Virginia team hopes to solve WWII mystery



Published: July 7, 2008 at 4:25 PM


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VIRGINIA BEACH, Va., July 7 (UPI) -- A Virginia team seeking answers to a grizzly World War II mystery says it hopes it can help bring closure to the families of 22 long-missing Marines.
A largely forgotten episode and mystery of the Guadalcanal campaign may soon be solved with the help of Radford University researchers and students, The (Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot reported Monday.
The group is headed for the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific armed with ground-penetrating radar to look for graves or human remains within a 6-acre plot on Guadalcanal that would reveal what happened to the Goettge Patrol, a 22-man unit ambushed by the Japanese with wounded Marines reportedly being butchered. Their bodies were never recovered.
It is believed the Japanese troops threw the Americans in trenches, along with some of their own dead. But various attempts over the past 20 years failed to locate the U.S. patrol's remains -- a mystery the Radford team will try to solve.
"It's not a good subject matter, what we are looking for," said Radford senior Sarah Clark. "But if we could actually find them, that would be an amazing thing for the families."


Virginia team hopes to solve WWII mystery - UPI.com

__________________
For the first time I have seen "History" at close quarters,and I know that its actual process is very different from what is presented to Posterity. - WWI General Max Hoffman.

I'm the "Confederate with a pipe"!! LOL

HI

The neat thing about this post is that Lt. Col. Frank Goettge's mother, Caroline Rausch Goettge and my grandfather, George Rausch, were brother and sister.

On 12 Aug 1942, Goettge, and all but three of his patrol, were killed on Guadalcanal near the mouth of the Matanakau River.

In 1995, I started compiling information on the Goettge massacre. Sources include, but are not limited to:

(1) the Marine Corps archives
(2) Sgt Monk Arndt (one of three survivors of the Goette massacre).
(3) Arndt's diary
(3) Marines who arrived after the massacre: (a) Rev HD Miller, Ohio; (b) Joseph Spaulding, Massachusetts, (c) Ronald Pritchard, North Carolina; (d) Richard Milana, New York; (e) Ernest Snowdon, Kentucky; and (f) Ore Marion, New York.

I sent all my information to Dr Cliff Boyd, of Radford (Virginia) University in August 2008. In July 2008 and August 2008, Dr Boyd along with a group of students and others, went to Guadalcanal to search for the remains of the Goettge patrol.

Their plans are to return to the site in the years ahead.

If there are any Guadalcanal vets out there who knew of this incident or have anything to share about Guadalcanal, please contact me through the thread. Thank you in advance.

Alan