Two years after a massive Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. Marines went after their enemies in a very personal way on the tiny Tarawa Atoll.

About 5,000 Japanese defenders were waiting when 35,000 Americans from the 2nd Marine Division, the Army's 27th Infantry Division and other units came ashore.

Armed with 14 Type-95 light tanks and 14 coastal defense guns purchased from the British before the war, Japanese soldiers were prepared for their most tenacious defense so far in the conflict. The 8-inch shore guns and millions of rounds from Japanese infantry rifles flew toward the Americans long before the soldiers hit the beach. Landing craft filled with Marines and armament ran up on a reef hundreds of yards offshore; U.S. planners had misread tide charts.

That's probably when 17-year-old James Johnson died, either trapped in the landing craft or working his way to shore in the shallows.

The November 1943 battle gave the United States a ledge to grab onto as it inched toward what was to have been an invasion of Japan's mainland. Two nuclear fission bombs two years later made that attack unnecessary, but in the early days of the Pacific campaign, Johnson was among tens of thousands of young men who died soon after leaving boot camp and boarding a Navy ship.

"Tarawa was his first foot in the water, the first gun in his hand, and his first battle," his nephew, James Johnson of Big Pine Key, told The Citizen Wednesday.

Johnson, who was putting together a collection of his own military memorabilia for his family, including medals and photos from his time in Vietnam, remembered talk over the years of his uncle's death while fighting at Tarawa.

Nephew seeks answers

"I wanted to look at Uncle Jimmy's records, so I wrote a letter to the military records [depot] in the Midwest where they keep records for other than active duty military," Johnson said. "His records were kind of sparse; they sent me six or seven pages. He enlisted, went through Marine basic training, and his first battle was Tarawa."

James Bernard Johnson is still 17 and still on Tarawa -- somewhere under the island's sand. The U.S. units had to move quickly, island hopping from one brutal battle to the next. Instead of tagging each soldier, placing them in body bags or coffins and shipping them home for burial, Americans troops quickly excavated mass graves in which to bury their fallen. After filling in the large grave sites, a military unit would sketch its location on a map of the island and move on to the next shore attack.

Johnson's nephew, 68, served in the Special Forces in Vietnam. He knew his uncle had never come home from the Pacific, but that was about it. If coincidence and the Internet hadn't intersected, the nephew never would have known that the answer to his uncle's fate was less than a mile away on Big Pine Key.

Mark Noah, whose nonprofit organization, History of Flight, is based at Florida Keys Marathon Airport, lives on Big Pine Key near Johnson. Noah's organization maintains classic aircraft, including World War II military planes, and gives barnstorming demonstrations and rides to spectators at air shows nationwide.

In 2008, Noah and his team of experts experienced in locating old military grave sites searched Tarawa, Palau, the Marshall Islands, Truk, the Caroline Islands and other World Ware II Pacific battle sites for the remains of Americans. At first they had been interested primarily in finding the remains of downed war birds and the remains of their pilots. But Noah's interest expanded to finding military grave sites that were marked on maps and long forgotten by the U.S. military.

Johnson learned about Noah and his work after he did an online search on the word "Tarawa." He found the Web site of Tim Darcy, who uses ground-penetrating radar to find old graves and other items. Darcy told Johnson he was working with Noah to find the burial sites of military men slain in the Pacific.

Search for the missing

That's when he learned Noah lived about a mile from his home. Johnson called Noah, and the two compared notes. Noah drove to Johnson's house with documents, maps and other Pacific campaign data.

"Mark came over, showed me and my wife the material he had, and I told him that my uncle had perished at Tarawa," Johnson said.

Noah's documents were a big addition to the half-dozen pages Johnson had received from the military records depot. In fact, Noah had medical records from the hospital ship that worked on Tarawa's injured while anchored offshore during the battle. He also had the old maps that showed the locations of burial sites.

Noah, who found the burial maps in the National Archives annex in College Park, Md., and the U.S. Marine Corps archive in Quantico, Va., had for years wondered about the missing of World War II. As he spoke to more families of lost servicemen, and learned about the men who never came home, he made it his mission to find those grave sites. He has made two trips to the Pacific, once in January 2008 and again in October.

Using funds and donations raised by giving rides in historic craft around the nation, Noah, and colleagues from WFI Research Group and Maverick Inspectors, which ran the ground-penetrating radar, went to Tarawa to search for the grave sites.

As on most of the Pacific islands where Americans fought, many of the battle sites at Tarawa are now under parking lots, homes and buildings. On some islands, the military built bases on top of unmarked graves without knowing it.

"When the grave registrations group of the Army Quartersmaster's General Corps went to recover all the bodies after the war, they could only find 49 percent of them," Noah said. "When buildings and roads were built, the markers and crosses had been lost."

Tarawa's hell

The killing was so extensive on the island, which is half the size of New York City's Central Park, that bones stick out of the surf and burned tanks and downed aircraft are easily spotted in the forest. Japan lost nearly 5,000 men; 1,100 Americans died.

"In almost all of the areas we searched, construction workers had dug up American Marines' bodies," Noah said. "One grave site was under a pigsty."

That was not the case of James Bernard Johnson, 17. Noah found his burial site on his second trip to the Pacific in October. Johnson was laid to rest next to a pier where he tried to come ashore on the north end of the island. His body is buried on shore with other Marines under what is now a gravel parking lot next to municipal buildings. Military historians refer to the shoreline by its battle position: Red Beach 3 and Red Beach 4.

Noah contacted the modern-day Johnson to tell him the news.

"After the second trip, I called him and let him know we found the graveyard his uncle was in," Noah said.

The idea isn't to disinter the young man's body and bring it home for burial; both Johnson on Big Pine and Noah understand that it is not their role.

"We don't dig anything up; we don't disturb the area," Noah said. "Those are sacred sites and it's not our role to touch or move anything."

Whose role is it to disinter the bodies in the Pacific and bring them home? The U.S. military's, Noah said.

"We don't go out of our way to contact families; that's intrusion -- they contact us," Noah said. "We don't know the military's procedures. They do. This is a forgotten issue because the military doesn't [bring the bodies home]. That's why private groups like ourselves are urging [the military] to get active. No one's looking for the Tarawa missing."

A soldier's memories

For Johnson, finding his uncle's remains was important not only for closure, but because he understands the chaos of war.

"It's a toss of the coin -- it could have been me," he said. "I was wounded in Vietnam by a hand grenade, and here's somebody who didn't make it. I did. He was only 17 or 18 and I was 21 when I was in Vietnam. War never changes."

Noah will speak about his trips to the Pacific and the fate of American servicemen in World War II at 6 p.m. today at the Key West Veterans of Foreign Wars headquarters at 2200 North Roosevelt Blvd.

jguerra@keysnews.com