“You couldn’t go anywhere without stepping over a dead man.” That’s how Dale Luton of Tulsa remembers the battle at Tarawa (above), which is featured prominently in Ken Burns’ documentary, “The War,” airing tonight on OETA.
Luton joined the Marines late in 1941. He had planned on enlisting in the Navy, but his mother did not want him to be on the ocean, so he became a Marine. Luton was one week away from completing his 7 weeks of training in San Diego when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Luton never got that seventh week of training. He did not know much about Pearl Harbor before the attack, but he knew war was coming. By the third week of January, 1942 he was on a luxury liner, headed for Pacific with the 1st Marine Brigade. He was 17 years old.
Luton drove trucks and hauled gasoline in Samoa, where he sustained burns when, because of a mislabeled can, he poured gasoline on the sand (instead of kerosene) and hot metal underneath ignited the gasoline, causing a flash fire. He returned to his unit after 21 days in the hospital, and wound up on the front line at Guadalcanal. The conditions there were awful.
“Well, there’s mosquitoes that could lift a mosquito net off of you, and when you woke up your entire arm was a welt, so I had malaria,” said Luton. “We were glad when the Army relieved us, because they had stacks of food and supplies. Before then we were eating Japanese rice, C-rations, and didn’t have much of anything.”
On the atoll of Tarawa, Luton saw some of the fiercest fighting of the war. “Tarawa was a 72-hour battle,” he said. “Where the airstrip was, there was high places on this atoll, and it was two miles long and 800 yards wide, at the widest place. It was a 72-hour battle, and when we got back on board ship there were 1,026 Marines killed and 3,000 wounded, and we had killed over 3,000 Japanese. It was over the equivalent of one square mile, and there was that many people killed. ”
Luton was an ambulance driver in Saipan, where he was captured in a photograph that is featured prominently in the promotion of ”The War.” Normally, Luton carried the living to the hospital, but in that picture from 1944, he is the Marine in the foreground, carrying a dead American soldier to the cemetery. 
Luton’s daughter, Linda Luton Jackson, saw ”The War” promo and told us about the picture that also resides in her father’s scrapbook and in a frame on a shelf in her parent’s apartment in Tulsa. We have now learned that Ken Burns hopes to meet with Mr. Luton, to discuss the circumstances surrounding that now well-known photograph.
Dale Luton married Betty Ritter after he returned home to Tulsa from the south Pacific. They celebrated their 63rd wedding anniversary on September 23, 2007. 
(above) Betty and Dale Luton in 1944. (below) Betty and Dale Luton today.
Dale Luton’s story is the second of our Oklahoma World War II Stories, airing Monday, September 24th at 6:30 p.m. on the Oklahoma News Report.
Until next time, Dick Pryor
(Dale Luton was profiled on the Oklahoma News Report on September 24, 2007. To see the story, click on “Videos” on this website and go to “OETA’s Dick Pryor interviews Oklahoma WWII veterans.)
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