Flags flew at half staff across the commonwealth on Friday to honor Private First Class John W. Mac Donald, a Somerville Marine being laid to rest nearly 75 years after he died fighting in World War II. MacDonald was killed on November 20, 1943, on the first day of fighting in the Battle of Tarawa, an atoll in the Central Pacific.
Taking Tarawa back from the Japanese created a strategic opening. But it was a costly victory: In just three days, Mac Donald and a thousand more Marines died, and over three thousand Japanese were killed — virtually the entire garrison defending the atoll.
In the carnage and chaos of the battle, Private Mac Donald and many others who fell to Japanese fire were buried on the battlefield. After the war, recovery operations were able to find some of the bodies, but in 1949 a military review board declared that Mac Donald’s remains were unrecoverable, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA). The DPAA is the government organization currently responsible for accounting for Americans who go missing while serving, with field teams working across the world.
It was a private group that discovered the grave that contained Mac Donald. Mark Noah is the founder and director of History Flight, a nonprofit dedicated to recovering and repatriating America’s war dead. He says they’ve been conducting an ongoing recovery operation in Tarawa since 2007, looking for the hundreds of Marines known to have been lost there. In 2015 they "discovered and recovered" a grave containing the remains of more than 30 Marines buried on the island of Betio, where Mac Donald died. The remains were transferred to the DPAA and taken to their lab in Honolulu for identification. Private Mac Donald was positively identified on August 15, 2016.
It took the DPAA a little longer to track down a next of kin to notify. There were no immediate family survivors, but they were ultimately able to locate Joyce Kelley, Mac Donald’s first cousin, once removed. Kelley says she got the news out of the blue from her son-in-law. “He was doing the ancestry thing over the internet, and he asked me all the information on my father's side [and] my mother's side. While he was doing that online, somebody contacted him about John McDonald.” It was the DPAA lab in Hawaii. Using a combination of forensic analysis, they had identified the body, and were looking for the closest relative to accept the remains.
Kelley never knew Mac Donald — she was born years after World War II ended — and growing up, knew practically nothing about him. But she now has the detailed report from the DPAA detailing how he died and how he was recovered. There are photos of the skeleton, remarkably intact after 75 years, with close-ups of the skull revealing damage from the Japanese fire that took his life. Kelley’s daughter is a Marine, and she says it’s impossible for her not to think of MacDonald’s mother and what it would have meant to her to know her son has returned.
“I feel just bad for the family because they received the notice that he was missing in action," said Kelley. "His poor mother must have been so horrified, he was so young. I'm glad that I can do this.”
And for all that was revealed by the extensive detective work by both the DPAA and History Flight, there was one final dramatic discovery about Private First Class John W. Mac Donald. When I spoke with her a few days before the funeral, Kelley had just discovered that Mac Donald’s military records had him listed as a year older than he really was. “We just found out today that he was he wasn't born in 1924, he was born in in 1925.” She suspects Mac Donald lied about his age to enlist. We now know that MacDonald was only 18 years old when he died in the Battle of Tarawa.
