Harry K. Tye

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) announced that the remains of Marine Pvt. Harry K. Tye, unaccounted for since World War II, have been identified and are being returned to his family for burial with full military honors. Pvt. Tye was assigned to Company E, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines, 2nd Marine Division, which landed against stiff Japanese resistance on the small island of Betio in the Tarawa Atoll of the Gilbert Islands, in an attempt to secure the island. Over several days of intense fighting at Tarawa, approximately 1,000 Marines and Sailors were killed and more than 2,000 were wounded, but the Japanese were virtually annihilated. Tye died sometime on the first day of battle, Nov. 20, 1943. The battle of Tarawa was a huge victory for the U.S. military because the Gilbert Islands provided the U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet a platform from which to launch assaults on the Marshall and Caroline Islands to advance their Central Pacific Campaign against Japan. In the immediate aftermath of the fighting on Tarawa, U.S. service members who died in the battle were buried in a number of battlefield cemeteries on the island. In 1946 and 1947. On Feb. 28, 1949, a military review board declared Tye’s remains non-recoverable. In June 2015, a nongovernmental organization, History Flight, Inc., notified DPAA that they discovered a burial site on Betio Island and recovered the remains of what they believed were 35 U.S. Marines who fought during the battle in November 1943. The remains were turned over to DPAA in July 2015. To identify Tye’s remains, scientists from DPAA and the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System used mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis, which matched a nephew; laboratory analysis, including dental analysis and anthropological comparison, which matched Tye’s records; as well as circumstantial and material evidence. Pvt. Tye's name is permanently engraved at ABMC's Honolulu Memorial located within the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.