Pennsylvania Burial Company

S. Marine from Pittsburgh who died fighting in the Pacific Theater of World War II and was missing for seven decades will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery next week, officials announced Monday. Marine Corps Pvt. Edwin W. Jordan was among the forces invading the small island of Betio in the Tarawa Atoll in November 1943 to try to secure a base for further U.S. operations against Japanese forces in the central Pacific, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, a part of the Department of Defense that accounts for missing military personnel. Jordan was killed in the first day of the battle, Nov. 20, 1943, and was buried on the island with other fallen service members. The 60th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company recovered some soldiers' remains from the island in 1946 and 1947, but Jordan's were not among them, and his remains were eventually declared “unrecoverable,” according to the DPAA. Records said Jordan was 19 when he was killed, but his niece, Nancy Erwin, 53, of Williamstown, W.Va., said he was in fact two years younger, having enlisted when he was just 16. “He lied about his age to get into the service, and my grandfather helped him out a little with that,” Erwin said. Jordan grew up on East Street in Pittsburgh's Spring Hill neighborhood with an older brother and younger sister. Both died before their brother's remains were identified. Erwin's father was Jordan's older brother. He enlisted in the Navy around the same time Jordan was killed, not knowing that his younger sibling had died in the Pacific. “The message, the telegraph, missed him by a couple of days,” Erwin said. For many years, the family was upset that Jordan's remains were unaccounted for. In July, the DPAA worked with Florida-based nonprofit History Flight to find more soldiers' remains on Betio and send them for laboratory analysis, which is how Jordan's remains came to be identified in September. His remains will be re-buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery on April 9. At the National Memo... (Tribune-Review)