Nopuko's Store: Micronesia Books WW2 Books Micronesia Shirts Island Videos Cell Phones & Service Computer & Video Games Cameras & Photo Click Here for Micronesia & WW2 Books		U.S. Army Archaeologists Search Kwajalein For Fallen Makin Raiders By Peter Rejcek Pacific Magazine, February 2004 The Makin Raiders will have to wait a little longer to return home. (see Marines Come Home) After more than two months of scraping topsoil, jack hammering through coral-rich dirt and shoveling and sifting through tons of earth, a U.S. Army team of archaeologists and recovery specialists failed to locate the remains of nine Marines believed executed and beheaded by the Japanese and buried on Kwajalein atoll, in the Marshall Islands. The excecutions took place at the dawn of America's World War II Pacific campaign. “We don't come up empty in our worldwide [recovery missions] very often. It was disappointing,” said Dr. Greg Fox, an archaeologist with the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii. CILHI is charged with researching, recovering and identifying lost U.S. service members throughout the world. The 10-member team, mainly consisting of “mortuary affairs specialists” and staff photographers, all of whom double as laborers, arrived on Kwajalein last January. On their heels followed a media train that rarely runs through this part of the world. In addition to Stars and Stripes and Soldier Magazine, two high-profile military publications, a documentary team working under the auspices of National Geographic spent more than two weeks filming the CILHI team for one of an eight-part series called Riddles of the Dead.
		More than a year of preparation-painstaking archival research by CILHI historians, who did everything from studying war crime testimonies to interviewing Marshallese witnesses-preceded the team's arrival. It was not an easy trail to put together, according to Tripp Wiles, CILHI historian. “The problem with this thing is, that most of the people who knew anything about it are dead,” he says.	Army Corpsman Matt Hanks sifts through dirt on a Kwajalein excavation site. Photo: Peter Rejcek
		Wiles gathered information from a variety of sources. Aerial photographs of the war era from the Bishop Museum in Honolulu show the site before it was blown away and bulldozed over in February of 1944. Data and maps also came from the U.S. National Archives, the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office, transcripts of the war crimes tribunal in Guam and a recently-found copy of the memoirs of the Japanese officer believed to have been in charge of the executions. All the evidence pointed to a mass grave at the west end of Kwajalein, literally across the road from a memorial Japanese Cemetery in a relatively open field. Working methodically, six days a week, the team used a backhoe to scrape the topsoil away to get down to the 1944 layer of earth, which they then removed in 16-square-meter plots. The dirt was taken to an assembly line of sifters, who pulled out bits of live ordnance, bomb fragments and some small pieces of “possible” human remains. The bone fragments were sent to the CILHI lab at Hickam Air Force Base on Oahu, Hawaii, for examination and DNA analysis, which will take months to complete. Excavators did uncover a few artifacts-such as a Japanese bayonet and an American pocketknife-and quite a few bomb craters (dark, oval bruises in the ground) from the February 1944 invasion of the atoll by American forces. About a month into the excavation, Fox revealed that he believed the maps the team had been using, including a pre-invasion one, were misplotted, based on the features the team had found during the dig, such as a half-buried gun emplacement that did not appear on their maps where it should. The location of the mass grave hinged on the location of the building where the Marines were held before their execution. With the validity of the maps questioned, the team had to find a way to align their World War II data with today's vastly different landscape. With a little ingenuity, Fox was able to locate the prison building using the scars of war-the eight bomb craters scattered throughout the site. But even that feat of creativity, in the end, didn't help. “We worked under the assumption they were in a particular building. That may be incorrect,” Fox explained. Don't close the book on the Makin Raiders just yet, however. There is still considerable interest in the case, from U.S. congressmen to members of the Makin Raider Association, a veterans organization of Marines whose comrades are buried somewhere on Kwajalein. One of their number, Ben Carson, even visited the site early in the excavation, along with 1936 Olympian and former Kwajalein POW Louis Zamperini. Carson had been a member of that famous 1942 raid on Butaritari Island in Makin Atoll in the former Gilbert Islands. That raid led to the capture and eventual execution of the nine Marines. Zamperini spent 42 days of captivity at Kwajalein after floating 47 days at sea when his B-24 went down in the Pacific. He says he saw the names of the nine Marines scribbled on the wall of his prison cell. “This is a strange feeling. I never thought I would be standing on the ground where these guys got the ultimate punishment,” said Carson, 79, during his visit in January. Unfortunately, Carson's 44-year-old campaign to retrieve his fallen comrades will go on a little longer. CILHI could return if new evidence can be found to continue the search. “We spent considerable resources on it, and nobody likes to quit, myself included,” Fox said. “My organization is very persistent.” ----------