Remains Of WWII Marine Headed Home After 72 Years On Pacific Atoll
“I feel I’m carrying on that goal that they started in 1944,” Clay Bonnyman Evans, Bonnyman’s grandson, pronounced of his great-grandparents. “Here we are in 2015. All those years later, it’s being done. He’s going to be buried accurately where they wanted him.”
More than 990 U.S. Marines and 30 sailors died in a Battle of Tarawa. Japanese appurtenance gun glow killed scores ofMarines when their boats got stranded on a embankment during low waves during a U.S. amphibious assault. Americans who done it to a beach faced heartless hand-to-hand combat.
Only 17 of a 3,500 Japanese infantry survived. Of 1,200 Korean worker laborers Japan brought to a island, only 129 lived.
Bonnyman led his Marines over a post to a beach, where they used flamethrowers and demolitions to destroy installations and conflict a bombproof preserve that was safeguarding about 150 Japanese soldiers. The Marines burning out some-more than 100 of a occupants into a open, where they were shot down. Bonnyman killed 3 enemy before he was mortally wounded. The U.S. cumulative a island a day Bonnyman died.
His Medal of Honor reference remarkable his “dauntless fighting spirit, harsh aggressiveness and forceful care by 3 days of unremitting, aroused battle.” It pronounced he “inspired his organisation to drastic effort, enabling them to kick off a counterattack and mangle a behind of antagonistic resistance.”
The U.S. fast buried a thousands of passed on a little atoll, about 2,400 miles southwest of Hawaii. But a graves were shortly uneasy as a Navy urgently built a alighting frame to ready to conflict a subsequent Pacific island on their trail to Japan.
Bonnyman was among 36 unclear servicemen a organisation History Flight exhumed in Tarawa in a Republic of Kiribati progressing this year. The stays were brought to Hawaii for marker in July.
The Department of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced Monday it had identified Bonnyman regulating dental annals and other evidence.
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