FEBRUARY/MARCH 2009 – The remains of more than 100 marines who were killed during the battle of Tarawa appear to have been discovered in mass graves on the tiny Pacific atoll, according to a group that conducted a search with ground-penetrating radar this fall.

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Mark Noah, executive director of History Flight, a Florida-based military history nonprofit, and Ted Darcy, a Massachusetts historian with the private military research organization WFI Research Group, say they have located 139 graves on Tarawa in eight sites. Their find could lead to the largest identification of missing American soldiers in history.

Keiji Shibasaki, commander of the Japanese garrison on the two-mile-long islet of Betio, had bragged that it would take a million Americans a hundred years to take Tarawa. Beginning on November 20, 1943, it took 35,000 soldiers, sailors, and marines three days—in one of the most brutal amphibious assaults of the war, and the first to encounter heavy resistance on the beaches. Of some 4,700 Japanese defenders there, only 17 survived.

More than 900 marines were killed in the fighting, many of them while wading through the surf for hundreds of yards after their landing craft were caught on a reef at low tide. The men were buried in mass graves, where the military planned to retrieve them and bring them home when the war ended. But as navy engineers swooped in to begin airfield construction on the island, many of the burial sites were covered over. After the war, only half of the bodies could be found and returned to the United States. The rest of the dead, a total of 541 soldiers, were listed as missing.

After more than a decade of research and two expeditions, Noah and Darcy, a former marine himself, say they have found at least some of those missing men. Their claim is backed by burial rosters, combat reports, and interviews with construction contractors who have found human remains at the site.

Noah and Darcy planned to share their findings with the Department of Defense in January; the federal government will conduct any excavation of the site. “We’ll make one additional trip to the island to search for the remaining grave sites and make arrangements for the return and identification of the bodies,” says Noah. “Allowing the families of the missing to finally have closure is our foremost goal.”

Several family members of the missing soldiers have said they would like their relatives’ bodies returned to the United States. “In the marines,” Darcy has told reporters, “we were taught to never leave any man behind.”

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