Tarawa Marine identified, buried with full honors

Approximately 1,000 Marines and sailors were killed and more than 2,000 were wounded taking the small island of Betio in the Battle of Tarawa in late 1943.

The amphibious assault on well-defended Japanese forces became known as “Bloody Tarawa” due to the stunning loss of life in such a short time — over 5,000 American and Japanese forces killed in 76 hours.

Marine Corps Pvt. John M. Tillman, just 21, died on the first day of the battle, Nov. 20, 1943.

The Reno, Nev., man was initially buried on the beach. Recovered after the war, Tillman’s remains were interred at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, but he was buried as an “unknown.”

As the result of an ongoing Defense Department effort to identify unknowns at Punchbowl, Tillman’s grave was disinterred in 2017.

On Friday he was reburied with full military honors, a name on his gravestone and the thanks of his family, who now know what happened to their relative after he made the ultimate sacrifice in World War II.

“We think about how he went to serve his country,” Navy chaplain Lt. Cmdr. Philip Ridley said during a service at Punchbowl, adding that Tillman “went forth with courage.”

Tillman’s nephew, John Benevides of San Juan Capistrano, Calif., was one of about five family members to come to Punchbowl for the reburial.

“I was in the Navy, and I was stationed in Pearl Harbor in the early ’60s and I came up here … and I saw my uncle’s name on the memorial to the missing in action and I didn’t know that he was here at the time,” Benevides said.

The identification and formal burial “eliminates the question mark in the back of your mind. It’s just nice to know that he’s identified and he’s home,” he said.

Wendy Hacke, Tillman’s niece, said her father, then 16, and her uncle, 18, probably enlisted in the Marine Corps together. Not much was known about her uncle’s service, but he had a Purple Heart from Guadalcanal, she said.

“He was one of the first groups going through (Tarawa),” said Hacke, who lives in San Jose, Calif. “We know that they were sitting ducks out there.”

The Navy said the objective on Betio Island was an airfield, but when Marines landed they were met with fierce opposition. The battle was fought Nov. 20-23, 1943. More than 4,000 Japanese defenders were killed.

To identify Tillman’s remains, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which has a lab at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, said it used dental, anthropological and chest X-ray comparisons with his service records.

In 2015 the Pentagon announced that it was taking the unprecedented step of exhuming all of the battleship USS Oklahoma’s remaining 388 crew members buried as unknowns at Punchbowl to make identifications.

Exhumations from the Korean War and World War II continue at Punchbowl. All 94 caskets associated with Tarawa remains have been disinterred, along with all the Oklahoma remains and all 35 caskets associated with the USS West Virginia, according to the accounting agency.

The agency said 23 identifications have been made from the Tarawa graves that were formerly marked as unknown, and 127 service members have been identified from the USS Oklahoma. Many families decide to bury identified service members in their hometowns.