Remains of 36 unidentified Marines from WWII battle return

The military and a private organization have brought home the remains of 36 Marines killed in one of World War II's bloodiest battles.

A group called History Flight recovered the remains from the remote Pacific atoll of Tarawa, the U.S. Marine Corps said. A ceremony was held Sunday in Pearl Harbor to mark their return.

Thank God they are home on American soil, how is it we find out about these things after the fact, how is it this ceremony was not covered by national news, it should have been headline in every news paper, it should have been bigger news than anything a candidate is say or doing, bigger than anything the POSPOTUS is doing.

As Americans, as a Republic, as a Nation it seems our priorities are at best perverted.

When I was going through Quantico in 1968, we had several senior NCOs as instructors. These were lifers..30 year guys..who'd served in WW II, Korea, and Nam...they'd tell the stories of the island campaigns...Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo, and the one thing I remember most to this day is their common belief is that nobody who wasn't there has ANY idea of what it was like. There is no frame of reference for the savage nature of those battles. I suppose the closest thing today would be if ISIS had 30,000 heavily armed troops occupying a province, and several divisions of Marines were sent in to dig them out..

It couldn't happen, because today it would be aired live, and Americans would not accept the casualties.

I have tried to convey this exact message to many. That radical fanatics not only willing to die, but in some ways eager to especially if it means taking several of the enemy with them are no tot be taken lightly.

If we allow such people inside our border the civilian casualties and collateral deaths would be a nightmare.

Surprising how just such an action only 14 years ago have been so quickly forgotten.

Tarawa is a classic example of poor intelligence and poor operational planning. Less than a year after Guadalcanal, the U.S. was in the opening phase of its central Pacific campaign. Preliminary operations had gone well, with Marines taking some atolls (ahead of Tarawa) with little-to-no resistance.

Planners expected a stiffer fight for Tarawa, but had no idea the Japanese had heavily reinforced their garrison and brought in 1,000 Korean laborers to build fortifications. But their biggest blunder was failing to account for the “neap tide” on the first two days of the invasion. The water was so shallow that Higgins boats couldn’t clear the reef, and Marines had to be dropped off hundreds of yards from the beach. Hundreds were cut down by enemy machine gun fire.

Actor Eddie Albert, a Navy Lieutenant in charge of a section of landing craft, won the Bronze Star for rescuing 47 wounded Marines from the surf and supervising the rescue of 30 more. Of the 5,000 Marines that landed on D-Day, 1,500 were killed or wounded.

You’re right about our refusal to accept casualties. Marine deaths during one month on Iwo Jima equal our total KIA from Iraq and Afghanistan over the past fourteen years. And very few people realize the 8th Air Force (which conducted daylight bombing raids over Nazi-occupied Europe) suffered more combat deaths than the Marines in the Pacific.

It was a different time and a different country. As a baby boomer, I must say that most of my generation pales in comparison to our parents and grandparents.

During a D-Day rehearsal in England, some 800 GI’s were killed when everything, for a whole bunch of reasons, turn to s**t. Ike ordered the news completely suppressed...and correctly so...it took decades until the families learned what happened to their loved ones. But could that happen today? Not a chance in hell..

You are referring to Operation Tiger, one of the dress rehearsals for the D-Day invasion. On the first day of the exercise, there was a friendly-fire incident because of communications problems and on Day Two, German E-boats attacked a convoy of LSTs, escorted by a British corvette.

There were reports of the incident in Yank magazine in July of that year, so the debacle wasn’t completely suppressed. But is was conveniently forgotten, and the families of many victims didn’t learn until years later that their son or husband died in a training accident, since the casualties were released along with those who died on D-Day.

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