Historian Recounts Digging Through a Building Floor on Tarawa to Bring 11 Missing Americans Home

Mark Noah, the historian who leads the nonprofit History Flight, told One America News this week how his team dug through the floor of a building on Betio, the main battle island of Tarawa atoll, and pulled out the remains of 11 more American servicemen who had been missing since November 1943. One of them was a Marine officer from Chicago whose daughter was 14 months old when he was killed, and who finally came home to Arlington National Cemetery after 74 years.

The recoveries Noah described took place in 2015 and 2016, and the identification he spoke about came in 2017. But the interview, aired by OAN on Oct. 15, 2026, is a reminder that the hunt for America’s missing from one of the bloodiest fights in Marine Corps history is far from finished.

“We dug down through the floor”

In the OAN segment, Noah described the work at a site on Betio that had sat under a modern structure for decades. “And so that’s what we did. And we dug down through the floor and recovered an additional 11 Marines and Navy corpsmen that were buried underneath the building,” he said.

The site was a wartime burial trench later known as Cemetery 27. According to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), the Army’s 604th Graves Registration Company never found it during its 1946 recovery sweep. History Flight located it, and recovered about 51 sets of remains from Cemetery 27 in 2015 and 2016. The research site Missing Marines, which documents Tarawa casualties, reports that the original trench lay under a parking lot and that the final graves ran beneath a shipyard building. That appears to be the building Noah described.

The discovery mattered beyond one trench. DPAA says it led the agency to launch the Tarawa Commingled Human Remains Project in 2016.

The lieutenant with the baby girl

Among the men recovered from under that building was Second Lt. George Bussa of Chicago. Bussa had come up through the ranks; Missing Marines reports he was a gunnery sergeant before he was commissioned in July 1943, and CBS Chicago reported he had earned the Silver Star for his fighting on Guadalcanal. At Tarawa he led a platoon in Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines.

On Nov. 20, 1943, the first day of the battle, Bussa’s platoon was ordered to assault a large Japanese bombproof near the Burns-Philp wharf at the eastern end of Beach Red 3. According to Missing Marines, enemy machine guns on the structure had a clear field of fire, the defenders badly outnumbered the platoon, and Bussa and about half of his men were killed. Noah, in the OAN interview, tied Bussa’s death to the same position where 1st Lt. Alexander Bonnyman Jr. later fell, saying Bussa “was actually killed at Bonnyman’s bunker in the attack that went against the bunker” before Bonnyman’s own assault.

Bonnyman, a combat engineer, received the Medal of Honor posthumously for leading the assault on a Japanese bombproof shelter on Betio. Marine Corps Times reported in July 2015 that he was killed on Nov. 22, 1943, at age 33, and that History Flight had recovered his remains from the Cemetery 27 burial trench that year.

Bussa was 29. His daughter, Jeri Heise, was about 14 months old and never knew him. “He knew I had been born, and I was mentioned in letters,” she told CBS Chicago in 2017.

Declared “nonrecoverable,” then found

For decades, the government had written Bussa off. Missing Marines reports that after the 1946 search failed, the men buried at the site were declared nonrecoverable. It took History Flight’s excavation, which was completed in 2016, to bring him back. Bussa was the last man buried in the trench and, according to the same account, the last one recovered from it.

According to Missing Marines, dental and anthropological analysis, along with a mitochondrial DNA comparison, led to his identification on April 4, 2017. CBS Chicago reported in early October 2017 that he would be buried at Arlington National Cemetery that month, and his daughter attended the ceremony.

Noah’s team was there. “When he was identified, we were invited to his funeral. And at Arlington, we met his daughter and we met his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren,” he told OAN. “And so it really shows you how, you know, how current this issue is, even though these people lost their lives in combat such a long time ago, their families are all still there.”

Hundreds still waiting

Tarawa was a slaughter. Boats hung up on the reef at low tide, leaving Marines to wade in under Japanese machine-gun fire, and the Associated Press reported in 2019 that more than 990 Marines and 30 sailors were killed. DPAA puts the cost at more than 1,000 American lives and twice as many wounded, in a battle that lasted about 76 hours.

The dead were buried in makeshift cemeteries. Navy construction battalions later removed many of the grave markers while building runways, and postwar Army excavations left parts of some individuals behind. In June 2019, AP reported that History Flight had recovered 272 individuals from Tarawa since 2015 under a Defense Department contract, and that Noah estimated at least 270 more were still there. Many of the remaining graves sit below the water table, so crews have to pump water out of the site every day just to dig.

DPAA’s own Tarawa page says the agency had identified 160 sets of remains from the battle as of September 2022, and that about 374 Americans from the battle remain unaccounted for. The agency says History Flight formally partnered with it in 2017 and has kept a continuous presence on the island since then.

That work is slow, expensive and unglamorous. It has meant demolishing an abandoned building with the permission of Kiribati’s government, raising a shipyard building on hydraulic stilts, digging under a parking lot and pumping out flooded trenches, all to put a name back on a Marine who has been gone for more than 80 years. It is also the most basic promise a country makes to the people it sends to fight: if you fall, we will come for you.

Noah said in the interview that the work is “just as important to them today as it was back, you know, 80 years ago.” George Bussa’s daughter waited 74 years to see her father buried. Hundreds of other Tarawa families are still waiting.

These men crossed that reef for their country, and America shouldn’t stop digging until every last one of them comes home.

Editor’s note: This article covers recoveries made on Tarawa in 2015 and 2016 and an identification made in 2017, which drew renewed attention in October 2026 after an interview with History Flight’s Mark Noah.

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