Profiles In Courage: Alexander Sandy Bonnyman

Alexander Bonnyman was as American as a young man in the 1940s could possibly get. He was born in Atlanta in 1910, but his father moved the family to Knoxville, Tennessee, to take the presidency of the Blue Diamond Coal Company. Young Alex graduated from public schools in his youth and attended Princeton University, where he became a star athlete on the football team. 

When his grades slipped at Princeton in 1932, Bonnyman decided he had a higher calling than engineering and football. He dropped out of college and joined the Army Air Corps. But although he was an excellent airman, the stick of a fighter plane wasn't where he belonged. He left the Air Corps to follow in his dad's footsteps. His lasting legacy, however, came when his country needed him. He answered the call to service, even though he didn't have to, and would receive the Medal of Honor for leading his outnumbered Marines to victory at Tarawa. 

Being discharged from the Army might have been a disappointment, but Bonnyman recovered and did very well for himself. By 1938, he had moved to New Mexico and started his own copper mining company. When the United States was attacked by the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1941, Bonnyman was reportedly agitated listening to the news coming from Pearl Harbor. Now 31 with a wife, three kids, and a thriving business that was vital to the war effort, he was exempt from the military draft and did not have to go off to war. He tried the Air Corps again anyway, and, yet again, he washed out. 

When he couldn't make it as a pilot, he enlisted as a private in the Marine Corps.

In October 1942, he was aboard a transport headed for the South Pacific. Then-Cpl. Bonnyman landed at Guadalcanal as a Marine pioneer, a kind of combat engineer. Toward the end of the Battle of Guadalcanal, he received a battlefield promotion to 2nd lieutenant and a trip stateside to visit his family. Upon returning to the Pacific Theater, he and the Marine Corps were planning their next island-hopping invasion: Tarawa. 

The 1943 Battle of Tarawa should have been a blowout victory for the Allies if you're just looking at troops' numbers on paper. Some 18,000 Marines and the Army's 27th Infantry Division would land on the island to knock out its 2,600 defenders and their 2,200 construction workers. But at this time, the Japanese garrison was well-supplied and reinforced and had spent a year building concrete bunkers, hidden tunnels, and trenches on the tiny atoll. 

The Allies brought its largest invasion force yet assembled to invade Tarawa, but the ocean hampered their progress, and the Japanese heavily contested the landing. Of the 5,000 Marines put ashore on the first day, more than a third became casualties. The fight for Tarawa, a 500 square kilometer island about half as big as Indianapolis, would last three days. The network of concrete pillboxes, bunkers, snipers, and artillery cut the Marines to pieces at every opportunity.