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WWII Veteran of Tarawa Invasion Targets Beach Again
By Bob Pool, LA Times Staff Writer, March 16, 2007

The last time Leon Cooper saw the tiny Pacific atoll called Tarawa, its beach was littered with bodies.

These days, the scene of one of the United States' bloodiest World War II battles is littered with trash.

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So from 5,000 miles away, the Malibu man has launched a beach cleanup campaign.

"The piles of garbage are an insult to the guys who died there for their country," Cooper said. "That beach is hallowed ground."

Cooper is certain of that. In November 1943, he commanded a group of landing craft that carried invading U.S. Marines to a stretch of Tarawa shoreline known as Red Beach.

During 76 hours of brutal fighting, 1,115 Americans were killed and 2,292 others wounded. About 4,800 Japanese fighters also died.

At the time, Tarawa was part of Great Britain's Gilbert Islands colony. Today its string of two dozen islets is included in a rapidly growing independent nation, the Republic of Kiribati.

As its population has increased, so has Kiribati's importation of packaged foods and goods. Because Tarawa's islets are tiny and only a few feet above sea level, there is no place to bury inorganic trash. So much of it ends up in its reef-sheltered lagoon — where it washes up on the beach.

The few who travel to Tarawa are jolted by what they see.

Simon Donner, a Princeton University scientist who went there in 2005 to study climate change, encountered "endless festering piles of garbage" along with rusting World War II relics and discarded appliances.

"Tarawa doesn't look poor. It looks like civilization after the apocalypse, after the nuclear holocaust," Donner said this week. "Most of the garbage ends up on the beach — bottles, food wrappers, old cars, human waste."

Cooper learned of the trash problem two years ago while doing research for his recently published book, "The War in the Pacific — A Retrospective." He discovered that a New Zealand conservationist, Alice Leney, had initiated a recycling program on Tarawa. But the beach where 63 years ago so many died remains a dump.

"The lagoon has become a gigantic sewer," Cooper said. "The place where I saw all these kids literally getting cut to pieces in front of me has turned into a stagnant cesspool."

Cooper, 87, is a retired computer company executive who lives on a hill above Malibu's popular Zuma Beach.

But in 1943 he was a young Navy boat group commander in charge of 20 landing craft carried by the transport ship Harry Lee. His job was to make certain that the small boats stayed in line and moved simultaneously toward the shore as they ferried invasion troops and equipment from ships. His wooden "Higgins boats" featured blunt-nosed bows, lowered to serve as unloading ramps when the craft were nudged up to the shoreline.