Cooper, Thomas Harley
Marines Corporal

Thomas Harley Cooper, age 22, from Chattanooga, Tennessee, Hamilton county.

Service era: World War II

Date of death: Saturday, November 20, 1943
Death details: On August 9, 2019, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) accounted for Marine Cpl. Thomas Harley Cooper, missing from World War II. Cooper entered the U.S. Marine Corps from Tennessee and served in Company A, 2nd Amphibious Tractor Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division. He was killed in action on Betio Island on November 20, 1943, and was buried on Betio. Attempts to locate Cooper’s remains following the war were unsuccessful. In 1980, Central Identification Laboratory-Hawaii (CILHI, now DPAA), traveled to Betio to receive human remains recovered during a construction project. One set of these remains, which was accessioned as CILHI 0002-80, could not be identified and in 1982, was interred in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, Hawaii. In 2016, DPAA disinterred the remains of unknowns associated with Tarawa Atoll, including CILHI 0002-80, for further examination. In 2019, advances in forensic techniques led to the identification of CILHI 0002-80 as Cooper.

Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency