News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: Six Decades Later, Marine Laid To Rest

Date: January 29, 2001

"Marine killed in 1942 memorialized, buried
JULIE STEWART
SPECIAL TO THE DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

MOUNTAIN HOME -- One by one, dozens of old soldiers stood silently before the small bronze box holding the remains of a U.S. Marine dead nearly six decades.

    The veterans' solemn procession capped a memorial service Saturday for Cpl. Kenneth K. Kunkle of Mountain Home, who died in a raid on Makin Atoll in the South Pacific in August 1942, nine months after the United States entered World War II.
    Kunkle's body remained in an unmarked mass grave on the atoll until 1999, when military investigators found an islander who had helped bury the Marines and remembered the grave site.

    On Saturday, Kunkle's remains were placed in his father's grave at the Mountain Home Cemetery. Kunkle's father, Oscar, died in 1960 without knowing what had happened to his son.

    "It's just overwhelming," said Kunkle's niece, Alice Trivitt of Cotter, who declined the military's offer to bury Kunkle in Arlington National Cemetery so that he could be buried next to his father. Trivitt said it's what Kunkle's father would have wanted.

    More than 300 people packed the Roller Funeral Home chapel for the service, including many veterans and dignitaries including U.S. Sen. Tim Hutchinson, R-Ark.

    "Like all Marines, he was faithful to the ideals of honor, courage and commitment," Hutchinson told Kunkle's mourners.

    "The corporal was thrown into the mouth of the dragon" when the United States entered World War II, Hutchinson said. But he added, "It did not take Cpl. Kunkle long to demonstrate courage."

    Kunkle was wounded but refused a medical discharge in order to stay with his the 2nd Marine Battalion, an elite commando unit known as Carlson's Raiders for its commander, Lt. Col. Evans F. Carlson.

    "Such uncommon dedication was common among the Marine Raiders," the senator said.

    The Raiders' two-day mission on Makin Atoll began Aug. 17, 1942, from two submarines: the USS Argonaut and the USS Nautilus. The mission was to destroy a Japanese garrison and divert attention from Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, where U.S. forces had landed days earlier.

    Kunkle and 20 other Marines were killed. Unable to evacuate the bodies, Carlson hastily arranged for islanders to bury the bodies.

    After the war, a military review board ruled the bodies were "unrecoverable."

    But members of the Marine Raiders Association, veterans from the unit, pushed the Pentagon to search for the Marines buried on Makin Atoll. In 1999, investigators from the Army's Central Identification Laboratory at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii found the mass grave on the atoll, now called Butaritari Island.

    "Without the concerted and concentrated persistence of the U.S Army Central Identification Laboratory, Alice and other relatives and friends would never have known what really happened to Kenneth," Steve Gray, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and aide to U.S. Rep. Asa Hutchinson, R-Ark., said at the service.

    Gray said the grave was found under an abandoned crushed coral road built by the Navy Seabees after the island was taken by U.S. forces in November 1943.

    Ashley W. Fisher of Covington, Tenn., a member of the Marine Raiders Association, also spoke at the service, quoting from Carlson's eulogy of the fallen Marines after the unit's return from the atoll.

    "Being human, we mourn the loss of each. But I believe these gallant men who so eagerly, so willingly went forth to meet the enemy, would not have us weep and moan their passage," Carlson said at the time.

    "They loved life, those comrades of ours. They were vital, eager, thoughtful, realistic. They lived those convictions even to the point of sacrificing their lives."

    The association is working to find the remains of nine other Marines who were unable to leave Makin Atoll with their unit and were taken prisoner by the Japanese, Fischer said after the service.

    The nine were taken north to Kwajalein Island in the Marshall Islands, where they were beheaded on Aug. 16, 1942.

    "We're asking the Japanese to find names of these men and to apologize to their next of kin," Fischer said.

    The association also wants the Pentagon to search for their remains, he said."