Challenges and Opportunities for the Accounting Community on Tarawa Atoll

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "A Decade of DPAA: Challenges and Opportunities to the Accounting Mission", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In November 1943, more than 1,000 U.S. Marines and sailors died wresting control of Tarawa Atoll from a Japanese garrison approximately 3,000 strong. After the battle, the Marines buried most of their dead in a series of cemeteries and small burials scattered across the island of Betio, where the assault occurred. Post-war recovery efforts on the island by the American Graves Registration Service resulted in the recovery and repatriation of several hundred servicemembers but, today, approximately 350 Marines and sailors are still unaccounted-for. This paper will discuss challenges to accounting efforts on Tarawa Atoll, created not only by the nature of the loss incident itself (a large ground loss concentrated on an island the size of Central Park), but also by rapid ongoing urbanization, climate change, and geopolitics. This paper will also discuss how these challenges may simultaneously provide opportunities for the accounting community to advance Tarawa casework.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• A Decade of DPAA: Challenges and Opportunities to the Accounting Mission   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow