Bones of My Grandfather

by Clay Bonnyman Evans

  Photographer Obie Newcomb carried on an extended exchange with Blue Diamond Coal Company secretary Edna Schneider before summoning the courage to write directly to the Bonnymans: “He will go down in history as one of the heros [sic] of this war. . . . I sincerely hope he receives the Congressional Medal of Honor.”3

  The family received letters of condolence from the governors of Tennessee, Georgia, and New Mexico, titans of the mining and railroad industries and Alex Bonnyman’s many high-profile friends, including US Attorney General Francis Biddle and Archbishop (later Cardinal) Francis Spellman of New York, who said a special Mass for Sandy in early January.4

  Even Jimmie Russell, who had carried on an affair with my grandmother, wrote to the Bonnymans to express his condolences.

  “I have loved Sandy as a younger brother and never met or hope to meet a finer, cleaner, all man. . . . All of us only wish we had the stuff to emulate him,” he wrote.5

  Alex Bonnyman replied graciously to every missive and asked marines for any detail of his son’s life and death overseas. Haunted by the thought that he would not be able to bury his son, he also struck up extended correspondences with reporters, marines, and chaplains, hoping to learn where Sandy was buried.

  In February, Clerou wrote the Bonnymans that they would be able get a final glimpse of their son if they could get ahold of a new Paramount newsreel.

  “Sandy is shown in action in several scenes. . . . One scene shows three (3) Marines going up the side of the pill box. The man in the middle has a flame thrower, the man on his right is Sandy. His back is toward you, but you can pick him out by his stature, also he has no camoflage [sic[ cover on his helmet whereas all the other Marines do,” he wrote.6

  In late March, the manager of the stately Tennessee Theatre in downtown Knoxville arranged a private showing of the newsreel for Alex, Frances, Gordon’s wife Isabel (their younger son was off fighting with Merrill’s Marauders in the jungles of Burma), and a number of her Ashe relatives. The local papers reported that the family was pleased to see the footage, but Isabel would later declare that “watching that film in the empty theatre was one of the saddest experiences” of her life.7

  Sandy’s shocking death was the beginning of a long, painful period for his young family. Almost immediately, Jo decided to break it apart, sending nine-year-old Fran off to stay with her Sanford relatives at the ranch in Rosita Coahuila, Mexico and once more leaving seven-year-old Tina with the Bonnymans before she returned to Santa Fe with baby Alix, her nurse, and Jimmie Russell. If my grandmother felt any grief, she wasn’t letting it show.

  “When you arrived [in Knoxville] that day early in January 1944, it was as if the bride of another had arrived,” my Granny Great wrote to Jo. “You seemed so far away from us in our sorrow, so aloof in spirit, so preoccupied with things other than our Common grief. . . . In that dark hour, it seemed almost as if God had answered your prayer, not ours. Living, we could not have shielded [Sandy]. Leave us to sit alone with our beloved dead in the shadow of that white cross far away on Tarawa.”8

  Yet Jo did find time to write the Marine Corps three days after receiving the news to request that, “government insurance proceeds . . . be made immediately available to me as it is needed for current expenses.”9

  Nobody was talking to nine-year-old Fran about her father, but being sent to the child’s paradise of the ranch was a great relief. Living with her beloved Aunty Blanche and Uncle Henry meant she could play with her cousin Ann every day after school, ride horses and bikes along dusty roads, and celebrate birthdays with piñatas. But she would never escape her loss, and remembered that Ann and a friend would prod her with questions—“How many people are in your family?”—intended to get her to talk about her dead father, out of curiosity, childish cruelty, or probably a bit of both. She never took the bait.

  On leap day 1944, two months after receiving news of her husband’s death, Josephine Bell Bonnyman and James Hobart Russell were married by District Judge William Barber in Santa Fe—“in haste, like Hamlet’s mother,” as one relative noted.10 The couple then went to the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix for a brief honeymoon.

  In a long letter to my great-grandmother, whom she called Aunt Frances, Jo insisted she’d had to marry to stop tongues wagging in Santa Fe. She declared her abiding love for Sandy “and all the fine things he stood for,” and claimed he’d told her “he’d rather see me marry Jimmie than anyone he’d ever known.” She promised that the girls would “be raised as Catholics and Bonnymans and will be taught always to love and revere their father who was such a beautiful person and such a hero.”11 (Emphasis in original.)

  Jo insisted that Russell was a positive influence on her girls. “Conservative” and “a very temperate drinker,” he would provide “a very quiet and peaceful life with a beautiful home. . . . This will be better for me and Sandy’s children in the long run.”12

  In reality, it was the beginning of twenty years of cruelty, neglect, and abuse for both Jo and the girls. Both Jo’s parents in Texas and the Bonnymans had spent enough time with Tina and Fran during the tumult of the past year to know that they hated Jimmie Russell, and why. Blanche Bell wrote Frances Bonnyman that her daughter had become “a perfect fool in the hands of a knave,” and noted with concerned circumspection that Russell had arranged the house in Santa Fe “with [the children] seeming to the fore and gives a show of more than expected interest.”13

  The grandparents all knew that Jo had married a sexual predator—though they wouldn’t have used that modern term—who was committing “indecencies” with their beloved granddaughters, but they were at a loss about what to do. It was, as they say, a different time.

  “Maybe they should have taken the children away from Jo,” said Robert McKeon, Sandy’s oldest nephew, at age eighty-one. “That was discussed between Granny and Grandfather Bonnyman.”14

  My grandfather’s beloved younger sister Anne Atkinson, whom he playfully called “Rooney” after a popular actress who shared her name, was so appalled by the situation that she came to believe his tragic death in battle was better than the “unhappy homecoming” he would have experienced if he’d returned.15

  As Catholics, Alexander and Frances Bonnyman believed in the resurrection of the body, and bringing their son’s remains home for burial in Knoxville’s Calvary Cemetery was their highest priority. Jo, having detached herself from her former life, surrendered her rights as next of kin to Alex, who immediately informed the marines that he wanted his son’s remains “brought . . . back to Knoxville when it is possible to do so.”16

  Thus began a relentless campaign by Sandy’s father—ably assisted by three Blue Diamond secretaries, Helen O’Rourke, Clara Hood, and Edna Schneider—to discover his son’s whereabouts and lay him to rest in consecrated ground.

  As I put together a paper trail of inquiry and response, I was baffled and appalled by the number of different explanations received by my great-grandfather and his employees over the next several years. I could understand how the grave locations had been “lost,” but not why authorities would not come clean to my family and, no doubt, hundreds of others.

  Given all the subsequent dissembling, it was more than ironic that the first information provided to the family about my grandfather’s burial place was absolutely correct: “Grave #17, 8th Marines Cemetery No. 2, Central Division Cemetery, Betio,” which would later be known as Cemetery 27.17 Weeks later, Alex was informed that he had been temporarily interred in Grave #17 of the 2nd Battalion, 18th Marines cemetery, which never existed.18 A year and a half later he was told that none of the previously reported burial sites for Sandy was accurate, including a memorial grave featuring a cross with his name misspelled as “A. Bonneyman.”19 But, he was assured, his son was somewhere on the island, and “everything humanly possible to care for the remains has been done by the military authorities.”20

  But in June 1946, my great-grandfather received a letter from the Marine Corps Commandant’s office explaining tha
t, “While some of the dead were quickly buried in temporary graves ashore, the majority of the bodies were of necessity buried at sea.”21 (Author emphasis.) Alex took that to mean Sandy now slept in Davy Jones’s locker.

  In fact, fewer than two hundred of the more than 1,100 Americans killed at Tarawa were given marine burial,22 and ships’ logs indicated that the number might be as few as one hundred.23 The reason was simple: most bodies were already in a state of advanced decomposition by the time they were buried; ferrying such remains out to ships to consign them to the deeps would have been not just ghastly, but absurd.

  A few months later, the War Department wrote Alex Bonnyman to say that it had not been able to locate his son’s grave, “which apparently was not well marked in the confusion of the disaster at Tarawa,” he wrote a friend. The cacophony of conflicting information was taking its toll on my seventy-seven-year-old great-grandfather: “I have almost given up hope of having him sent here for interment in our cemetery.”24

  US Army Maj. G. Gordon Bonnyman, Sandy’s younger brother, did not come home from the war unscathed. Gravely wounded and suffering from severe malaria, he’d spent months in a hospital in Calcutta, India, before was well enough to be sent to recuperate in Nashville. But he was suffering from what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder, and when it became clear he wasn’t ready to assume his duties as a husband, father, and Blue Diamond heir apparent, his father arranged for him to spend a couple of months recuperating at the Sanford ranch in Mexico, where he and Sandy had used to go bird hunting.

  Once recovered, Gordon returned to Knoxville, where he began a long, sometimes frustrating, apprenticeship to his father, and took command of the quest to find his brother’s remains. He would leave no stone unturned, continuing to track down the thinnest of leads over the next two decades. And where Alex Bonnyman’s persistent inquiries regarding Sandy’s remains were polite to a fault, Gordon was familiar with military bureaucracy—and less inclined to deference.

  In July 1947 a friend sent Gordon a page torn from Life magazine with a letter to the editor from former marine Bob McGuire, who wrote that he had seen Sandy’s grave on Betio on December 10, 1943, “surrounded by his fallen Marine comrades and the simple wooden marker over him read ‘Good Luck Bonny.’”25 But when Blue Diamond secretary Clara Hood wrote to McGuire for details, he was no help. “I can’t give you any further information,” he wrote;26 he pointed her to a Time magazine photo from “two or three years ago,” but it did not show what he had reported.

  Later that year, after hearing from a Graves Registration officer that all remains had been exhumed from Tarawa and were now stored at Schofield Barracks in Honolulu, Gordon wrote to officials offering to send his brother’s dental records, which included X-rays of extensive, highly distinctive gold dental work, to help with identification.27 He received the following reply: “Until you receive word from the Office of the Quartermaster General, I can only assure you that the American Graves Registration Service is sparing no effort or expense in the tremendous task of identifying unknown war dead.”28 In other words, don’t call us, we’ll call you.

  For all his tenacity, Gordon wasn’t getting anywhere, either.

  In 1946 the 604th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company had spent two and a half months on Betio for the purpose of locating, disinterring, identifying, and “reinterring the remains located in a master cemetery.” Among those involved in the search were two navy chaplains who had overseen some of the burials in the immediate aftermath of the fighting, my grandfather’s Father William O’Neill and Father Francis “Foxhole” Kelly, as well as dental experts, a bulldozer operator, and a licensed undertaker. From March 4 to May 20, the team recovered bodies from eight named or numbered cemeteries and numerous isolated graves on the island, as well as from burial sites on Buariki at the northern end of the atoll, Abemama to the south, and a C-47 transport plane that had crashed into the lagoon.

  In the end, they located forty-nine percent of the bodies believed interred on Tarawa; of those, just fifty-eight percent were identified, less than a third of the total number of those killed. No remains were found beneath hundreds of markers in both large cemeteries and isolated graves and the survey noted that hundreds of others probably were not marked at all.29 In March 2015, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency—successor to JPAC—found that that of 1,049 Marines and Navy servicemen killed on Tarawa from November 20–23, 1943, 510 “are not accounted for.”30

  In the end, AGRS recovered at least some remains from every named or numbered burial locations in 1946–47—except one. They failed to locate Cemetery 27, despite an apparent clue in the form of an elaborate 1944 monument with a plaque listing twenty-four men and sixteen unknowns buried “near this spot,” near the boat basin and a Quonset hut that served as a theater.

  The team confidently removed the monument and dug the surrounding area to a depth of seven feet. Finding nothing, they began digging exploratory trenches in every direction, “but all this work was in vain.” Kelly and O’Neill even climbed an old Japanese watchtower in an effort to pinpoint the location of the trench, but after three weeks “it was felt that this was only a memorial site and there was no value in continuing the search in that area.”31

  Shortly thereafter, authorities declared that “All original burial sites on Tarawa Atoll were disinterred in 1946 and concentrated in the Lone Palm Cemetery, Betio Island, Tarawa.”

  The construction of gleaming white cemeteries neatly studded with crosses bearing the names of some 680 Tarawa dead (including some 400 known to be buried elsewhere, 122 who were buried at sea, and 88 missing and presumed dead) didn’t fool those in the know.

  “Existing cemeteries on Tarawa . . . are fictitious,” Col. David Shoup wrote to Gen. Julian Smith in 1946. “Although they may appear neat and properly cared for, the markers may not identify the remains buried under them, if there are any remains buried there at all. . . . There were other instances where bodies were disinterred completely during the process of construction with no attempt to move them to proper burial spots so the remains of many may have been entirely lost. . . . It’s a disgraceful mess but I am damned if I can see any measures we can take to remedy it at this late date.”32

  Smith thought the answer was to turn the entire island into a marine memorial.

  “It seems to me that Betio is such a small piece of real estate that an agreement could be made with the British Government whereby it would remain as a shrine to the Marines who fell recapturing a piece of British territory,” the general mused, noting that it might also “go a long way toward improving the relationship between the United States and England.”33 I’ve found no further documents indicating whether Smith or Shoup broached the idea with higher-ups.

  But by 1949, the government was ready to end its search, despite having reclaimed only around half of the missing remains.

  “In view of the fact that two separate operations have already been conducted to recover all remains on Tarawa; that further attempts would be difficult and costly; that in the event identifiable remains were recovered, it is quite possible they might not actually prove to be those of persons whose remains have supposedly been delivered to their next of kin; it is recommended that the findings of non-recoverability approved on 20 and 21 October 1949 be confirmed,” advised the Quartermaster’s Memorial Branch.34

  Unidentified remains brought back from Tarawa were buried individually in the Courts of the Missing at the National Cemetery of the Pacific on Oahu beneath engraved letters reading, “The names of Americans who gave their lives in the service of their country and whose earthly resting place is known only to God.”

  According to a review of Sandy Bonnyman’s case, “Dental and physical characteristics of the above-named individual were compared with all unknowns from Tarawa with negative results.”35 In 1949, his remains were determined to be “non-recoverable.”36

  That year, Alex Bonnyman ordered a ten-foot-long marble headstone from It
aly. He had “BONNYMAN” carved on the front, and on the back, these words:

  FIRST LT. ALEXANDER BONNYMAN, JR.

  UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS RESERVE

  BORN ATLANTA, GEORGIA

  MAY 2, 1910

  KILLED IN ACTION

  TARAWA, GILBERT ISLANDS

  NOVEMBER 22, 1943

  BURIED AT SEA

  He had the monument placed atop the highest hill in what is now Knoxville’s Berry Highland Memorial Cemetery, just a couple miles from Bonniefield, and purchased twenty plots for his family and succeeding generations of Bonnymans. Alex would be the first to be buried there, in 1953, followed by Frances and their daughter Margot in 1968, daughter Anne in 1990, and son Gordon in 2004. All went to their graves believing that Sandy had been lost forever.

  As momentous as it had been in late 1943, the Battle of Tarawa receded quickly in the American imagination, replaced on front pages by ever-bigger battles and brutal fighting in the grim competition for bloodiest battle in Marine Corps history.

  “It is strange the way life goes,” photographer Obie Newcomb wrote Alex Bonnyman in July 1945. “Tarawa is so far away. Iwo Jima has sort of replaced it with its terrible memories.”37

  But for my family, Tarawa would always be painfully close. In hopes of easing his parents’ grief, my great-uncle Gordon continued to pull at the most tenuous of threads in his dwindling campaign to bring his brother home. More than two decades after Sandy’s death, a former navy Seabee named LeRoy J. Kain from Raton, New Mexico, gave some black-and-white photos he had taken in 1943 of a memorial cross marked “1st LT A. Bonneyman” (sic) to one of his bank customers, Gertrude Bonnyman, a cousin by marriage to Alex Bonnyman. Gordon immediately contacted Kain after his parents received the photos.

  “The advice that the family received after Sandy’s death was that he had been buried at sea. We had heard conflicting stories indicating that he had been buried on the island, but all efforts to substantiate this through the Marine Corps were fruitless, and I tried writing to the Graves Registration Officer in Hawaii in 1947 and again hit a dead end. The snapshots that you sent are the only conclusive (sic) proof that we have obtained indicating that he was buried on land,”38 he wrote.