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This Remembrance Profile was originally created by MGySgt Scott Welch - Deceased
Contact Info
Home Town Radford City
Last Address Mrs. Nell Kincaid Dunahoe (wife) 1053 Second Avenue San Diego, California
MIA Date Nov 20, 1943
Cause KIA-Killed in Action
Reason Gun, Small Arms Fire
Location Kiribati
Location of Memorial Courts of the Missing at the Honolulu Memorial - Honolulu, Hawaii
Memorial Coordinates Buried at Sea by Naval Authority, 21Nov1943
Tarawa (Gilbert Islands, Kiribati) - November 20 to November 23, 1943
Of the 3,636 Japanese in the garrison, only one officer and sixteen enlisted men surrendered. Of the 1,200 Korean laborers brought to Tarawa to construct the defenses, only 129 survived. All told, 4,690 of the island's defenders were killed. The 2nd Marine Division suffered 894 killed in action, 48 officers and 846 enlisted men, while an additional 84 of the wounded survivors later succumbed to what proved to be fatal wounds. Of these, 8 were officers and 76 were enlisted men. A further 2,188 men were wounded in the battle, 102 officers and 2,086 men. Of the roughly 12,000 2nd Marine Division marines on Tarawa, 3,166 officers and men became casualties. Nearly all of these casualties were suffered in the 76 hours between the landing at 0910 20 November and the island being declared secure at 1330 23 November. The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), investigated the cases of American servicemen who remain unaccounted for from the Battle of Tarawa, including 103 who are buried as "Unknown" in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. It is a tiny island; its main feature (and the reason for its capture) was a small airstrip that ran down its middle, almost from one beach to the other. Marines commented that, in most places on the island, a pitcher with a good arm could throw a baseball from one side to the other. Rather than one big cemetery, the Americans buried their dead in several smaller cemeteries where space and convenience permitted. They were marked as well as possible, understood to be temporary and left to the care of the garrison. When graves registration teams arrived after the war, they found an enormous mess and very few remains. The small cemeteries had been moved during the war to accommodate the expanding base and while the main cemetery had been spruced up (in advance of a visit from a LIFE magazine photographer) headstones often did not line up with graves or, indeed, follow the lines of burial at all. Many of the bodies had no identification, and identifying features were long gone. By the time the graves registration teams called it quits, they had repatriated a few score remains, returned a few dozen as unknown, and left hundreds behind as simply unrecoverable.
World War II/Asiatic-Pacific Theater/Guadalcanal Campaign (1942-43)
From Month/Year
August / 1942
To Month/Year
February / 1943
Description The Guadalcanal Campaign, also known as the Battle of Guadalcanal and codenamed Operation Watchtower by Allied forces, was a military campaign fought between 7 August 1942 and 9 February 1943 on and around the island of Guadalcanal in the Pacific theatre of World War II. It was the first major offensive by Allied forces against the Empire of Japan.
On 7 August 1942, Allied forces, predominantly American, landed on the islands of Guadalcanal, Tulagi, and Florida in the southern Solomon Islands with the objective of denying their use by the Japanese to threaten the supply and communication routes between the US, Australia, and New Zealand. The Allies also intended to use Guadalcanal and Tulagi as bases to support a campaign to eventually capture or neutralize the major Japanese base at Rabaul on New Britain. The Allies overwhelmed the outnumbered Japanese defenders, who had occupied the islands since May 1942, and captured Tulagi and Florida, as well as an airfield (later named Henderson Field) that was under construction on Guadalcanal. Powerful US naval forces supported the landings.
Surprised by the Allied offensive, the Japanese made several attempts between August and November 1942 to retake Henderson Field. Three major land battles, seven large naval battles (five nighttime surface actions and two carrier battles), and continual, almost daily aerial battles culminated in the decisive Naval Battle of Guadalcanal in early November 1942, in which the last Japanese attempt to bombard Henderson Field from the sea and land with enough troops to retake it was defeated. In December 1942, the Japanese abandoned further efforts to retake Guadalcanal and evacuated their remaining forces by 7 February 1943 in the face of an offensive by the US Army's XIV Corps, conceding the island to the Allies.
The Guadalcanal campaign was a significant strategic combined arms victory by Allied forces over the Japanese in the Pacific theatre. The Japanese had reached the high-water mark of their conquests in the Pacific, and Guadalcanal marked the transition by the Allies from defensive operations to the strategic offensive in that theatre and the beginning of offensive operations, including the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, and Central Pacific campaigns, that resulted in Japan's eventual surrender and the end of World War II.
