TWENTY-ONE

CONSPICUOUS GALLANTRY

2014–2015

The discovery of Cemetery 27 had solved the mystery of grandfather’s death.

But even after five years of investigation, tens of thousands of miles traveled, countless hours of interviews, and the best efforts of the top researchers I could find, I still didn’t have answers to some vexing questions: Why was my grandfather denied the Medal of Honor in 1944, only to receive it two and a half years later?

“All medals,” Rich Boylan told me, “are political to some extent. And the Medal of Honor is the most political award of all.”1

He would know. In his thirty-six years with the National Archives and Records Administration, Boylan served as an expert witness in the cases of fifty-five eventual Medal of Honor recipients who were overlooked in World War I and World War II because of anti-black or anti-Asian racism or anti-Semitism.

Although the Medal of Honor is supposed to be awarded to individuals for discrete acts of “conspicuous gallantry” at the clear risk of one’s life above and beyond the call of duty, you need look no further than one of the medal’s most famous recipients to understand that those criteria are sometimes overlooked for reasons of politics, public relations, or even propaganda.

On the night of March 11, 1942, under orders from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur, his wife, his son, a nanny, and fourteen staff officers boarded a PT boat and fled the Philippine island of Corregidor for Australia. The general had been a powerful symbol of resistance and strength to Americans, and even the Japanese enemy, who would soon claim America’s far western Pacific outpost and initiate the brutal Bataan Death March.

Not long after, Gen. George C. Marshall gave the order to award MacArthur the Medal of Honor, “to offset any propaganda by the enemy directed at his leaving his command.” Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had served under MacArthur from 1932 to 1939, strenuously objected, pointing out that his former boss hadn’t actually engaged in the kind of singular action required for the medal.

Whatever MacArthur’s qualities, his Medal of Honor was not so much to recognize actions, but rather to soothe anxious American reactions and, ostensibly, undermine Japanese overreaction.

But simply knowing that medals can be political didn’t tell me anything about what had happened in the case of my grandfather. At the beginning of my search, I was absolutely certain that somewhere, perhaps at the bottom of a dusty box in the deep recesses of the National Archives—à la Indiana Jones—yellowing pieces of paper would explain, at last, why Sandy Bonnyman was awarded the Medal of Honor after first being denied. To my great frustration, no such evidence materialized.

“I’ve searched as hard for this as anything I’ve ever looked for, and it’s just not there,” said researcher Katie Rasdorf.2

Experts cautioned me not to expect answers to my questions.

“There is a slim-to-none chance that such documents as you are looking for exist,” said Laura S. Jowdy, archivist for the Congressional Medal of Honor Society. Award recommendation packets from World War II, she said, consist mostly of “a lot of ‘rubber stamps’ that say in essence whether the award is approved to go further up the ladder.”³

With no new information to guide me, I repeatedly pored over every page of my grandfather’s military records, as well as every letter that mentioned the medal, searching for the tiniest clue. Finally, a detail so mundane I had never noticed it before caught my attention: Every page in my grandfather’s case that had been examined by the awards board on March 8, 1944, bore a stamp reading, “FILE–SELECTION BOARD CASE” (some pages also bore the scribbled initials, “ngw” and “JM”). That stamp appears on just four pages of my grandfather’s military records, all those pertaining to his arrest for “rendering yourself unfit for duty by excessive use of intoxicants” in Wellington, New Zealand on July 27, 1943.

Lt. Col. Chester Salazar, commander of 2/18 at Tarawa, acknowledged the incident in his October 1, 1943, fitness report supporting Sandy’s promotion to first lieutenant, but made clear that it should not “materially affect” the promotion of an officer whose “value to the service” he rated “excellent.”4

But the awards board may have had other considerations. There was already some concern that too many high awards were being given out, and given the public attention paid to the Medal of Honor, recognizing a marine of questionable character might—in their eyes—result in a public relations snafu. If the board was going to make someone a hero, perhaps he needed to be, or at least appear to be, squeaky clean. Had Sandy Bonnyman’s case been judged differently than those of William J. Bordelon and William Deane Hawkins, who had received the exact same endorsements, because of concerns about character?

“It’s very plausible,” Rich Boylan told me. “But they probably would not have documented that. Nothing was kept.”⁵

Indeed, the secretary for a post-war navy board created to review all high medals given during the war noted, “The Senior Member cautioned the Board that conversations or votes taken in session were not to be revealed for obvious reasons.”⁶

The evidence is circumstantial, but concern over my grandfather’s arrest makes for a logical, believable solution to the mystery. There was, after all, no doubt among those who were with Sandy during his final hours that his actions (the only factor that was supposed to matter) warranted the Medal of Honor, and many of his fellow marines and superior officers were deeply distressed that he did not receive the medal.

But someone, somewhere, must have continued to fight on Sandy’s behalf.

“Getting an upgrade usually requires a rabbi [senior officer] with both a staff and the political will to go to bat. I’ll bet an irate field-grade officer who was there went to work on the upgrade as soon as he found out about the downgrade,” said Tarawa historian Eric Hammel. “But in your grandfather’s case, I have no idea who that would be.”7

Finding the identity of my grandfather’s “rabbi” became my new mission.

First, I obtained hundreds of pages of minutes from the Horne Board, a committee convened by Adm. Frederick J. Horne, Vice Chief of Naval Operations, in January 1946. The board was tasked with reviewing the twelve percent of cases in which the navy awards board had not approved recommended medals, as well as all Medals of Honor, posthumous and in-absentia awards, and considering “cases not previously recommended.”⁸

Notes from the first meeting reported that, “The idea started back in October in the Naval Affairs Committees. . . . The committee felt that . . . many deserving persons were not getting or had not received awards.”⁹

The Horne board systematically considered cases in chronological order, declining in virtually every case to upgrade Navy Cross awards to the Medal of Honor. The most notable exception was Capt. Jefferson J. DeBlanc, a marine pilot who risked his life to attack Japanese planes and destroyers, shooting down five enemy aircraft before being forced to crash-land in the sea off the Solomon Islands on January 31, 1943. Although the senior naval officer “strongly recommended” DeBlanc for the Medal of Honor, the awards board approved him for the Navy Cross on May 27, 1944, confirming its decision on August 11. The Horne board overruled both decisions, but the minutes, to my frustration, offered no detailed explanation, noting only that DeBlanc’s “acts of heroism . . . are sufficient to justify the award of the Medal of Honor” and the Navy Cross.10

I was even more frustrated to discover that the Horne board minutes made no mention of my grandfather’s case at all. And James E. Nierle, president of the US Navy Board of Decorations and Medals, told me that I’d seen every Horne board document his researchers had found in the National Archives or Bureau of Naval Personnel or post-war papers of the chief of naval operations and secretary of the navy.¹¹ And even if there were notes on my grandfather’s case, it’s unlikely they would have been any more detailed than those for DeBlanc.

“Even if the minutes existed somewhere,” Nierle said, “there really isn’t much discussion of why in the minutes. . . . I doubt you would get a satisfactory answer.”¹²

No rabbi, no minutes, no nothing. It was hard to accept, but perhaps too much time had passed and I would simply never get an answer.

Then one hot August day, I dropped my mother off at Denver International Airport for a trip to meet my aunt Alix for opera and chile in Santa Fe.

“Oh, I remember what I wanted to tell you,” my mother said as the porter put her luggage on the conveyor belt: She had hired a professional organizer who had found a few things about her father scattered in boxes, trunks, and files in her basement. “They’re all in one box somewhere, but you’ll have to find them.”

I broke my personal best time for driving from the airport to her house and was lucky not to break my neck when I bounded down into the dark, cluttered confines of her Old Curiosity Basement. It took me a while, and when I found the horde, it was not the shoebox and “few” items I’d expected, but three cubic feet of letters, photos, clippings, and other oddments I’d never seen before, including my grandfather’s Second Marine Division patch. I spent every hour I was not working, sleeping, or running going through thousands of pages, eagerly copying down fascinating, if obscure, details about my grandfather’s life, before picking up the crinkly, brown-edged letter written by one of his old friends that finally put me on the scent of the missing rabbi.

Many of my grandfather’s friends had mentioned Tarawa Medal of Honor recipient Col. David M. Shoup in letters to the Bonnymans, prompting my great-grandfather to write him in 1944 to inquire about the whereabouts of his son’s remains. He never received a reply.

But in 1946, Navy Cmdr. J. Gordon Reid, an old Knoxville friend of Sandy’s, wrote Alex Bonnyman to say that he’d spoken with Shoup at the navy hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, where the colonel was recovering from an emergency appendectomy. At Reid’s mention of Sandy, Shoup “loudly sang his praises.”13 He also told Reid that he had formally requested that the US Navy Board of Review, Decorations and Awards reconsider Sandy’s recommendation for the Medal of Honor in 1944 and after the war.

“In fact, he was of the impression that it had already been awarded,” Reid wrote. “Perhaps I should keep my big mouth shut and wait for you to hear something in the normal course of events—but on the other hand, I knew you would like to know that the matter is under consideration.”¹⁴

Shoup had endorsed Sandy’s case from the beginning, but may have found additional motivation in his own circuitous path to the Medal of Honor. After planning the assault and leading the marines to victory on Tarawa, he was named chief of staff for the Second Marine Division in December 1943. At division, he schemed out battle plans for and later fought on Saipan and Tinian in the summer of 1944, for which he received the Legion of Merit with a combat “V.”

Even as Shoup was putting his name on recommendations for Bonnyman, Bordelon, and Hawkins, someone put his name forth for the Medal of Honor for leadership on Tarawa. But not even Shoup’s two biographers reported that, despite the enthusiastic recommendation of Gen. Julian C. Smith and endorsements up the line, he, like Sandy, was initially denied the highest honor and awarded the Navy Cross instead, also in May 1944. But at the urging of Shoup’s superiors, the awards board reconsidered his case and in August 1944 substituted the Medal of Honor in lieu of his Navy Cross.15

Shoup would go on to reach the pinnacle of Marine Corps achievement, becoming commandant under President John F. Kennedy. After his retirement in 1963, he bluntly spoke out about “the limits of US power and our capabilities to police the world,” the nation’s growing militarism, and the dangerous intrusion of “business interests” into foreign policy and war making. Beginning in 1966, he vocally opposed American involvement in Vietnam. Above all, he was angry that marines were being put in harm’s way for an unwinnable war driven by politics rather than sound military strategy.¹⁶

“Civilians can scarcely understand or even believe that many ambitious military professionals truly yearn for wars,” Shoup wrote in an Atlantic article in April 1969. In a personal copy of the issue, he wrote, “I believe responsible protest is the most sincere kind of patriotism,” in the margin on the same page.¹⁷

What followed Shoup’s bold candor and prescience is a cynical example of the use and misuse of heroes by politicians, generals, and media who may not always have the best interests of the troops, or the American public, at heart. Rightly celebrated for two decades as a hero for his actions at Tarawa, Shoup was suddenly subjected to savage attacks by members of Congress and the military establishment, vilified as a traitor, a coward, and a mental defective by editorialists, and monitored by the FBI on the orders of President Lyndon B. Johnson. The message was loud and clear: “Real” heroes do not question war.

“The whole ‘heroic’ trope answers questions before they get asked,” retired Air Force Lt. Col. William Astore told me. “Heroes follow orders without question, just like ordinary Americans should. . . . The rhetoric of universal heroes enables war and silences dissent. That’s why it’s so dangerous. And so universally pronounced by our so-called leaders.”18

With that tantalizing clue about Shoup to guide me, I flew to California and spent a day in the archives of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, which houses thirty-five boxes of papers donated by Shoup’s estate. It was a long shot, but I was hoping to find evidence to tie the late general to my grandfather’s Medal of Honor. After several hours, I had just begun to think I’d wasted a good deal of time and money when I came across a small, elegant envelope written in a now-familiar hand.

“My Dear Colonel Shoup,” began my great-grandmother. “I am giving myself the pleasure of thanking you for the kind words you have spoken for my son, Alexander Bonnyman, Jr. to Commander Reid, and also the pleasure of writing to my son’s commanding officer in the Battle of Tarawa.”

Frances Bonnyman described her son’s pride in being a marine, and offered her own praise: “The Second Division fought and won against such odds, it seems to us that it was made up of heroes all.”¹⁹

The letter is short, mournful, and painfully personal: “We never saw our son in uniform. When he came to say good-bye and to announce his enlistment in the Marines, we were shocked. He had every exemption. When we mentioned this, his reply was that after Pearl Harbor, every red-blooded American should act on the feeling in his heart—what was more natural than he should join the Marines!” She closed with the heart-rending words, “I would visit Tarawa if I could.”20

Next I came across a typewritten letter from my great-grandfather, dated January 24, 1947, explaining why he had pressed so hard for Shoup’s attendance at Sandy’s January 22, 1947, Medal of Honor ceremony in Washington: “I am certain that it was your persistent effort that secured for Sandy this recognition.”²¹

And finally, there was Shoup’s belated reply to my great-grandmother, dated March 24, 1947, in which he expressed regret that he hadn’t been able to meet her at the ceremony in Washington, D.C. Mysteriously ill, my Granny Great was recuperating in Oklahoma at the time; some diagnosed her condition as heartbreak.

“As I told both your husband and your granddaughter, your son, Alexander Bonnyman, Jr., by the very actions which brought on his death had made certain that he would never die but instead would live forever in the annals of our history,” Shoup wrote.²²

He offered an explanation for why he had not previously responded to her letter: “I felt that my best reply would be to continue pushing for a reconsideration of the recommendation for (the) award for your son which was submitted as a result of his gallant action during the struggle for possession of the island, Betio, Tarawa Atoll.”²³

David Shoup was the missing rabbi. He had lobbied his old friend Gen. A.A. Vandegrift to rectify what he had always seen as an injustice, the denial of the Medal of Honor to 1st Lt. Alexander Bonnyman, Jr.

The last of the mysteries that had haunted me since I’d set out to reclaim my grandfather, in every way imaginable, had been solved.