Niehoff first contacted Joseph Alexander at age seventy-one after reading the author’s monograph, “Across the Reef,” saying he wanted to correct the “very wild and exaggerated view of why (Sandy) won the Congressional Medal. . . . He was too fine a person to have to doctor the story.”27
After interviewing Niehoff, Alexander wrote a letter to my mother, Fran Evans, describing her father’s actions on the bunker as something more like effective management than conspicuous gallantry.
“I have . . . been advised by Mr. Harry Niehoff that events atop the bunker were not quite as melodramatic” as previously described, the author wrote. “Your Dad’s conspicuous contributions were more in the realm of organizing and leading a demoralized group of men from scattered units in attacking a seemingly impregnable Japanese strongpoint, one which had stonewalled the 8th Marines for three days. Fine. That does not diminish the significance of his sacrifice at all.”28
But Harry Niehoff’s own words and actions suggest that he may have misremembered what happened that day. For starters, he himself enthusiastically recommended Sandy Bonnyman for the medal while bivouacked at Camp Tarawa on the chilly, windswept saddle between two volcanoes on the Big Island of Hawaii.
“We were asked if we wanted to recommend anyone for awards. I happened to be with Johnny Borich at the moment and we both said we wanted to recommend [Sandy] for the Congressional,” he wrote. “I am sure it wasn’t just us two but I believe others there also wrote him up for the Congressional Medal.”29
(Documents show that Maj. William Chamberlin recommended Sandy for the medal; several others, including Col. David Shoup, Capt. Joseph Clerou, Pfc. Marvin Sheppard and, according to Sheppard, “the other kid,”30 put forth his name, and there may have been others.)
In addition, while Niehoff did receive the Silver Star for his “gallantry and intrepidity in action” on Tarawa, the citation simply does not support his version of events: “He attacked and helped destroy by demolitions an enemy pillbox [sic] which held up the advance for fifty hours. Later, he voluntarily carried demolitions and supplies for flame throwers through heavy enemy fire to advance positions.”31 There is no mention of Niehoff planning the assault on the “pillbox” or singlehandedly (or otherwise) firing into an enemy counterattack.
I have no doubt that Harry Niehoff accurately shared what he remembered of that day. But memory is a tricky beast, perhaps especially in combat.
“There is no true narrative in combat; nobody understands what the hell is going on,” said former combat correspondent Chris Hedges. “For everybody who comes through, there is a need or propensity to make it make sense. The fact is, it never does.”32
The battle of Bonnyman’s Bunker was no exception. It was fast, loud, chaotic, and terrifying, from start to finish.
Alexander reported his version of events as fact, but Niehoff himself began to question his memories of the battle not long after giving the interview to the author. Cecil Goddard, a staff sergeant and engineer in Niehoff’s outfit who also took part in Forlorn Hope, disputed his old friend’s description of a “passive” Sandy Bonnyman, remembering instead that he was “really trying to pump up everyone and running back and forth to check with everyone on our sector.”33 Following a conversation with Goddard, Niehoff wrote a follow-up letter to my aunt in which he worried that, “I have developed greater tunnel vision than I thought.”
He acknowledged not just that his memories might be flawed a half-century after the battle, but also his realization that they might never have been correct.
“It is true, when one is in the middle of a war where it was so bad on that first night we knew we were not going to get off that island alive, you think mostly of your own person,” Niehoff wrote. “This thinking really separates you from others mentally in a way that you can remember what you were doing clearly but only have a hazy picture of who and what some of the others were doing around you. . . . Your dad was outstanding and age only dims more of the recollections. . . . If this letter rambles it is because my mind is doing the same. As I write of one thing other memories crop up and began to jump around and shift.”34
I had asked the question of myself honestly, and was willing to follow the evidence wherever it led. In the end, my interviews with living witnesses, which solidly confirmed official documents and contemporary accounts of my grandfather’s actions, coupled with the evidence of Niehoff’s citation, and his own doubts, reassured me that Sandy Bonnyman had indeed performed the actions that led to his posthumous distinction with the nation’s highest military honor.
But my grandfather’s story did not end when he fell, and many more unanswered questions still lay ahead.
FIFTEEN
REQUIEM
NOVEMBER 22-DECEMBER 5, 1943
When the fighting was over, nine of the twenty-one marines of Forlorn Hope lay dead on the bunker that would one day bear my grandfather’s name. Their names, alas, are lost to history, but their sacrifices had not been in vain.
Scores of Japanese rushing from the hellish confines of the blockhouse had all been cut down by machine-gun and rifle fire as they fled. Marines stood sentry at the two entrances to the bunker until a bulldozer arrived to block them with tons of coral sand, entombing any living Japanese unlucky enough to remain inside. With the last of the three obstacles now taken, the men under Maj. Crowe’s command swept through the cluster of Japanese structures on the northern edge of the island, where they found at least a hundred Japanese who had committed suicide.1 They halted at the eastern end of the airfield, forming a line across the island’s eastern reaches with marines that had taken most of south-facing Black Beach.
By the end of D+2, with the exception of one pocket of resistance inland of Red Beach 1, all enemy fighters were dead or trapped on Betio’s long, tapering tail, their escape route across the reef to Bairiki cut off. Still, the Japanese mounted three desperate counterattacks, firing machine guns and making suicidal charges into marine lines. Thanks in part to shelling from the Schroeder and Sigsbee offshore, there was almost no resistance left to fight by 0500. By one o’clock the next afternoon, D+3, November 23, fighting on Betio had ended, seventy-six bloody, brutal hours after it had commenced.
In the end, the fighting had taken the lives of more than 1,100 Americans and nearly five thousand Japanese and their captured Korean laborers. To the north, the US Army’s 27th Division wrested Makin Atoll from the Japanese, at a cost of 76 killed in ground combat, 644 who died when the Japanese sank the USS Liscome Bay, and 44 who died in a turret fire aboard the USS Mississippi. (In November and December 1999, JPAC recovered the remains of nineteen MIA marines from Butaritari the main island of Makin Atoll; at the time, it was the largest single recovery since the Korean War.)
“I’ve been in this business for 30 years,” wrote marine Col. Evans Carlson, whose ill-starred 1942 attack on Makin had helped prod the Japanese into fortifying Betio, “and this is the damnedest fight I have ever been in; much worse than Guadalcanal.”2
Journalist Robert Sherrod wrote, “The story of Tarawa is a saga in which only a few of the heroes have been or ever can be identified.” Indeed, the entire Second Marine Division later was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation, recognizing that it collectively had fought at a level worthy of a Navy Cross.
“Sandy Bonnyman’s death was no more tragic than any other death,” observed former marine Bill Niven. “But he did accomplish things that few others did.”3
With the end of combat, marines and navy construction battalions (aka Seabees) immediately turned to the task of burying the dead. More than ninety Americans were buried at sea, according to ship’s logs, while others had drifted away or sunk in the lagoon. That still left thousands of corpses, American and Japanese, to be buried. Supervised by Sandy’s friend Father William O’Neill and Father Francis W. “Foxhole” Kelly, marines buried their dead in at least forty-three locations around the island, doing their best to record the names and mark the graves with sticks, scrap wood
, or even ration cans. Just a day after the battle, Betio was already studded with rows of crude wooden crosses bearing dog tags of the dead, with many more to come.4
At one of the burial sites, someone set a simple wooden marker inscribed with an apparently original poem, “Requiem: November 1943.” Its final stanza read:
REST, WARRIORS, REST
AGAINST THE DAY OF JOURNEYING FORTH
TENDER HANDS SHALL LIFT THEE OUT
TO HOME SOIL WAITING.5
Sometime before sunset on D+3, combat photographer Cpl. Obie Newcomb climbed the captured bunker to visit the spot where the charismatic marine with the booming Southern voice had been killed. He was surprised to find an undamaged helmet perched on the sand, emblazoned with three red shore-party stripes and marked “Bonnyman”; he’d heard Sandy had been shot in the head by a sniper.6
“I picked it up and looked at it. I felt so bad . . . As I was leaving the area two Lts. approached me and asked me if I had seen his body. They were his buddies. I told them no,” Newcomb recalled.7 One of the men was probably Sandy’s friend 1st Lt. Bernard A. “Barney” Boos.8
By that time, Pfc. Marvin Sheppard and the “other kid” had already retrieved the body and taken it back to the seawall near the command post.9 That fact, recalled decades later, would provide an answer to another mystery: How did my grandfather’s remains come to be buried in Cemetery 27 alongside thirty-nine marines, none of whom had been killed in the fighting atop the bunker? All but a handful were killed on D-day, and the only one killed on November 22 was not with a unit associated with the assault.
I was unsuccessful in my efforts to confirm the names of every member of Forlorn Hope. However, records do indicate that eight members of 2/18 (besides my grandfather) and the other two units under Crowe’s command that day, 2/8 and 3/8, were killed on the third day of fighting. But we’ll probably never know certain whether they fell taking the bunker or not.
Once the smoke had cleared and the relentless thunder of bombs, mortar fire, grenades, machine guns, and M-1 rifles had fallen silent on Betio, US Navy Adm. Raymond A. Spruance summoned Lt. Cmdr. Kyle Campbell Moore on the USS Indianapolis, flagship of the US Fifth Fleet, floating just offshore. He had an assignment for the junior officer.
Moore, thirty-four, had been commissioned as a junior-grade lieutenant in the US Navy Reserve on December 8, 1941, as the ruins of the Pacific Fleet still lay smoking in Pearl Harbor. Kasey, as his shipmates called him, had until then spent almost his entire life in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he was a star running back for the undefeated Knoxville High Trojans football team and two-time city tennis champion in his age group.
He’d entered the University of Tennessee hoping to become a doctor, but the Great Depression forced him to put his plans on hold after just a year. Having been the editor of his high school newspaper, the Blue and White, Moore took a job as a reporter for the Knoxville Journal. His editors quickly recognized that his real talent lay in photography, and he soon became the paper’s sole staff shooter, as well as a southeast region photographer for New York Times and William Randolph Hearst’s International News Service. Armed with one of the Times’s newfangled “telephoto” devices, which allowed him to transmit images by phone, Moore covered President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s visits to dedicate Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934 and check on the progress of the Tennessee Valley Project in 1940.
Once Moore enlisted, the Eighth Naval District in New Orleans had planned to make use of his photojournalism skills in its public relations wing. But on his insistence, he was sent to the Northwestern University Midshipmen’s School in Chicago to train for sea duty, and in July 1942 he was assigned to the Indianapolis, where he would remain throughout his wartime service. He married fellow Volunteer and journalism student Katherine Davis just days before reporting for duty in the Aleutian Islands off Alaska’s southwest coast.
Assigned to the Indianapolis, Kasey Moore was promoted to lieutenant commander in April 1943 and placed in charge of damage control and repairs of the ship’s thick steel hull.10
“As damage-control officer he couldn’t go ashore any more. That was a matter of great anguish for him, because he enjoyed being with the marines,” his widow Katherine recalled at age ninety-five.11
Spruance ended the young officer’s shipboard exile at Tarawa. The admiral thought him a “splendid photographer,” and needed someone he could trust to document why the navy’s relentless, months-long bombardment of tiny Betio had not destroyed so many Japanese emplacements, bunkers, and blockhouses, a monumental failure that magnified the death toll in the bloodiest battle in Marine Corps history.
Coming ashore, Kasey Moore watched as navy men used boat hooks to retrieve corpses from the water, and marines performed the ghastly job of burying their comrades. He had just stepped off the Japanese-built pier, camera in hand, when he passed a group of filthy, exhausted marines sprawled on the sand near a burial trench marked with rude crosses assembled from the blasted shards of Japanese structures. Moore happened to overhear the men talking about an officer who had fearlessly led the assault on the hulking bunker he was on his way to photograph.
“Did you say Bonnyman?” he asked. The marines nodded. From Tennessee? Could be, they said; the man had a Southern accent. Bonnyman was a name Moore had only ever heard in Knoxville; surely they were talking about his old friend and tennis partner, Sandy. They’d lost track of each other when Sandy went to college at Princeton, but as teenagers, they had been almost like brothers. Both were rough-and-tumble boys of Scottish descent, adventurous and charismatic. Moore was “an athlete, an avid sportsman, a crack shot, and gentle with his hunting dogs,” and he “never lost a friend or forgave an enemy.”12 Much the same could be said of his old friend.
When Moore asked if they knew where the man was buried, the marines pointed to the freshly covered trench.13 A month later, he recounted the remarkable exchange with his wife while home on Christmas leave.
“I can tell you he had tears in his eyes when he told me that story,” Katherine Moore told me. “He never even knew Sandy was in the marines.”14
Years later, his widow would become a patient of Sandy’s youngest nephew, Dr. Brian Bonnyman, in Knoxville.
“Brian told me Sandy Bonnyman had been buried at sea,” Katherine Moore said. “I said, ‘No, I don’t think so,’ and I told him that story about my husband on Tarawa.”15
Like Sandy, Kasey Moore would not come home from the war, and his mortal remains would become lost to history. His bones now sleep forever three miles deep in the watery grave where the Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese torpedo July 30, 1945, after delivering uranium for the atomic bomb that would soon fall on Hiroshima.
By November 25, even as members of the 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines chased down and killed the last couple hundred of fleeing Japanese on Buariki, the northern terminus of the atoll, the first transports began steaming away from hell, loaded with those who had survived the battle. After docking at Pearl Harbor on December 5 to unload wounded, the ships embarked for the Big Island of Hawaii, where the marines would begin construction of their own camp on a windswept volcanic plateau before they could rest, recuperate, and start training for their next deployment (Saipan, in June).
Within a week after taking Betio, all the men who knew where their fallen comrades were buried were gone. On the island they left behind, the navy’s 18th Construction Battalion/Engineers, the 74th Construction Battalion, and the 549th Construction Battalion Maintenance Unit set about the task of “reorganizing” the graves and cemeteries—the opening chapter of a mystery that Mark Noah and History Flight were still trying to solve more than seven decades later.16
SIXTEEN
SEVENTY YEARS AND COUNTING
AUGUST-NOVEMBER 2013
In the summer of 2013, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command quietly decided to follow up on “new leads” developed by Bill Niven, whose archival research had helped thrust the lost graves of Tarawa into the public e
ye back in 2008.
Like Mark Noah, Niven had been frustrated by the lack of progress in locating the lost graves of Tarawa. But he’d kept the lines of communication open and in late spring he was invited to fly out to meet with JPAC officials in Hawaii to present “updated findings” on the burial locations of dozens of marines at four sites, including one he believed to be Cemetery 27.
“I locate original photographs of the original graves, then locate that spot on current and original maps of Tarawa,” Niven told me, describing his research technique. “Photographs don’t lie. It’s very clear where these men are buried.”1
As he had previously, the former marine declined JPAC’s invitation to make the trip to Tarawa, saying he didn’t want to be a distraction. But, he said, “I don’t lie awake at night, wondering if my research is right. I expect they will come back with 73 men.”2
Under the direction of Central Identification Laboratory deputy director Bill Belcher, a team dug exploratory trenches across the road from the copra plant, where Bill Niven believed they would find Cemetery 27 (and about 300 feet west of Mark Noah’s preferred site, which Belcher had declined to further excavate in 2012). They found old fire pits and other interesting features, but no signs of a burial trench. Niven complained from afar that the team wasn’t digging in the right places, just as Mark Noah had in 2010.
“He’d say, ‘I’ve relooked at the photos, and you need go five meters to the north.’ So we’d dig there, and when we didn’t find anything, he’d say, ‘You need to go five meters more,’” Belcher said. “We were actually chasing this thing to the point where we had moved into the area that was probably Cemetery 26.”3
Bones of My Grandfather Page 17
