HONOLULU — Forensic anthropologist Gregory Fox and his team sifted dirt on the remote Pacific atoll of Tarawa at what they thought might be the graves of U.S. Marines and sailors killed in one of World War II's most savage battles.

They unearthed instead a mass grave of Japanese soldiers killed in the 1943 battle, along with a forgotten local cemetery.

The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command team searched four other sites during a recent six-week trip to Tarawa in hopes of finding the remains of hundreds of U.S. servicemen. But they came up empty each time, underscoring the difficulty of bringing home those missing from America's wars.