Coming Home

 

The remains of Pfc. Norton V. Retzsch, who died on New Georgia in the Solomon Islands were recently identified and will be buried on April 13 in Marana, Arizona, a town near Tucson, 83 years after his death.

Retzsch, 25 years of age and recently married, was with the 1st Marine Raider Battalion.  On July 9, 1943 he and two fellow Marines were caught in a Japanese ambush and killed.  It took decades after the end of WW2 to identify possible remains and have them DNA tested and compared to one of his relatives.  

After Norton's death his wife, Margaret, enlisted in the Marine Corps Women's Reserve.  She eventually remarried and passed in 2005. 

The New Georgia campaign, from June 30 to October 7, 1943 and cost 1,195 American lives, is one of many almost forgotten battles in the U.S. effort to capture the Solomon Islands with most of the fighting occurring between August 1942 and April 1944

The search for remains of the missing continues.  The difficulties in this process can be seen in the Military.com article on the search for Norton Retzsch.

After the war, the 604th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company searched the Bairoko Harbor and Enogai Inlet area from November to December 1947 but found no trace of Retzsch. The military declared him non-recoverable in 1949 and inscribed his name on the Tablets of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in the Philippines.

What the military did not know at the time was that Retzsch's remains had likely already been recovered. In December 1943, unidentified remains buried at the Enogai Cemetery were exhumed and transferred first to a New Georgia cemetery, then to Finschhafen, Papua New Guinea, where they were designated as Unknown X-182. After multiple failed identification attempts, X-182 was interred at the Manila American Cemetery in 1950.

The case remained dormant for decades until DPAA turned its attention back to New Georgia. Agency researchers flagged a group of unidentified remains from the Enogai and Bairoko area as possible matches for missing Raiders, and in January 2019, X-182 was pulled from the Manila cemetery and sent to the DPAA laboratory. 

In 2013, I wrote of another missing Marine, Alexander "Sandy" Bonnyman, killed during the attack on Tarawa in November 1943.  Bonneyman is the only Medal of Honor recipient photographed during the action for which he received the medal.  In 2015, Bonnyman's remains were finally identified and he was returned home.