Top Photo: Marine Corps Sgt. Robert F. Van Heck. Photo: Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency

A US Marine killed during the Gilbert Islands Campaign of the Pacific war has been laid to rest in Illinois more than 80 years after his death.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) announced that 25-year-old Marine Corps Sergeant Robert F. Van Heck of Chicago, Illinois, was accounted for in April 2023. His remains were buried in Hillside, Illinois, on January 7, 2025. 

Van Heck, a member of Company A, 2nd Amphibious Tractor Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, Fleet Marine Force, landed on the small island of Betio in the Tarawa Atoll in November 1943. The Marines faced stiff Japanese resistance as they tried to secure the island.

The invasion of Tarawa marked the first major action by American forces in the Central Pacific. Waves of Marines were badly mauled as they struggled to cross reefs and assault the beach. 

Capturing the island required a series of savage battles against sturdy enemy positions. Approximately 1,000 American Marines and sailors were killed, and more than 2,000 were wounded. More than 2,500 Japanese combatants—nearly the entire defense force on the island—died in battle or committed suicide. 

The DPAA reported that Van Heck had died on the first day of battle, November 20, 1943. A memorial marker for him was placed in Cemetery 11.

According to newspaper clippings shared by the DPAA, the Van Heck family’s Christmas celebration was interrupted by a letter from their son Robert, which read, “Don’t count on my coming home this spring as we had planned.” About half an hour later, the family received a telegram announcing that Robert had been killed in action. 

In 1946, the 604th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company centralized all the remains of Americans found on Tarawa at the Lone Palm Cemetery for later repatriation. The DPAA states that almost half of the known casualties were never found. The remains that were recovered were sent to Hawaii for analysis, and those that could not be identified were buried as unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. Those remains included a set designated as Tarawa Unknown X-265.

In 2017, the DPAA disinterred X-265 as part of an effort to identify the Tarawa unknowns. The remains were identified as Van Heck’s using anthropological analysis and mitochondrial DNA analysis through the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System.

Van Heck’s name is recorded on the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific along with others still missing from World War II. A rosette will be placed next to his name to indicate that he has been accounted for.