New Zealanders, four Englishmen and a Fijian national were executed by the Japanese in the Gilberts but no real attempt has been made to locate their bodies.

The US Marines 2nd Raider Battalion was led by Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson, who planned the attack on the Japanese in an ill-conceived operation to divert Japanese pressure on Guadalcanal in the Solomons. Carlson's Raiders killed around 80 Japanese but the operation went bad and at one point Carlson even wanted to surrender, and then changed his mind and basically said it was every man for himself.

In 1999, the Army’s Central Identification Laboratory heard reports Tokarei knew where the Butaritari bodies were. A team was put together and flown to the island. After the return of the bodies, it took months of tests to finally identify the 19.

Colonel David Pagano of the laboratory said they employed all techniques for identifying the remains. "Their remains were judged against all 30 missing records," he said. "The primary key in terms of insight was dental, the physical dental attributes. We used DNA for four of the remains. We used bone X-rays for unique bone patterns the individuals had on files. We used age, height and stature, for several of them that were not the same size as the others." Pagano said they will continue searching now for the Kwajalein remains. That atoll was subjected to six days of allied bombardment during the war and has since been radically remodelled to become the US Army's main ballistic missile testing base. But evidence suggests the other Carlson bodies may be in the Kwajalein Public Gardens.