Last Landing

The saddest work in the Pacific was under way. Thousands of U.S. war dead were being moved from the islands where they died to the islands which the U.S. expects to hold. There they would be reinterred in national cemeteries.

To the quiet, palm-edged cemetery at Guadalcanal went the bodies of soldiers, sailors and marines once buried in the Russells, Espiritu Santo and Tulagi. Men who died as prisoners in scattered, Jap-held islets of the Marshalls, soldiers who fell at Makin, marines who died to take Roi and Namur will be moved to the cemetery on Ennylabegan, in the south of Kwajalein Atoll.

Everywhere the men of the Graves Registration Service were faced with an appalling, sickening task: probing into a mixture of earth, rotting equipment and decaying flesh to find a few bones large enough to pass for the remains of the man whose name appeared on the cross above him.

On Wake it was worst of all. There the Japanese had dug up the bodies of 42 U.S. servicemen and civilians, buried together in a common grave before the island fell. The bodies have disappeared. In another mass grave, where 98 civilian prisoners were hastily buried after their execution in October 1943, identification has been impossible.

The Hope. Servicemen still in the Pacific hoped that this would be the last journey for their dead comrades. So did the only war widow who has yet visited her husband's grave in a Pacific battlefield. Said Red Cross Worker Virginia Matthews, whose husband, Second Lieut. Ernest A. Matthews, died at Tarawa:

"I wish that all the other families who have loved ones there could share the experience. . . . These men earned the right to lie there.

"In some places native plants have started to come back and this results in a gorgeous flood of purple morning-glories--it reminds me of a little old cemetery in the U.S. which is mellow and not closely pruned. I can't think of a righter place for my husband to lie."

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