state of the art incineration systems that would recycle trash as well as provide electricity for the island the ons action plan could be used for any island through some diminishing land sources but the local fiji television station peepin interview story and his current mission to taro. there are two cleone out in his boat to revisit the scene of the battle. i used to have a nightmare. i granted for years afterwards. i had somehow. fallen into the water and i had sunk down and there was a kid sitting on i am on a tank. he was saying he he waved at me he and i are about twenty maybe thirty feet under water and i was looking at i'm wondering what the fuck are you

doing here and he was sitting on top of the sherman tank and the koran was all round us bright yellow red blue car all was all around us and it was a kid very happily sitting on top of the chair for take and that's a dream that i had for years. i had told my wife. if i start threatening ron but just leave the bread because i get. back kind of crazy i'm not aware of it but anyway. she she knew when i made those morning sounds i couldn't talk because of i began to speak i would drown i would swallow water. later that day leon visited the residence of john and molly brown she showed a movie about the battle for tara prior to a tour of the sites. just

tired of her couch. that's for three. player. plays. over the years the browns have collected munitions in their backyard a number of shells are still alive. that's right in the river just for these are. live in thirty minutes from america just very often it is still a long way around. and yet you said you don't kick it and play for an hour when i'm right those are dangerous shells and weapons of all shapes and sizes a majority of them american constantly turn up on base sheo although these of cause

deaths and injuries to the local population over the years there is no exact figure provided by the kid about government. my cordner the local australian naval commander on the island still has the difficult task of dealing with world war two war yes. the issue here is that no one escapes turning out how they got rid of all we wanted to do i kind of but there's a whole range of stuff that just keeps turning up or whatever and it's amazing what some people you know the senate foreign affairs bomber discovered was that one sort of a chicken curry you know that so i had standing upright. on the end of a bomb and nothing to detonate a bomb and are using it as just one corner of the way to invent the wheel you know leon was introduced to two australian ex-pats involved in exploring the history of the battle of tara stan ghosh to his professional diver initials expert and peter scarlett has lived on the island for over fifteen years stan has done hundreds of

dives off base e.o. and is employed by history flights on their two year program to survey the island for lost graves there's there's a plane just looking at randy that's further evidence of the waste that's officially for the brotherhood as that what's in the water at the time far is a picture of it that's the station this is the whole see. the wings intersections there before. the debris from the battle still covers the island and every storm on earth new ordinance stand showed leon a fifty caliber machine gun sitting in the water a few yards from the beach front home. i said that's a fifty fifty caliber machine. scope look up again we're talking flight on a stand keeps a storage container full of the weapons and munitions he's collected. lines like sixty no more to choose the c.e.o.'s the u.s.

more a mortar is a more mortar and edible a good. still with the fears and the flawed system the motor. a lot of us still own that this is full of the play this. stuff by is about the radio portable radio that was run out of a boy named truck already baked this is the fault of the job but on the supposed office of from him a can that i dug up and also. said if it makes you can see the nickel couple. of books event in addition to the japanese still going to take for the main gun it's a thirty seven no room still the whole explosion room a lot of room. up on your head like this very carefully. by the end of day to the ground commander colonel chute who had been wounded by

shrapnel during his landing the day before rallied his troops to capture the airport runway this effectively cut the enemy defenses into. day three began with an easier landing of additional marines at the western shore as the american forces began to outflank the japanese defenders that morning a chance event was taking place in the skies nearby. a flight of hellcat fighter planes on routine patrol from the aircraft carrier lexington accidentally intercepted a formation of twenty japanese sikhs fighters based from the nearby marshall lines the japanese were on a mission to bomb and strafe the tower landing force. by ten o five that morning the americans had shot down seventeen of the twenty bombers and force the remaining three back to their base the marines on base year received from potentially devastating casualties. meanwhile supported by

reinforcements and artillery fire from nearby islands the marines used all means necessary to systematically take out the japanese defenders they slowly advance through the narrow eastern tip of the arc. leon paid a visit to mother superior margaret sullivan of our lady of the sacred heart mission she showed in the declaration the japanese government is that it just hours after they took over the island now that you have money and playing on a warning that japan was going to occupy the xining all of a sudden they simply showed up as a right to die is that really what i want to finish up every tenth of december to those up till now to where they land and base. as his outreach to local officials continued leon and ted met with the minister of interior. her more than three years i've been trying to get our government to do something about they does a creation that has happened to the beach as well as so many americans died in defense

of our country as a lot of. them it was. a fight with the civil war the. vehicle the it was. the show that leon had taped for fiji television was broadcast to all the islanders. but it. was full of the different schools i made a number of trips in the big stuff i saw killings i never saw like everyone but it really never stopped once and never did it. all the time i was coming and thinking surely to hell. but because i. still. i was damn i think the best thing for me to kill as many of the end of.

the world i did some helpless person which i simply because i chatted with my. by one twelve pm on november twenty third the island was declared secured over five thousand five hundred men lay dead on the sands one thousand one hundred thirteen were american marines and two thousand two hundred ninety were wounded only one japanese officer and two enlisted men survived along with fourteen korean labor. the entire island was a vast twisted wasteland of death and destruction. american and japanese bodies covering the island were a mute testimony to the ferocity of the battle. one marine commented that it was the closest thing to dantes inferno you never seen. it was a hellish wasteland of destruction. literally covered with thousands of bodies and

ordnance. now came the grim task of collecting and bury a body. general holland smith and the marine commander was reputed to have said later that tarot was a tragic mistake. after the battle the marines would bury their dead take detailed plot maps of the grave sites and within a matter of days return to their ships. meanwhile the burial were continued gun issue. identification was made more difficult by the condition and decomposition of several bodies and a number were lost at sea. i unfortunately had the unpleasant duty of attending

a number of burials and say i can't remember how many at least a half a dozen but one of the stands out in my memory in particular the chaplain who was in charge of the burial details i was standing next to him after he said his usual words before we dumped the guy into the date and i said the chap on the horizon who is a sky and he said we don't know and i said well his dog tags are in the sail coffin he said. i can't imagine anything more that needs to be said other than i absolutely absurd ridiculous treatment in yes absolutely indifferent treatment was given to all these guys who had died in defense of our country. lieutenant bonny been a posthumous medal of honor winner for his valor in the battle would be buried in the eighth marines grave site number two the navy seabee units which were the logistic backbone of every operation would then clean up the

battlefield can quickly build the infrastructure to support an airfield. this is a picture of the island after the c.d.c. cleaned it up and turned it into a modern air base you can see some of the temporary cemeteries there's thirty three twenty six twenty five this is part of the old pier right here the island basically had forty three cemeteries and in any building into a modern air base they basically erased some of the senators. louis hcan has been working for the australian government as a contractor. he has made some unusual discoveries while rebuilding base use infrastructure and you know there was one instance we dug out of the water table this is the one that stain very interested in and we found it really in complete skeleton still had partial uniform boots watch and let live because a lot of the the i was how much did the metal yes the rubble the rather the way it

was a it was the line in the front of the it was. part of the last one it was gives the sun. and nothing else up now. so you told somebody in a government the u.s. government about this. that the project engineered the project a project manager and the write off to. the admiral nimitz organization but what happened was the the law and order a and b. buttons in that up in law office in a rush by. an oil rig bring a draftsman or have a truck drop the drawing type and this bag was the type. and they would say it will months now sample on such a letter to them it's not so so i think what we should do with the five and then was our reply here which will as. we can for

a awarded i feel almost like he's one of like can you at all leon had spent months seeking assistance from every level of government to address the garbage situation at base you now he discovered something even more disturbing that hundreds of marines remains still lie in the sands of the island. just as we've been told by the guys we met with the. woman down on the ground almost anywhere you walk you see the mortal remains of somebody japanese american he was introduced to the minister of health dr. presented saxon place i don't lie the things that i want to do to help you ultimately he was granted the meeting with the president of cuba i know to talk a little on the employment of citizens of who will who will assist in the in the monitoring of the refuse collection of your country and

ultimately. a state of the art incineration system. which will have a number of benefits for. the brutality of the tower were campaign would soon hit home when the american public began to see the pictures of the casualties and devastation in late december one thousand nine hundred eighty three the gruesome carnage was so disturbing that some mothers demanded nimitz's resignation what was more striking was not just the heavy casualties but the confusion regarding the burial of hundreds of marines who gave their lives ataru the actual number of total missing people from this from this battle was five hundred eleven basically it's a very nebulous number there is a huge distance here there's eleven hundred six people lost at the end of the war

when the army came back to dig these people up and take them back to the states only three hundred ninety two were dug up and brought back to the states there's over. well over two hundred fifty probably almost three hundred people on the island today the quartermaster corps of the of the army made a reasonably diligent effort starting in february of one thousand nine hundred eighty six and winding up in. may of nine hundred forty six they had done to find the remains of approximately three hundred maybe four hundred guys but. the report that i read issued by the guy in charge says that they could not account for almost fifty percent of the people who were brought back to the states those are real graves those are real people who were brought back but there was over three hundred that were never brought back and those people's names are still listed as missing in action today although many of them we have pictures of their graves we have

pictures of the maps of where they were buried those people those families were never told that here's your family member and return to the states those people are still lost in space this is a photograph from. bernard she leaves grave on the west side of the island near what was known as green beach and that's a photograph of his grave and he's still missing today this is someone named steve momar who no one even knows who he is and no you can't even find. a mention of him in any of the original rosters here's a picture of grave number eighteen with robert brand baseball norman jr frank as the c. and henry lot so they're all still missing today this is a photograph of grave number eleven where there are one hundred forty five graves and only thirty two were disinterred this is

a plot math grave number thirty three were four hundred people were were listed as being buried but in reality only one hundred twenty nine were recovered. one of those people by the way is alexander bonny man who was who won the congressional medal of honor in the battle of sorrow and in doing so he lost his life and he was buried in one of these temporary cemeteries and never found lieutenant alexander bonnie min was one of four congressional medal of honor winners which also included first lieutenant hawkins william bordelon and the only survivor of the battle colonel david chu. the men and many other brave men were on leon's mind when he paid his respects at the marine monument which has been placed in a parking lot away from the litter on the beaches. as a fitting tribute to the many missing in action and still lost on this tiny stretch of coral leone pieces respects to a special marine soames lies here he came to the coast watchers memorial

a beautiful moral to those guys who gave their lives. in defense of their country and ours too by the way and the brits the the australians of rusal of theirs are no more allies here but soames is not he lies here or somewhere we're i'm standing and then on margrave and like our government recognized forgotten. and of no value. god rest him. and i feel very sad about him and his relatives in the intense difficulty of world war two many people seventy nine thousand of them basically were lost in space this is an example of different branches of the service not being able to communicate effectively with each other and show where they left all these people and this is not on usual island i mean this is an enormous mistake that happened

during an enormously difficult time in american history and this was a reticence generation of people because after world war two many people does that all the time they get on with their lives and this issue is a done issue but in reality a lot of people's families don't feel that way. leone and the crew finally headed home but for him the work is just begun. he is determined to fight until action is taken by our government i'm going to present a documentary into salad or feinstein and i hope play have her take the necessary action have appropriations provided to tara so that they garbage control program and the public education program could get underway before tara sinks under the ocean a couple of gallons in the twelve the thirteenth island archipelago are now the most the needs the ocean and it's only a matter of time maybe

a dozen years or twenty or thirty years before the entire island group will be called a new atlantas because there won't be any tomorrow. after nearly sixty five years have passed many unanswered questions remain hundreds of americans are still lost in the sands of species and there's a dangerous as well as disastrous environmental legacy that remains on this tiny atoll and many other islands throughout the pacific campaign. for leon cooper the battle is just beginning.

more than a month. in one of the most extreme environments on the planet this is antarctic guts and people have to be aware that they're far away from civilization showing thomas discovers flight makes antarctica so special and attractive for many the wildlife in antarctica is a both elite and fragile. expedition to the bottom of the earth. soon which brightened a few pounds soon from feinstein christians. friends

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flight recorders from the plane that crashed in northwestern russia with forty four lives have a. bad weather conditions and. fifteen more civilians killed. but instead. of his four year old grandson. the showdown the greek parliament. needed from a big. as the country. becoming the first. hello

it's one am here in moscow you're watching r.t. and i'm kevin zero in with our top story for you officials say bad weather and pilot error the likely causes of a plane crash that killed forty four and left eight injured in northwestern russia on monday night the rest say a flight on route from moscow to petrus divorce crashed into a road just one kilometer from its destination our correspondent tess riseley reports from the scene. a commercial plane that would have landed on schedule ended up in pieces and in flames this tuple of one three four carrying fifty two people from moscow to northwestern russia crashed on a road around a kilometer from the runway narrowly missing a row of houses and killing forty four on board airport officials say the plane hit a high voltage power line that cut off lights on the runway which also knocked out the town's electricity. at around midnight the lights went off in our house we were going to check the electric transformer we heard the sound of

a huge explosion we arrived at the scene of the accident the airplane was seriously damaged we could see its wing justing out of the bushes scattered all around the field lots. where here at the side with a tuple of one three four crash landed on a road and as you can see behind me there's a lifting parts of the plane the man living here was first on the scene because the plane had landed right in front of his home. i carry three people out of the wreckage one was either a girl or a woman and i could not tell but she was larger than the man who was honked to see it was dark then there was a man he also wasn't happy he was launching than me then we carried out two more people from the wreckage in the middle of the road another man reached out his hand towards me but i couldn't make it to him and everything started exploding i could not get any closer everything was engulfed by fire so very. among the eight survivors were a young boy his teenage sister and their mother.