Whatever was said, it’s inescapable that when History Flight teed up a site that would have thrown many an archaeologist’s heart into joyous palpitations, one of JPAC’s top scientists simply walked away. Assuming Belcher knew best, Mark turned elsewhere in the search for Cemetery 27, Betio’s most elusive burial site and the final resting place of my grandfather.
Sandy Bonnyman, left, with his father, Alexander Bonnyman, 1912. Author’s collection.
Sandy Bonnyman at six or seven years old, Knoxville, Tennessee. Author’s collection.
Sandy and Jo Bonnyman, date and location unknown. Author’s collection.
Sandy Bonnyman at Camp Judgeford, New Zealand, September 1943. Author’s collection.
Sandy Bonnyman, second from right, in a foxhole during the fighting on Tarawa, November 21 or 22, 1943. Note the lack of a helmet cover and three stripes indicating shore-party duty. Obie Newcomb/US Marine Corps.
Marines swarm up the sand-covered bunker during the final assault on November 22, 1943. Sandy Bonnyman is not visible; he had already been killed at the leading edge of the bunker, out of sight, when this photo was taken. Obie Newcomb/US Marine Corps.
Posthumous 1944 portrait of Sandy Bonnyman by Italian artist Arturo Noci. Clay Bonnyman Evans.
Frances Bonnyman, age twelve, receives her father’s Medal of Honor from Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal on January 22, 1947. To Forrestal’s right are her mother, Josephine Russell, and grandfather, Alexander Bonnyman Sr. US Marine Corps.
Close-up of Sandy Bonnyman’s Medal of Honor. Clay Bonnyman Evans.
The author stands at the northwest corner of “Bonnyman’s Bunker,” where his grandfather led the assault, in 2010. The same corner is visible in Obie Newcomb’s photo above. Clay Bonnyman Evans.
Local children play on the ruins of the medium Sherman tank Cobra, which remains stuck in the shell hole where it foundered nearly three-quarters of a century after the battle. Clay Bonnyman Evans.
A Kiribati girl poses atop the wreckage of an amphibious vehicle from the battle, surrounded by garbage. Clay Bonnyman Evans.
History Flight’s Kristen Baker, foreground, left, Paul Schwimmer, center, and John Frye, right, begin the final excavation of Sandy Bonnyman’s remains on May 29, 2015. Clay Bonnyman Evans.
Kristen Baker brushes away sand, exposing remains in the grave next to Sandy Bonnyman, whose skull is visible behind. Note gold dental work used to identify his remains. Clay Bonnyman Evans.
The skull of 1st Lt. Alexander Bonnyman, Jr., uncovered after lying hidden for more than seventy-one years in the sands of Betio island. Clay Bonnyman Evans.
Sandy Bonnyman’s Zippo lighter, located by the author beneath his remains on Tarawa. Clay Bonnyman Evans.
The skeletal remains of Sandy Bonnyman prior to their removal. The helmet belonging to another marine, Roland Vosmer, is visible to the left. Clay Bonnyman Evans.
Members of the History Flight team that contributed to the recovery of Cemetery 27. From left, front row: Hillary Parsons, Clay Bonnyman Evans, Reid Joyce, Paul Schwimmer Middle: David Senn, Corinne D’Anjou, Mark Noah, Ed Huffine, Glenn Prentice, Rick Snow Back: Jim Williams, Kurt Hiete, James Goodrich, Katie Rasdorf, John Frye, Kristen Baker. Jeremy Edward Shiok.
Retired US Army Lt. Gen. Michael S. Linnington, then-director of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, left, with the author, center, and Mark Noah, founder and director of History Flight, Inc., following a lying-in-honor ceremony for Sandy Bonnyman in Knoxville, Tennessee on September 26, 2015. Jeremy Edward Shiok.
A custom-built caisson transports the remains of 1st Lt. Alexander Bonnyman, Jr. to his final resting place at Berry Highland Memorial Cemetery, Knoxville, Tennessee, September 27, 2015. Jeremy Edward Shiok.
US Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Burke W. Whitman hands a folded American flag to Frances Bonnyman Evans at her father’s funeral on September 27, 2015. Visible to Evans’ right are her sister, Alexandra Bonnyman Prejean, the author, and Margot McAllister, surviving daughter of their late sister, Josephine. Cpl. Sarah Graham/US Marine Corps.
TEN
PROUD TO CLAIM THE TITLE
JUNE 1942-NOVEMBER 1943
Those close to Sandy Bonnyman were torn about his decision to join the Marine Corps in the winter of 1942.
“I knew he would unquestionably make a good soldier,” his father said, “but I did not like to see him enter the marines at thirty [sic] years old as a private, leaving a copper mine that was paying him $30,000 to $40,000 a year . . . and leaving a comparatively young wife and three girls, the youngest of whom was only one year old when he enlisted.”1
My grandmother Jo “admired him for wanting to fight for his country,” but considered the Marine Corps “practically a Suicide Squad. . . . I would not have minded a safer branch of the service.”2
Sandy hoped the war would not go on for long. But he shared President Roosevelt’s conviction that unconditional surrender by the Japanese was the only sensible conclusion, and he knew that would take time. He was busy with the mine during the spring of 1942 and my mother didn’t recall seeing him at all after April. But he went to great lengths to ensure that his family and business would be taken care of in his absence.
On June 29, my grandfather signed a partnership agreement that gave his best friend Jimmie Russell sole management of the Guadalupe Mining Co. He would continue to own fifty percent of net assets, receive half of all profits, and would be liable for just ten dollars in debts or obligations.3
Upon hearing of the proposed partnership, Alex Bonnyman hired a local attorney to nose around about Russell’s reputation (much as he had done with my grandmother before her marriage to Sandy). Ultimately, Alex “thoroughly approved” the partnership, citing Russell’s “very fine brand of honesty and splendid character,” business knowledge and “pep and energy.”4
Sandy initially set Jo up with a monthly allowance of $400—nearly $6,000 today—though he would later have to raise the amount more than once: “I had hoped that she would do on her $500 [$6,800], but which [sic] is not happening.”5
Alexander Bonnyman, Jr. boarded a train in Albuquerque, bound for Phoenix, on June 28, 1942. The next day, he completed his paperwork—including forms certifying he had never been convicted of a crime and a sworn affidavit that “there is nobody dependent upon me for support beyond my ability to contribute beyond the pay of a private in the U.S. Marine Corps”—and was inducted in the US Marine Corps Reserve. On that day his income dropped from $3,000 a month to just $183.34.
On July 7, Pvt. Bonnyman was ordered to board a Southern Pacific Railway train to San Diego and, likely because of his age, put in charge of three other new recruits. Arriving twelve hours later, he herded the men aboard buses that would take them to the depot at Marine Corps Base, San Diego, where all recruits from west of the Mississippi were being sent for training (on Sept. 25, President Roosevelt would dedicate the new facility and it would be named Camp Pendleton after World War I Gen. Joseph H. Pendleton). Two weeks after arriving, Sandy was appointed acting corporal, the first of many promotions he would receive over the next fourteen months.
At thirty-two, he was very much the “old man” to the young recruits enduring boot camp with him. Sandy’s age no doubt also paved the way for his highly unusual friendship with forty-nine-year-old Col. Gilder D. Jackson Jr., the highly decorated commander of the Sixth Marine Regiment. The corporal and the colonel became so close that Sandy visited him and his wife Vesta in their home many times, and when Jo came to San Diego to see her husband for the last time, the couple spent an evening with the Jacksons at the Hotel del Coronado. Jackson declared that he’d never had a marine in his command “that I was any more devoted to on such short acquaintance.”6
It took less than two weeks of boot camp to disabuse my grandfather of any romantic notions he might have had about being a grunt (“An enlisted man’s life would grow a little monotonous,” he wrote7). He had helped train his first platoon after an instructor became ill, and
was kept behind when it was shipped overseas to be a drill instructor. He didn’t love the assignment, especially having to attend “school” from 1500 to 1630 every afternoon, but it was an importance showcase for initiative and leadership.
“I took the assignment as a stepping stone to Officer’s Training School or OCS or whatever the correct term is,” he wrote his mother. “It is supposedly not possible for me to go there until I am a Corporal . . . although I have the same responsibilities and duties of a regular Cpl.”8
Ironically, maturity and success put Sandy at a disadvantage when it came to being commissioned as a marine officer. The upper age limit to join officer’s candidate’s school as a recruit was twenty-seven and regulations specifically excluded married men and those without college degrees (unless they had earned credit for, or taken an examination in, ten of fourteen tough classes, including differential calculus, physics, and “rhetorical principles”).9 Meanwhile, field commissions were generally reserved for recent college graduates or non-commissioned officers who had served for more than a year.
Nonetheless, Jo and his parents were thrilled by his change of heart, convinced that serving as an officer would be safer than as an enlisted marine. But time was a factor, and Alex immediately began pulling strings. He wrote to his friend Francis Biddle, Attorney General in the Roosevelt administration, to ask for advice. And through a mutual acquaintance, he arranged a meeting with retired marine Maj. Gen. Hugh B. Matthews, who had received the Navy Cross while fighting with the Second Marine Division in France in 1918. The general concurred Sandy was “just the type of man they wanted as an officer.” (Alex wrote his son, “Maybe this was brought about by your father’s, shall I say eloquence?—or salesmanship?”10) Matthews wrote Maj. Gen. Clayton B. Vogel, commanding general of the Marine Amphibious Corps in the Pacific, on October 7, urging him to take a close look at Sandy Bonnyman. To the disappointment of all, Vogel never replied.
But Sandy might not have needed such help in the first place. Jackson had seen his potential and placed him in the Officers’ Candidate Class, which “put him in a status for commission later, provided he made the grade.”
“After seeing him in my home and having him in my Regiment, I was never in doubt as to the eventual outcome,” the colonel later wrote.11
Sandy wasn’t the only one in his family to show leadership potential. Before he even became a marine his brother Gordon, nine years his junior, had graduated from the ROTC program at Princeton and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. Promoted to first lieutenant on February 1, 1942, he was sent to India on October 31, where he began instructing Chinese troops in the use of field artillery. In April 1943, Gordon was promoted to captain and sent to Burma as a liaison to the Chinese army.
On October 19, 1942, Sandy boarded the USS Matsonia as part of Headquarters Company, 6th Marines, arriving in Wellington, New Zealand, on November 4. Wellington was about as close to home as a marine could get overseas, reminding many of San Francisco with its wharves, hills, and temperate climate. When the marines weren’t training, they enjoyed milk shakes and ice cream sodas at the city’s many “milk bars,” ate hearty meals of fresh lamb, beef, and eggs, and drank Waitemata beer and eye-opening Australian “jump whiskey,” a “villainous, green Mexican distillation.”12
On November 25, Sandy was promoted to corporal and appointed to F Company, 2nd Battalion, 18th Marine Regiment, “to take full advantage of his talent and ability . . . (as an) Engineer.”13 His experience in the mining business had prepared him well for such a role, and he was excited to be “back in my old trade.”14
The New York Times editorial page wrote admiringly of combat engineers: “They are masters of many trades, men-of-all-work as well as men-at-arms. . . . They lay and unlay mines, dig trenches, run railroads and railroad shops, make bridges, roads, fortifications, airports, bomb-proofs, gun emplacements, barracks, anything buildable. They map and camouflage. They are photographers and cinematographers. They incinerate, refrigerate, disinfect. They are first-class plumbers. They attend to the water supply. They are expert handlers of explosives and all tools, including a rifle and a bayonet. One of their favorite sports is tossing a flame-thrower at a pillbox. . . . They are real Yanks of the Yankiest kind.”15
Sandy’s 18th Engineers, aka Pioneers, were among some 3,800 marines billeted alongside the Third Wellington Regiment of the New Zealand Army in the Judgeford Valley, a bucolic farming community north of Wellington. He boarded the USS President Jackson December 24 and spent Christmas at anchor in Wellington Harbor before sailing for the Solomon Islands to mop up after the First Marine Division, which had been fighting—and winning—the grinding jungle campaign on Guadalcanal since August. He made landfall on January 4, 1943.
Engineers were jacks-of-all-trades on the island, serving as everything from infantry to demolitions experts to bridge builders. Sandy Bonnyman’s most notable task in his six weeks on “the canal” was supervising construction of a pontoon bridge over the Toha River. His team labored from daylight until dark and bivouacked on the river, where Japanese artillery or machine gun fire kept them awake half the night. In the morning they breakfasted on scalding coffee and hardtack before getting back to work.16
“It was due to Sandy’s energy, ingenuity, and his personality that he was able to have his men erect this bridge in record time,” Col. Jackson recalled.
Bonny, as his friends now call him, made little fuss over his first taste of combat, when he and a reconnaissance team surprised eight Japanese fighters, killing three.17
Stories of a dramatic jungle ambush and bridge building make good copy. But on Guadalcanal, as it would be on Tarawa, it was Sandy Bonnyman’s leadership and work ethic that won the respect of his fellow marines. As Jackson wrote, “He was always cheerful, ready to work twenty-four hours a day without rest, and was always to be found in the front line trying to do some job that would make the Infantry advance a little bit easier.”18 Jackson’s gambit and Sandy’s hard work paid off, and on February 7, 1943, he received a commission as a second lieutenant. His commanding officer, Capt. Joseph Clerou, recommended that he be given command of a company once the Second Marine Division had finished up on Guadalcanal. Seven months after entering the Marine Corps as a private, against the odds, my grandfather was an officer in the US Marine Corps.
“Obviously your confidence in Bonnyman’s ability is justified,” a secretary for Gen. Vogel wrote Maj. Gen. Matthews—five months after the Bonnymans thought the retired general’s efforts had gone nowhere.19
The family was elated, and with good reason. At Guadalcanal enlisted men of the First Marine Division had been killed at nearly twice the rate of officers, a ratio that would be matched at Tarawa.
On February 19, the marines handed Guadalcanal over to the Army and 2nd Lt. Alexander Bonnyman, Jr. sailed back to New Zealand aboard the USS President Adams. Having tasted combat, he was eager for more.
“When we do get another chance,” he wrote Jo, “I believe we will do a good job. We certainly pray and hope so because the First Division certainly gave us a mark at which to shoot.”20
But it would be nine long, difficult months before the Second Marine Division engaged the enemy again.
During his second stay at Camp Judgeford my grandfather forged close friendships with numerous officers—2nd Lt. Barney Boos, 1st Lt. Paul Govedare, Capt. Clerou, Capt. John Murphy, Capt. Bert Watson, Capt. Don Farkas, 1st Lt. Tracy Griswold, and others.
“There’s so much a fellow could write about Bonny and it wouldn’t even cover half the man he was,” wrote Boos, one of the few who also had “come up through the ranks” to become an officer.21
Though eager for action, Sandy enjoyed New Zealand. He served as F Company’s athletic officer, tasked with keeping the men in fighting trim. He frequently went to the horse races and shopped for his daughters, even placing an order at a local harness shop for a custom English saddle for Fran that he would never see completed. While other marines took jaunts
to such places as Rotorua, the “valley of geysers,” and Christchurch on the country’s South Island, Sandy took his two weeks of R&R in March in a “Scotch town”—perhaps Dunedin on the South Island—where he slept between soft sheets and enjoyed eating “anything that wasn’t G.I. cooking.”22
With thousands of young Kiwi men deployed overseas in Africa and Europe, many of the marines found local women receptive to their charms, and many ended up marrying them. Competition between the Americans and New Zealanders occasionally erupted into violence, as with the April 3 “Battle of Manners Street,” a tavern brawl that began at the Allied Service Club when a group of drunken Southern marines refused to let dark-skinned Maori soldiers enter. More than a thousand American and New Zealand troops and hundreds of civilians, some armed with belts and knives, were embroiled in the melee for four hours before the police could restore order.23 (There is no indication that Sandy took part in the melee.)
Rumors persist among family members that he fathered a child with a Kiwi girlfriend but so far as I know, no long-lost relatives have ever appeared on any Bonnyman doorstep.
Malaria was a scourge of Guadalcanal, and many marines came down with the debilitating disease after the battle. Sandy stayed healthy for months, attributing his immunity to, “hard work, and lots of it.”24 But on April 26, complaining of headaches, chills and malaise, he reported to a Navy doctor and learned that he had not escaped the pestilential mosquitoes after all.
“The So. Pacific islands,” he noted ruefully, “are a far cry from Hollywood’s portrayal of the Tropical Paradise. No Hedy Lamarrs, no dusky Belles, just mud, bugs and bad smells.”25
Bones of My Grandfather Page 12
