Marine killed in WWII found, to be buried in Beaver Valley next week
By Larry Miller.
Marine Sergeant Fae Moore is coming home. The Chadron-area Marine was killed nearly 73 years ago in the amphibious assault on the Pacific atoll of Tarawa during World War II. More than 1,000 U.S.
servicemen died in the 76-hour battle with Japanese forces to take control of a strategic airfield.
In June 2015, a nonprofit organization called History Flight notified the Department of Defense that they had discovered the remains of 35 servicemen on Tarawa.
One of them was Fae Moore.
Fae Verlin Moore was born in Chadron, Nebraska on May 16, 1920, the youngest of Alonzo and Mary Moore’s 10 children – six boys and four girls. The family farmed in Beaver Valley east of Chadron during the 1920s until moving to the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1931.
Fae attended Beaver Valley School and completed the 8th Grade before leaving school to work and help his family during the “Dirty Thirties.” He was barely 5’ 6” and weighed just 134, but he knew how to work and took on ranching jobs for a few years.
Moore signed up for a four-year hitch in the Marine Corps on August 18, 1941, nearly four months before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Accepted for enlistment in Rapid City, he traveled to Minneapolis for his physical examination and processing. Three days later 21-year-old “Private” Fae Moore was at Marine Corps Recruit Depot-San Diego for “boot camp.” After just one week, he wrote to his sister Hazel Moss in Nebraska that “the Marines are a lot tougher and stricter than the Army or Navy…I don’t get to leave this post for seven weeks and after that they may send me somewhere else.
This Marine Corps keeps their men on the move all the time.”
By December 2, Moore had finished boot camp and was “on the move” himself, receiving orders to Company E (“Easy” Company), Second Battalion, Eighth Marines. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, he again wrote to Hazel, “I guess everybody is worried, but I can’t understand why.
We aren’t…most of these boys have or had pals over on Wake Island, and they are crazy to go over and get even.” On January 6, 1942, Fae Moore and his unit departed San Diego aboard the SS Matsonia, part of a convoy carrying 5,000 Marines assigned to defend American Samoa – and begin 10 months of intensive jungle warfare training.
Moore was promoted to Private First Class (PFC) and in November his unit shipped out for Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. They reinforced the 1st Marine Division, which was bogged down in the first major Allied offensive in the Pacific. It was the first taste of combat for the young man from Nebraska.
The death toll was high: some 20,000 Japanese and 2,000 Americans. The Japanese withdrew from Guadalcanal by February 1943, and “Easy” Company was on its way to New Zealand for a bit of rest – and further training. Upon arriving in Wellington, Fae again wrote to Hazel, “I am where I can get some pictures taken; this is a pretty nice place.”
Perhaps his impressions were shaped a bit by a girl named Jill Hudson. Little is known about their meeting or courtship, but eventually they became engaged. Moore was promoted twice during 1943, sewing on Sergeant stripes in August. He had to say good-bye to Jill Hudson in late October when his unit boarded the USS Heywood, for “exercises” and then an unknown destination.
By November 19, the Heywood was in the central Pacific, approaching the Gilbert Islands and the Japanese stronghold at Tarawa. Control of the airstrip there, according to the Navy, “offered the Pacific Fleet a platform from which to launch assaults on the Marshall and Caroline Islands” to help the Navy in its westward campaign. The island of Betio, where the airstrip was located, is only about two-and-a-quarter miles long and less than a half mile wide.
Operation Galvanic, the assault on Betio, began November 20, 1943. Moore’s 2nd Battalion, Eighth Marines launched the first wave, landing on “Red Beach 3” before the Japanese could man their weapons.
Unfortunately, many U.S. landing boats were caught on reefs, and hundreds of Marines had to wade through the chest-high surf and were mowed down by enemy machine guns before hitting the beach. The battle raged for 76 hours before the Marines took control of Betio. Among the 1,027 Marines reported killed was Sergeant Fae Moore.
Decaying bodies, including about 5,000 Japanese military personnel and Korean slave laborers, posed serious health issues. Most of the dead were buried in temporary trenches.
Back in Nebraska, Fae Moore’s mother and father in Chadron were likely making preparations for Thanksgiving.
They knew their son was in the Pacific, but they didn’t know where. News reports told of the Allied push across the Pacific, including the battle on Tarawa, but there were no details on casualties.
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