![]() ![]() Unfortunately, by accident, nine raiders were left behind. ![]() Around 11pm August 18 almost all of raiders still on the island reached the submarines and just before midnight they set sail for Pearl Harbor. During the remainder of day and the next the raiders picked up important documents at the headquarters and from the bodies of the dead and destroyed enemy weapons and equipment. ![]() The Japanese were wiped out in suicide attack or subsequently killed or killed themselves. Japanese efforts to reinforce Makin were to with little avail, with no more than 35 soldiers being added to the Japanese forces. Gerald Holtom, who read, wrote and spoke fluent Japanese and served as the battalion’s intelligence officer, was killed by a sniper.By the end of the morning the Japanese had been pressed into a last-ditch defense at the shore. The raiders went ashore at dawn on August 17 and attacked the Japanese garrison. James Roosevelt, the President’s son and Carlson’s executive officer, to the island. Two large submarines, Nautilus and Argonaut, carried Carlson’s 221-man raiding force, including Maj. Actually it was garrisoned by no more than a platoon of the 62 nd Guard Unit, fewer than 50 men in all, commanded by Sgt. It appeared that the atoll’s main island, Butaritari, was as a weather station and seaplane base, defended by force estimated between 50 and 350. The Americans had little information about Makin in 1942. Seaplanes there could harass shipping lanes to Australia. At first the only military installation that the Japanese constructed on the Gilberts was a seaplane base on Butaritari Island of the Makin Atoll. In Mid-December 1941 the Japanese had occupied the Gilberts. Carlson (bottom center) and his Raiders on Guadalcanal during the famous “Long Patrol,” November-December 1942 The raid was intended primarily as a diversion to distract Japanese from sending reinforcements to Guadalcanal and Tulagi where Marines had landed earlier in the month. Carlson, made a harassing raid on Makin Island, an atoll in the Gilberts. Some seventy years ago, this past August, the first major collection of captured Japanese documents in the Pacific Theater to arrive at Pearl Harbor were those captured in August 1942 when the 2 nd Marine Raider Battalion, under Lt. If you are a family member of this service member, you may contact your casualty office representative to learn more about your service member.Today’s post is written by Dr. Analysts used forensic analysis to successfully identify Cpl Pearson from among these remains.Ĭorporal Pearson is memorialized on the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. The site was excavated and the comingled remains were recovered and transferred to CILHI. The team was led to the mass gravesite, located under an abandoned coral road. In 1999, a CILHI investigative team traveled to Butaritari where they interviewed a villager who participated in the burial. On August 19, he was buried on Butaritari by local villagers in a communal grave with other Marines who had died during the assault, and his remains were not returned to the U.S. Cpl Pearson was killed during the ensuing battle. On August 17, 1942, members of the 2nd Raider Battalion participated in an attack on a Japanese seaplane base on the small island of Butaritari, Makin Atoll, in the Gilbert Islands. Marine Corps from Oregon and was a member of Company A, 2nd Marine Raider Battalion. On October 23, 2000, the Central Identification Lab-Hawaii (CILHI, now DPAA) accounted for Corporal Robert Brooks Pearson, missing from World War II.Ĭorporal Pearson entered the U.S. ![]()
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