Thirty-six Marines are finally coming home.
Semper Fidelis
http://news.yahoo.com/bodies-wwii-us-marines-recovered-pacific-075205962.html
Why. I thought policy was to leave remains around where they fell.
Its my understanding most of the battlefield graves on Iwo Jima were reinterred in the US. Arlington or private cemeteries if the families request it.
These thirty-six soldiers were found buried on Betio Island in Kiribati in unmarked graves and they’ll have to be identified with DNA. I’m sure it will be a comfort to the families to get closure.
I believe that the Marines make every possible effort to leave no one behind.
Not even remotely close for the US military. Since sometime in the Korean War, they’ve been doing what they call “concurrent return”, which means that they ship the bodies stateside as soon as they can, embalm them, and return them to their families for burial. The Tarawa dead were somewhat notable in that it’s a tiny atoll, we conquered it, and somehow, we lost track of where 36 Marines were buried. There are nearly 100,000 other missing soldiers, sailors and airmen somewhere out there in the world though.
Prior to Korea and the ready availability of air travel like that, they would establish temporary cemeteries in-theater, and then after the war, dig 'em all up, and either ship them back to their families, or reinter them in the permanent cemeteries. Something like 40% of the dead were buried in the permanent cemeteries, and 60% were returned to their families, sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s.
In Europe, there are some 8 World War I cemeteries with 30,922 dead and 4,452 commemorated missing, and 14 World War II cemeteries, as well as two Pacific cemeteries (one in Honolulu, and one in Manila) with about 106,000 dead and 97,000 missing Of course, some of them overlap a bit, being actually buried in the cemeteries as unknowns, and commemorated by name as missing.
Since all the Pacific war dead were eventually either repatriated or reinterred in either Manila or Honolulu, I’d bet good money that the vast majority of the 36 will probably be identified via DNA tests or something, and at this point, will probably be mostly be buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, although a few may be repatriated to their families if they so wish.
Relevant links:
http://www.bentprop.org/grs/ (Disposition of WWII dead; a somewhat weird, but interesting read)
VA.gov | Veterans Affairs (Natl. Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific)
https://www.abmc.gov/ (American Battle Monuments Commission - who administers the overseas cemeteries and monuments)
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015012916378;view=1up;seq=7 (“Crosses in the Wind” - another weird read, written by a officer in Graves Registration during WWII at the cemetery at Margraten in the Netherlands… the cemetery mentioned in Coldfire’s immortal May 5th post of remembrance.)
Lieutenant Alexander Bonnyman’s full Medal of Honor citation provided by the U.S. government:
Remind me again how to get DNA from 70 year old corpses?
Bones. Maybe.
Textbooks say from the teeth. How is it really done? Donno.
Hey, they were able to get testable DNA from Richard III after 530 years. Progress in genetic forensics has resulted in that it’s expected there may never be another “unknown soldier” – the Vietnam-era US Unknown was eventually identified and his space in the Tomb of the Unknowns rededicated to commemorate the missing and never recovered.
As mentioned, the idea with the battlefield dead was provisional burial and later relocation to permanent facilities (or dedication of the provisional as permanent) – the category that was accepted as no reinterrment possible was of course burial at sea, and many a sunk ship was declared itself a protected burial ground. The change in policy around Korean War time, enabled by advances in transportation, refrigeration and preservation and by casualties no longer being of such overwhelming scale as in the World Wars (so there was time for concurrent processing) must have been to a great degree influenced by experiences such as this case of “misplacing” a whole platoon’s worth of fallen including a MOH awardee.
So just to ask, I saw a crime show last night in which the murderer soaked his victim’s body in quicklime to strip it to the bone fifteen years previous. The detective seemed confident they could still get DNA off the skeleton. Could they?
In the article linked in the OP, it says
Just making sure, does that mean they plan to exhume, ID and repatriate/reinter those several hundred bodies as well? It sounds like they would, but then why is the article about just 36 of them? If it’s because those were the only ones they didn’t know about, then why hadn’t the other bodies been taken care of before now?
Because they were and are unrecorded, and these 36 are the ones they’ve found so far?
As for the bodies of the Marines, would they have been buried with their dog tags and other personal effects?
ISTR reading that they had makeshift temporary cemeteries, and somewhere in the chaos of the fighting and subsequent withdrawal, they lost track of exactly where those cemeteries were- possiblly even due to some incoming vehicles and Marines accidentally driving over the plot markers unaware of what was there and scattering/destroying them such that the plot couldn’t be found.
For example, Lt. Bonnyman and the other 35 Marines were intentionally buried, but the records of where were lost. And yeah, with dogtags, uniforms, etc… possibly even with grenades and ammunition, although that wasn’t typically the case when the graves registration units were up and running- they had a system for dearming and identifying the dead, packing up their effects and shipping them stateside, and burying them in the temporary cemeteries.
Odds are that these guys weren’t listed as unknowns, but rather missing, even though they knew more or less where they were buried, they hadn’t actually recovered the actual remains.
Most of the other missing from WWII seem to have been aircrew or burials at sea, where there weren’t bodies to bury for one reason or another. The military did a surprisingly good job of accurate record keeping of where people were buried from what I could tell from reading the first link I posted upthread.
I think you can get DNA from marrow of bones.
FYI, there are still bodies in the rear of the sunken U.S.S. Arizona (a Pearl Harbor casualty), which were never recovered for a proper burial. Experts determined that there’d be no hope of identifying the remains, so they didn’t go to the trouble of retrieving the bodies. Of course, they are still on “American” soil, or close enough I guess, so maybe that doesn’t really count. And the memorial was built over the wreckage, so thousands of people honor the men and pay their respects daily. I suppose that’s some consolation to the families.
I can just imagine the nasty, horrible task of digging up all the dead bodies on Iwo Jima. I’d guess they were just put in body bags or did they have caskets? Regardless a grisly yet neccessary task.
I wouldn’t describe it as necessary. At this date, the odds of there being any living family members like a wife or parent who has a significant emtional investment in having those bones to bury is quite slim.
ISTR that they used mattress covers in the temporary cemeteries, and transferred them to caskets in the permanent ones. And it wasn’t just Iwo Jima; it was literally nearly EVERY dead US soldier from WWII. Even in the permanent US cemeteries like Epinal or Luxembourg, they ended up disinterring/reinterring them even if they were going to remain there- after shipping the ones home whose families requested repatriation, they had to fill in the gaps and make the new permanent cemeteries organized and good looking.
[Grand]children?