The National Museum of the Marine Corps: A Tribute to all Marines Past, Present, and Future

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NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE MARINE CORPS

THE

A TRIBUTE TO ALL MARINES – PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

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Title pages

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Commandant Letter

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A Message from the President Marine Corps Heritage Foundation The opening of the National Museum of the Marine Corps is the culmination of a grand vision, hard work by a dedicated staff and volunteers, and the support demonstrated by so many across this great nation. The Marine Corps Heritage Foundation is proud to have played a vital role in bringing forth this spectacular building, which is clearly destined to become legendary in its own right – a most fitting tribute to all Marines, past, present, and future, who have made and will continue to add to the Corps’ illustrious history.

The National Museum of the Marine Corps will be a superb learning facility, especially for the majority of visitors who are non-Marines. They will have an opportunity to see, hear, and feel episodes of history, from the Marine perspective – “through the eyes of Marines.” Equally, Semper Fidelis Memorial Park will add greatly to the experience, welcoming all to this very special place of reflection and remembrance.

The combination of the National Museum of the Marine Corps, Semper Fidelis Memorial Park, and the entire Marine Corps Heritage Center will soon become a landmark destination for all Marines, and for all who acknowledge and respect the monumental contributions that the Marine Corps has made to the United States of America.

Semper Fidelis, Ron Christmas Lieutenant General, United States Marine Corps (Ret) President, Marine Corps Heritage Foundation

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Table of Contents A Message from Gen. Michael W. Hagee Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps

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A message from Lt. Gen. Ron Christmas (USMC-Ret.) President of the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation

............................................................................11

Editors’ Foreword .............................................................................................................................................................................13 Making Marines ...............................................................................................................................................................................20 History and traditions foster spirit and resolve in Leatherneck recruits

By Clarence A. Robinson, Jr. U.S. MARINE CORPS HISTORY EXCERPTED FROM A Fellowship of Valor: The Battle History of the United States Marines

by Col. Joseph H. Alexander (USMC–Ret.) The Leathernecks (1775-1859) ............................................................................................................................................32 Manifest Destiny (1859-1914) .............................................................................................................................................37 “Devil Dogs” (World War I) ................................................................................................................................................42 “Skilled Watermen and Jungle Fighters, Too” (The Interwar Years, 1919-1941) .................48 Issue in Doubt (World War II, 1941-1942) ............................................................................................................52 Guadalcanal – First Offensive .............................................................................................................................................57 Strangling Rabaul (1943) ..........................................................................................................................................................67 Across the Reef at Tarawa ........................................................................................................................................................75 Westward to the Marshalls and Marianas .................................................................................................................81 Heading for the Philippines ..................................................................................................................................................89 Sulfur Island (Iwo Jima, 1945) ...........................................................................................................................................90 Amphibious Capstones (Okinawa to V-J Day) ..................................................................................................96 The Fire Brigade (Korea, Summer 1950) ..............................................................................................................102 The Great End Run (Inchon, 1950) ..........................................................................................................................108 Frozen Chosin (North Korea, 1950) ...........................................................................................................................115 The Seesaw War (Korea, 1951-1953) ..........................................................................................................................120 Cold War Crusades (1953-1967) ....................................................................................................................................127 Khe Sanh, Tet, Hue City (1968) ......................................................................................................................................133 Limited War, Violent Peace (1969-1990) .............................................................................................................140 Brave New World ........................................................................................................................................................................149

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MET-Rx proudly salutes The National Museum of the Marine Corps. ®

All Marines — past, present and future deserve our respect, honor and gratitude.

Thank you for protecting our freedom for over two centuries.

© 2006 MET-Rx® USA, Inc. 118206rs

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FIGHTING FOR THE FUTURE ................................................................................................................................................158

By J.R. Wilson THE MARINE CORPS HERITAGE FOUNDATION

By Craig Collins CONVEYING SEMPER FIDELIS TO AMERICA The Marine Corps Heritage Center

By Tom Linn

...............................................................................................172

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A New Icon ........................................................................................................................................................................................188 Architects designed the National Museum of the Marine Corps to evoke the uniqueness of the Corps

By Craig Collins THROUGH THE EYES OF MARINES .............................................................................................................................202 The National Museum of the Marine Corps’ design team, through carefully crafted exhibits, summons the spirit of the nation’s military elite

By Craig Collins PRESERVING A HERITAGE .....................................................................................................................................................214 From architects to curators to restorers, the National Museum of the Marine Corps wages war against a museum’s cruelest enemies: light, temperature, dust, moisture – and the passage of time

By Craig Collins

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NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE MARINE CORPS

THE

A TRIBUTE TO ALL MARINES – PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE A FAIRCOUNT PUBLICATION NORTH AMERICAN HEADQUARTERS 701 N. West Shore Blvd., Tampa, FL 33609 Tel: (813) 639-1900 Fax: (813) 639-4344 EUROPEAN HEADQUARTERS 5 Ella Mews, Hampstead, London NW3 2NH UK Tel: 44 (0) 20-7428-7000 Fax: 44 (0) 20-7284-2118 PUBLISHERS

Ross W. Jobson and Peter M. Antell Editorial Director Charles Oldham oldham@faircount.com Managing Editor Eric H. Seeger Editors Ed Lammon Ana E. Lopez Art Director/Project Designer Robin K. McDowall Design & Production Rebecca Laborde Daniel Mrgan Lorena Noya Assistant to the Publisher Alexis Vars Production Assistant Kenia Y. Perez Writers Col. Joseph H. Alexander Craig Collins Tom Linn Clarence A. Robinson, Jr. J.R. Wilson

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UNITED STATES MARINES Marines helped make VFW what it is today.

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©Copyright Faircount LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduction of editorial content in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Faircount LLC does not assume responsibility for the advertisements, nor any representation made therein, nor the quality or deliverability of the products themselves. Reproduction of articles and photographs, in whole or in part, contained herein is prohibited without expressed written consent of the publisher, with the exception of reprinting for news media use. Printed in the United States of America. Permission to use various images and text in this publication was obtained from the U.S. Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, and in no way is used to imply an endorsement by the U.S. Marine Corps or any Department of Defense entity for any claims or representations therein. None of the advertising contained herein implies U.S. Government, Department of Defense, or U.S. Marine Corps endorsement of any private entity or enterprise. This is not a publication of the Department of Defense or U.S. Government.

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Senior Drill Instructor Staff Sgt. Christopher Carlisle leads Platoon 3001, Kilo Co., 3rd RTBn., during a graduation practice.

MAKING MARINES History and traditions foster spirit and resolve in Leatherneck recruits

T

hey come from all over – small, rural towns and large metropolitan cities, farms and barrios.

Initially, they are strangers with only one thing in common. Each has accepted a challenge.

This ordeal will irrevocably alter the rest of their lives in ways they cannot possibly fathom.

Their reasons for signing enlistment contracts to become U.S. Marines are vastly different, personal and private; however, each individual understands they are about to undergo 13 weeks of the most intense training of their young lives.

They also know they will soon embrace a warrior’s ethos.

The Marine Corps recruits those who enlist specifically for combat training, not for technical skills. Some may later acquire specialized training by attending service schools to meet the needs of the Corps. But every Marine is first a rifleman, and could eventually move into the line and fire at an enemy, regardless of skill level.

Each recruit beginning boot camp is not yet a Marine.

That title must first be earned, along with the right to wear the distinctive Eagle, Globe and Anchor emblem of the Corps. This insignia is elusive, out of reach for

the next three grueling months, and not everyone will measure up and earn the title Marine. Recruits will soon learn the meaning of a French phrase, esprit de corps – the spirit of the Corps. It is ethereal, profound, and contagious. Once acquired, it lasts a lifetime. The “once a Marine, always a Marine” aphorism expresses it well.

Recruits also learn a new language, one full of nautical terms honed over years of operations at sea with the Navy, fighting from ships and seizing objectives ashore. Called “Boots,” recruits are often referred to as “maggots.” They are told that they are lower than whale feces at the bottom of the ocean. The only grudging recognition they will ever gain is by performance, doing the job better than anyone might expect. And for weeks to come they will hear “heels, heels, heels,” at 120-steps-per-minute cadence, as recruits dig their heels into the grinder marching for hours on end. In rare moments, Boots are exposed to sardonic wit, the unique gallows humor of the Corps.

Whether asked five or 50 years later what it means to be a Marine, the memories that come flooding back are of boot camp and that first encounter with the drill

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USMC photo by Lance Cpl. Darhonda V. Hall

By Clarence A. Robinson, Jr.

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USMC photo by Lance Cpl. Dorian Gardner

USMC photo by Lance Cpl. Edward R. Guevara Jr.

Making marines

Above left: Pfc. Riley F. McNeal, Platoon 2058, scales a cargo net. This was the last obstacle before Company F men hiked the Reaper. Boot camp for prospective Marines is as tough, or tougher, than ever. Above right: Staff Sgt. Ysid R. Gonzalez, drill instructor, Platoon 2082, Company H, explains to a recruit from Platoon 2083 the importance of discipline. Drill instructors are a formative and lasting influence on Marines. instructor (DI). His name and mannerisms will become indelibly etched in their memories for the remainder of their lives. The smart ones listen carefully, react rapidly, and learn from the DI. His job is to teach them how to become Marines through discipline,

peacetime or combat, add to the experience. What others would answer, I cannot say. But to me, being a Marine is about training and constant readiness. A tour of duty is also about the colorful characters with whom one serves, sometimes in precarious situations.

To be a Marine is to share an incredible legacy and a great sense of commitment with those who wrote our history on battlefields around the globe.

Trained at Parris Island, San Diego, or Quantico, each of us worked hard to be found worthy of the title "United States Marine." Once earned, that singular accomplishment serves as the foundation from which all future success grows. Whether serving for two years or forty-two years, Marines continue to wear the indelible marks of honor, courage, and commitment.

I began my Marine Corps career as a rifle platoon commander in Vietnam. I remain on active duty today because of the debt I still owe to those Marines who followed my orders, and died serving their country. I get up each morning determined to do all I can to honor their memories by supporting today's young men and women in uniform to the utmost of my abilities.

To me, being a Marine is an incredible honor, an awesome responsibility, and a lifelong commitment to all who ever have, or who ever will, share the legacy of our Corps!

Peter Pace General, United States Marine Corps, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the art of warfare, and an indomitable will to prevail, regardless of the odds.

Boot camp is a shared Marine experience. Duty stations, overseas or stateside, will also color what it individually means to be a Marine. Assignments, whether in

Arriving recruits quickly depart the bus, follow yellow footprints painted on the ground, form ranks, and stand at attention, even though they are still wearing civilian clothing. They form ranks facing the drill instructor, with the tallest on the right and the shortest, or â&#x20AC;&#x153;feather

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For How Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve Made History.

And How You Protect Our Future.

The makers of the M-Gator A1 salute the brave men and women of the U.S. Marine Corps

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USMC photo by Lance Cpl. Dorian Gardner

Making marines

DIs, however, are sharp in appearance, their crisp uniforms and shined shoes, commanding presence, and booming voices immediately setting an example. They wear the traditional “Smokey Bear” hat with the brim low, just above their eyebrows. Many DIs have already experienced combat, and their no-nonsense attitude is hardly subtle. Over the coming weeks they will spend countless hours teaching recruits how to march smartly in formation and execute the manual of arms with the rifle. There is even a creed for the rifle: ”This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this is mine. I must master it as I must master my life. My rifle without me is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless … ” Continuous close order drill on the “grinder,” or parade deck, teaches recruits the importance of teamwork and to instantly obey commands. Drill forges a cohesive unit without individuals. There is also competition with other recruit platoons for excellence in performing drill; marksmanship, the key to combat success; bayonet; handto-hand combat; physical fitness, a way of life; swimming; and myriad other military skills. Competition is a Marine Corps constant. After boot camp, wherever a Marine is stationed, training continues, including annual rifle qualification.

Along with close order drill and the manual of arms, recruits learn how to properly wear and care for their uniforms. They also attend classes on the history and traditions of the Marine Corps, which help instill pride in their legacy. The Marine Corps way of doing things – its uniforms, insignia, and history – make it a distinctive organization set apart from the other services. If they can measure up, recruits will earn that Marine title and assume the mantle from their forbears. Wherever assigned afterward, they will find strong bonds and camaraderie.

From this boot camp crucible Marines are forged and tempered, trained to perform under fire with courage. The Corps’ history and heroes are the DNA of would-be Marines. That title is within their grasp through superb training in the fundamentals of being a rifleman, and the

merchants,” on the left. The first rule learned is to always speak of themselves in third person when addressing other Marines. Most important of all, they do not address anyone other than another recruit without first asking permission. For example, while standing at attention, the recruit states: “Sir, Private Jones [or Smith] requests permission to speak to the Drill Instructor, Sir.” And never enter the drill instructor’s doorway without first loudly knocking three times and requesting permission to enter.

Over the years, field uniforms have changed from the gray-green herringbone utilities, split-leather, ankle-high “boondockers,” and canvas leggings of my era to today’s computer-designed camouflage uniforms and high-top desert boots. The object is the same – work clothing for combat, to find, close with, and destroy an enemy.

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USMC photo by Cpl. Jess Levens

Above: Before recruits look through their rifle sights, marksmanship instructors teach proper weapons handling and techniques. The credo “Every Marine a rifleman” remains as important today as ever. Left: Gunnery Sgt. Coleman Kinser, senior drill instructor, Platoon 1061, Company B, inspects a Co. C recruit's rifle.

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tried and true traditions of having grit to find, close with, and destroy an enemy with whatever weapons are available.

Starting in boot camp, and throughout their association with the Corps, recruits hear a “do something, even if it’s wrong” refrain. This concept is about deciding rapidly on an imperfect course of action to gain momentum, rather than developing a more perfect plan too late to be effective. The concept is sometimes called a 70percent solution. The attitude helps make the Corps an agile, almost freewheeling, adaptive force that can handle dynamic and complicated challenges with alacrity.

Adaptability and flexibility under demanding conditions are so effective that U.S. companies in highly competitive environments study Marine Corps management practices.

After several weeks of a demanding training schedule, the all-important marksmanship and rifle qualification cycle begins. Whether recruits in the old Corps qualified with the Springfield ‘03, M1 Garand, M14, or M16 rifles, the tenets of shooting remain the same. Shooters learn every aspect of the weapon; tearing it down, cleaning it endlessly, and reassembling it in jig time. They also practice proper breathing, taking up the slack, and squeezing the trigger. Before the first round is fired, recruits spend

brass (shell casings), and move back to the 300- or 500yard line echoes over the range. After days of shooting, qualification day arrives as recruits vie for expert, sharpshooter, and marksman ratings. Their shooting badges will be worn on the uniform at graduation and throughout their enlistments, until requalification changes that ranking. Rifle proficiency also is considered for promotion.

The importance of this proficiency with the rifle is evident throughout the history of the Corps, but one of the earlier examples came at Belleau Wood during World War I. Ordered to plug the line where a major German offensive was streaming through French troops, Marines boarded trucks to be deployed.

Even before the Marines could reach the woods, an endless stream of refugees and remnants of French combat units in blue uniforms were fleeing the advancing Germans. Filthy, weary, and wearing looks described in a later war as a 10,000-yard stare in a 3-foot room, they moved in shock.

A high-ranking French officer called Marine Capt.

Lloyd W. Williams aside and told him a full retreat had been ordered and to withdraw his men. “Retreat hell,” Williams exploded. “We just got here.” The Marine

From that Nov. 10th day in 1775, at Tun Tavern, Philadelphia, Penn., young Americans have stepped forward and joined the ranks of patriots to become known as United States Marines. From that day to the present they have exhibited and embedded in history the highest standards of military service to our great nation. Words alone cannot adequately express my gratitude and thankfulness to the Drill Instructors at Parris Island, S. C., to the officers of Marines, and Marines that I had the privilege and honor of serving together with for over 31 years. I will always be in their debt and eternally grateful for their camaraderie. May the Marines of the present day as well as those of the future be blessed with fair winds and following seas!

Semper Fidelis –Sgt. Maj. John R Massaro, (USMC-Ret.) endless hours snapping in, practicing all of the shooting positions – standing, sitting, and prone, the most accurate, especially at 500 yards.

They learn about a six o’clock sight picture and how to adjust windage and elevation. They will soon zero the weapon, firing rounds to determine how much windage and elevation to add or subtract to find the V-ring, the center of the bull’s-eye in the target. Under the watchful eye of expert rifle coaches, shooting begins in relays. Each recruit fires a prescribed number of rounds in a specific period of time. Spotters mark each round from the butts.

Hits in the bull’s-eye are marked with a white disk and those in the outer rings of the target with a black disk.

When a shot misses the target, the red-faced recruit is greeted with a flag called “Maggie’s Drawers,” waved across the target for all to see.

Safety is paramount, and coaches react swiftly to any infraction of the rules. After each relay fires, the command to cease fire, check the chamber is empty, pick up

regiment kept moving forward, marching toward the sound of gunfire. By 5 p.m. an enemy attack began with Ludendorff ’s Imperial Army moving forward in columns.

Marines adjusted their rifle slings, and setting their elevation and windage, opened withering, deliberate, and wellaimed rifle fire. More than 600 yards away, German soldiers began to fall at an alarming rate.

The Germans concluded the men they faced were armed exclusively with machine guns and gave the order to hold up and dig in. The Germans halted their advance for the day, not realizing they would go no farther.

This emphasis on marksmanship is evident even in an example of Corps humor that took place during the Korean War. After months in combat, Marines came off the line into reserve. One night, an old black and white Bette Davis film was shown outdoors in a cold, driving rain. Nevertheless, the makeshift theater was packed.

Wearing helmets and ponchos, Marines sat on sandbags to view it. Partway through the movie, the actress pulled

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out a pistol and pumped several shots into her cheating lover. Realizing what she had done to the man she loved, the actress emotionally screamed, “What will I do, what will I do?” From the back of the crowd came a loud retort: “Pick up your brass and move back to the 500yard line.”

Officers too must periodically qualify with the rifle and also with the pistol. College graduates, or those about to graduate, who opt to become Marines attend officer candidate school at Quantico, Va. Like enlisted recruits in boot camp, they are known as candidates, not yet Marine officers, and undergo training equally as rigorous, with the emphasis on leadership and resolve. After three months and commissions as second lieutenants of Marines, the newly minted “nuggets” begin an arduous nine-month Basic School course of field exercises and classroom work to learn how to lead Marines in combat and triumph.

The pages of Marine Corps history reveal the true Leatherneck spirit. World War II heroism and combat prowess by Marines at Wake Island, Guam, Midway, the Solomons, the Philippines, Saipan, Tinian, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and Guadalcanal thunder through the ages as eternal monuments to the Corps and to all the men who are part of its history. An iconic military symbol, the Mount Surabachi

Without much warning, pilots and crews were scrambled to open trucks, heading to their helicopters. They quickly took off into the heavy weather. Battered by wind gusts, the UH-34D helicopters soon began rescuing homeless women and children from raging floodwaters, returning them to the airfield.

An empty hangar readied with floodlights provided a measure of warmth for soaked and shivering children.

Many of them, like their mothers, were in shock.

Helicopter crews walked among the refugees handing out blankets stripped from their own beds, along with cans of C-ration food. Huddled together, they marveled at their survival, but they had lost everything.

The flights by HMM-365, commanded by Lt. Col. Joseph Koler, Jr., USMC, continued for several more hours as the crowd of survivors rapidly increased. Enemy sniper fire made rescues even more hazardous, but pilots pressed on, realizing people were perishing. Col. John H. King, USMC, the task element commander, met each returning aircraft filled with waterlogged survivors. No one then realized the scope of the storm’s devastation.

More than 200,000 Vietnamese would be left homeless.

After flight operations halted for the night, King walked among the refugees, reassuring frightened survivors, and suddenly remembered the Marine Corps

I joined the Marine Corps at age 17 and in those early days it was very apparent to me that men wanted to be Marines because of the exclusivity, eliteness, and toughness that characterized the Corps. Now, 50 years later, that is still the case, and perhaps even more so. Every man wants to be a part of something great, something noble and always with an exclusive right of entry – toughness. We Marines like it that way, and we will always strive to keep it so … and our honor clean.

Col. John W. Ripley, (USMC-Ret.) 1957-1992 flag-raising on Iwo Jima is arguably the world’s most famous war memorial. This statue honors those Marines who overcame a determined, dug-in enemy and prevailed.

With the establishment of the American Navy, Congress authorized formation of two Marine battalions on Nov. 10, 1775, the birthday of the Marine Corps. That date is celebrated every year, no matter where Marines are serving, usually with a cake, even in combat. Recruits also learn about the feats of Corps heroes whose exploits are true but also legendary. They set the example.

One birthday cake-cutting the writer witnessed took place in Vietnam. The sound of pouring rain mingled with an air of anticipation and the smell of food. A large sheet cake with white icing and a scarlet and gold emblem had been baked. All was ready for the 189th U.S. Marine Corps anniversary celebration in two hours.

Pilots and crews of a single Marine helicopter squadron and a small task element were preparing for a party in their compound adjacent to the Da Nang, Vietnam, airfield. It was Nov. 10, 1964. The rain and chilling winds increased as Typhoon Joan moved ashore.

birthday cake. He sent a truck driver to retrieve it. Each child received a piece of the cake, brought to the hangar and cut without traditional ceremony or fanfare.

Hardened Marines took long breaths to control their emotions. It may not have involved the usual ritual, but this Marine Corps birthday could not have been more meaningful.

At dawn, pilots took off again to resume rescue operations. By day’s end, more than 1,700 women and children had been plucked from raging floodwaters – then the largest helicopter rescue in history. Before his retirement, Koler became a major general.

Recruits studying Marine Corps history also learn of other, more modern-day heroes and their deeds. Some will go on to serve in units commanded by these living legends. Many Corps heroes are self-effacing and taciturn, but don’t let that fool you. When the bullets start flying, observe their leadership and coolness under fire.

First Sgt. Jimmie E. Howard, USMC, is an example of tenacity and courage in the face of overwhelming odds.

There is much for young Marines to learn from his actions and those of his men.

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USMC photo via Clarence A. Robinson

10/10/06

Above: Your best friend or your worst enemy. When Typhoon Iris left some 200,000 Vietnamese homeless and in danger, personnel of HMM-365 and other Marines were their best friends and saviors. Left: On the Marine Corps birthday, Nov. 10, 1964, the unit’s birthday cake was given to tired, frightened, refugee children.

For two days and nights atop Hill 488, 25 miles west of the Marine base in Chu Lai, Vietnam, Howard and his 17man reconnaissance team called in air and artillery fire on a North Vietnam Army (NVA) battalion operating in the area. At 1,500 feet in elevation, the rock-strewn, barren vantage point was an ideal location to observe. The enemy knew the Marines’ position and was determined to destroy this small unit. A nearby Army Special Forces team with a platoon of South Vietnamese irregulars saw the enemy’s movement and radioed that information.

Aware they were in for a fight against an overwhelming force, Howard briefed his team leaders and readied for battle. At 10 p.m., a lance corporal shot a camouflaged infiltrator from a distance of 12 feet. Close combat was joined. When it was over, every surviving Marine in the unit was wounded. A Medal of Honor, four Navy Crosses, and 13 Silver Stars were added to the Corps’ heritage. The Recon Marines pulled back to a perimeter about 20 meters in diameter with shallow one-man fighting holes and prepared to defend it. Heavy enemy machine guns opened fire; grenades and mortar shells landed in the perimeter. The Marines beat back several well-coordinated assaults, but ammunition and grenades started running low.

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USMC photo via Clarence A. Robinson

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When the enemy screamed “Tonight you die, Marine!” as had other foes on Pacific islands, Howard orchestrated boisterous laughter. This hilarity confused the enemy, momentarily delaying their assaults. Howard moved around the perimeter distributing the remaining ammunition, and ordered that only clear, single shots be taken. As grenades ran low, Howard had his Marines

National Archives

I think the U.S. Marines have done and are still doing an outstanding job in protecting our country.

As the Fifth Sgt. Major of the USMC for four years, I found much bravery and heroism in the things we were committed to do, and I am proud to have been a participant.

Sgt. Maj. Joseph W. Dailey (USMC-Ret.) throw rocks toward enemy positions. Unable to tell whether a “grenade” might explode, the enemy was forced to dart away. Whenever they moved, Marines shot them.

An extraction was attempted at 3 a.m., but hostile fire was too heavy for helicopters to land. Howard, wounded from a bullet ricochet, was unable to use his legs. Choosing to remain clear-headed, he refused morphine, dragging his radio and crawling from position to position to encourage his men. Throughout the night, Howard continued calling in artillery, helicopter gunships, and fixed-wing aircraft ordnance, often within 25 meters of his own position.

Just before dawn, Howard called out “reveille” to his surrounded unit. Later, with air and artillery support, a Marine rifle company landed below by helicopter and started toward Howard’s position. After a stiff fight, the enemy started melting away, but left 30 of their dead around the reconnaissance team’s position.

When the relief force arrived, there were only eight rounds of ammunition remaining among Howard’s men.

Of the reconnaissance Marines, six had been killed and the other 12 wounded. For his valiant leadership and

It’s at least 20 degrees below zero. They are surrounded and it is 60 miles to the nearest friendly lines. The Marines smile for the camera. Along with Medal of Honor recipients like then-Capt. William Barber and Lt. Col. Raymond G. Davis, ordinary Marines with determination, courage, esprit de corps and attitude like this have sustained the Corps over its 231 years of history.

Commandant of the Marine Corps in 1972 after 34 years of service. Having earned a Navy Cross and Purple Heart as an infantry battalion commander on Peleliu, he was credited with being bold and ingenious for saving the

Over 50 years ago, I left Mobile, Ala., on the back car of a segregated train to begin my officer’s training at Quantico. That training enabled me to experience the greatest honor a man can ever have – to lead Marines in combat. From there I became a Marine general, which then allowed me later to be a U.S. ambassador. I hope my experience will be an example to other young people, that in the Marine Corps anything is possible.

– Maj. Gen. J. Gary Cooper (USMC-Ret.) resolute fighting spirit, Howard was awarded the Medal of Honor. His vastly outnumbered small unit is believed to be the most highly decorated in U.S. history. After retiring from the Marine Corps in 1977, 1st Sgt. Howard passed way in 1993.

Never loud or profane, Gen. Raymond G. Davis, USMC, was modest in everything and temperate under fire. He received a fourth star and retired as Assistant

invasion force’s left flank. But his battalion also suffered 71 percent casualties, with one company reduced to 90 men. Still, his Marines persevered.

During the early stages of a later war, surrounded by Chinese Communist forces, Davis again displayed calmness in the face of staggering odds. This action was near Yudam-ni and the Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War. At Toktong Pass, a Marine rifle company, cut off and

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surrounded by vastly superior numbers of Chinese, fought on and held out.

Then a lieutenant colonel, Davis made a bold dash over frozen ridges through knee-deep snow to engage the enemy in 40-degrees-below-zero temperatures and bone-chilling winds. Shrouded in blizzard-like conditions and encountering enemy fire throughout, his battalion linked up with the stranded Leatherneck company.

His unit went on to play a vital role by helping a surrounded Marine division fight its way to the sea against massive Chinese armies. His actions won him the Medal of Honor.

In May 1968, Davis, now a major general, took command of the 3rd Marine Division along the southern trace of the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Vietnams.

occasions. These rear-area Marines, reacting with their basic training, quickly repulsed the enemy force, silencing their automatic weapons. Under extremely dangerous conditions, Marines in the command post element performed with courage, enabling rifle companies of the battalion to continue pursuing the enemy. The “every Marine a rifleman first” maxim paid huge dividends when needed most during the heat of battle. Hopkins went on to become a brigadier general before retirement.

Davis, who died in 2003, also conceived of Operation Dewey Canyon, designed to halt the North Vietnamese Army from barreling down along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

A thousand vehicles a day supplied enemy efforts in the Da Krong and A Shau Valleys, building toward a major spring offensive.

I’ve frequently been asked why I joined the Marine Corps. Perhaps it’s related to youthful memories of the famous photograph by Joe Rosenthal of Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima – and subsequently meeting and obtaining the autographs of several of these Marines when they were on a tour of the United States.

Then some years later as a student at the University of Michigan, I read about a new Marine Corps officer candidate program for women. I contacted the NROTC unit on campus to obtain more information and decided to apply. After completing officer candidate training, I was commissioned as a second lieutenant when I graduated from the university. The Korean War had begun and I was assigned to active duty. When I retired from the Corps in 1980, I became active with the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation as a volunteer. I feel very privileged to have watched the plans for the new National Museum of the Marine Corps become a reality “as a place where the American people can view the history of our nation through the eyes of Marines.”

– Brig. Gen. Margaret A. Brewer, (USMC-Ret.) He immediately revolutionized tactics by seeking out and engaging the enemy. The division’s approach to the war quickly changed, with rifle companies occupying battalion defensive positions, freeing whole battalions as mobile forces to ferret out the enemy. Davis, often called the greatest Marine tactician of the modern era, was considered a division commander without peer.

Dense jungle, high mountains, and great distances between rifle companies caused a Marine Corps battalion commander to establish a forward, or “jump,” command post. Just below the Demilitarized Zone in South Vietnam, this temporary combat enclave was necessary to assist coordination and communications between fastmoving units and the commander.

Rifle companies of the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, then commanded by Lt. Col. Joseph Hopkins, USMC, were heavily engaged in combat with the 246th North Vietnamese Regiment in the upper Cam Lo Valley.

The only security force available for the command post was a recoilless rifle platoon reinforced with clerks, cooks, bakers, truck drivers, and other headquarters personnel from the rear area. The assistant operations officer moved forward and took command of this unit.

The command post was probed by enemy forces and taken under heavy machine gun fire on numerous

The 9th Marine regiment, commanded by then Col. Robert H. Barrow, USMC, was given the task of hopscotch helicopter attacks into the A Shau Valley. The colonel earlier won the Navy Cross during the Chosin Reservoir campaign in Korea, along with a Silver Star during the Inchon-Seoul landing. Later, Gen. Barrow became the 27th commandant of the Marine Corps.

The Dewey Canyon thrust, the most successful largescale operation in Vietnam, captured and destroyed enormous quantities of enemy weapons, including heavy artillery, and cut the enemy’s supply route by ambushing the Ho Chi Minh Trail inside Laos. Traffic slowed to a trickle, with Marines driving the enemy from the valley.

Barrow was awarded the Army’s Distinguished Service Cross for extraordinary heroism.

Today’s Marines are just as gung ho and tenacious in going after the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Esprit de corps is alive and well among Marines like Gunnery Sgt. Justin Lehew, Lance Cpl. Joseph B. Perez, Capt. Brian R. Chontosh, and Sgt. Robert J. Mitchell. They each performed with great courage in the face of heavy enemy fire.

Upholding the highest Marine Corps traditions, each brought great credit on himself in winning the Navy Cross.

Their training and devotion to their fellow Marines paid off. And, as always, it all started with a challenge.

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U.S. MARINE CORPS

HISTORY

By Col. Joseph H. Alexander (USMC-RET.) Excerpted from A Fellowship of Valor: The Battle History of the United States Marines

The Leathernecks (1775-1859) captured fort. The American Revolution had for the first time spread beyond its borders.

Primitive and obscure, the seizure of Fort Nassau in 1776 served as the progenitor of epic amphibious landings to come.

In late 1776, however, the British Army launched a series of attacks that sent the Continental Army reeling across New Jersey.

Washington led his patchwork forces back across the Delaware River to strike a surprise blow against Lord Cornwallis’s overconfident veterans at Princeton. This was a desperate battle for the Americans. At the height of the confused fighting, Washington personally rallied the Marines and Pennsylvanians for yet another charge against the Redcoats. It turned the tide. Cornwallis had to modify his otherwise promising campaign.

Thereafter, the Marines would do their fighting afloat, or storming ashore, with the Navy. But Nicholas had set a valuable precedent. His “sea soldiers” had fought inland admirably with the Army.

As the Revolution raged on, Continental Marines saw Naval action as far east as the British Isles.

There they served with distinction with Captain John Paul Jones, executing the first amphibious landings in European waters at Whitehaven and St. Mary’s Isle in the Irish Sea. In September 1779, Jones’s Marines manned the fighting tops of his flagship, the Bonhomme Richard, when she squared off against the fifty-gun British frigate HMS Serapis in the North Sea. As the thundering, burning ships grappled together, the Marines aloft responded

The Revolutionary War (1771-1783)

On a blustery February morning in 1776, during the tenth month of the American Revolution, Commodore Esek Hopkins led a squadron of eight extemporized warships out of the ice-clogged Delaware River below Philadelphia. In this, the first deployment of the Continental Navy, Hopkins’s force included 236 newly recruited Continental Marines, commanded by Captain Samuel Nicholas, a thirty-two-year-old former Philadelphia innkeeper. They were the vanguard of two battalions of Marines authorized by the Second Continental Congress on November 10, 1775 (traditionally celebrated as the birthdate of the Corps).

The new contingent, patterned after the British Marines, was a separate adjunct of the regular American Navy, recruited for service as sharpshooters and boardingparty fighters during close combat at sea. Congress also expected the Continental Marines to conduct seaborne landing operations and help maintain discipline among the polyglot Navy crews.

On March 3, 1776, in the company of fifty sailors, Samuel Nicholas and his men conducted the first amphibious landing in Marine history when their surfboats touched shore at New Providence Island in the Bahamas. The Marines and sailors seized undefended Fort Montague and, the next morning, advanced on nearby Fort Nassau.

The undermanned garrison fired a few cannon shots in defiance, then surrendered. To Captain Nicholas went the honor of raising the Grand Union flag over the

Editor’s note: The following excerpts are taken from A Fellowship of Valor, by Col. Joseph H. Alexander, with Norman C. Stahl and the late Don Horan. This work was adapted by kind permission of the author, Col. Joseph H. Alexander, and Lou Reda Productions. This vastly condensed excerpt by necessity comprises only a small part of the book, and does not do justice to the complete work. We recommend all readers consult the original for a far more complete history of the Corps and its Marines. The sidebars were compiled from National Museum of the Marine Corps’ and other materials by Charles Oldham.

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Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

THE MARINES

One of the earliest depictions of a Marine, by a Marine. U.S. Marine, 1825, by 2nd Lt. Charles Rinaldo Floyd, Continental Marines, 1825, watercolor on paper.

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The United States Marine Corps and Marine Corps Heritage Foundation did not select or approve this advertiser and does not endorse and is not responsible for the views or statements contained in this advertisement.

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THE MARINES

magnificently, first shooting their counterparts out of their towering crow’s nests, now just yards away, then raining a deadly fusillade against every British attempt to launch a storming party below. The British soon struck their flag.

When the Treaty of Paris finally ended the eight-yearold Revolutionary War in 1783, an economy-minded Congress gradually disbanded its plucky Marines and sold off the nation’s warships. Marine numbers dwindled until finally there were none.

On July 11, 1798, Congress passed “An Act for Establishing and Organizing a Marine Corps.”

The wording of this legislation reflected unusual forethought. The Marine Corps was to be a separate and distinct armed force “in addition to the present Military Establishment.” Further, the Corps would ever thereafter hold the special mission, in addition to service afloat, of conducting “any other duty on shore, as the President, at his discretion shall direct.” This blanket proviso became the so-called “wild card” among the Marines’ roles and missions, leading to joint adventures with the Army in such diverse places as New Orleans, the Everglades, Mexico City, Belleau Wood, and Okinawa.

President John Adams selected forty-year-old William Ward Burrows, a Charleston attorney with combat experience in the Revolutionary War, as Major Commandant.

appeared out of the trackless desert and formed a line of battle.

Eaton, leading, demanded the city’s surrender. The governor, summoned to behold the phenomenon, was not impressed.

“Your head or mine!” he replied.

Implausibly, Eaton’s force, led by O’Bannon and his Marines, surged forward in a lusty charge.

The invaders breached the walls; the fighting became hand-to-hand and vicious. Three of the eight Marines went down. American warships entered the harbor and opened a hot distracting fire.

The dazed governor surrendered. And Marine First Lieutenant Presley Neville O’Bannon became the first American military officer to raise the Stars and Stripes over a captured fortress in the Old World.

Lieutenant O’Bannon received a ceremonial sword from the state of Virginia. And forever more “the Shores of Tripoli” would herald the emergence of the United States Marines.

The War of 1812 The brief period of peace that followed the Tripoli misadventures ended with a military confrontation between the United States and its former adversary, Great Britain.

When diplomatic efforts failed, the U.S. Congress declared war against England on June 18, 1812.

The Marine Corps, now under the leadership of Lieutenant Colonel Commandant Franklin Wharton, a forty-five-year-old Philadelphian, commenced the war with 493 officers and men, most assigned to the fast frigates.

In late summer 1814, a confident, combined-arms British force under Vice Admiral Alexander Cockburn and Major General Robert Ross advanced on Washington, brushing militia forces aside contemptuously.

President Madison and his Cabinet fled Washington.

So, to his later disgrace, did Lieutenant Colonel Commandant Wharton, taking the payroll with him.

But Wharton’s adjutant, Captain Samuel Miller, stayed to fight, along with 110 Marines from the new Barracks. Miller attached his small force to the disembarked sailors commanded by Commodore Joshua Barney near the hamlet of Bladensburg.

A fierce little battle ensued. The British had the numbers and the experience; the Marines and sailors had grit and the high ground. At length, out of ammunition, and with Barney and Miller both down with wounds, the Americans withdrew in good order.

Ross and Cockburn burned much of Washington but spared the Marine Barracks and the Commandant’s quarters at “8th and Eye,” some say out of respect for the valiant Marines who had stung their advance force so sharply at Bladensburg.

Capturing Washington represented the apogee of British military action in America. The Treaty of Ghent, signed on Christmas Eve 1814, essentially ended the war.

But rudimentary communications kept word of the war’s end from reaching the combatants until more blood had been spilled.

The Tripolitan War The four Barbary states of North Africa – Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli – exacted galling tribute, bribes, and ransoms from unescorted American merchantmen plying the Mediterranean. Then the Basha of Tripoli burned the American flag and declared war on the United States.

The Barbary states were no weak sisters compared to the tiny American fleet. Their port cities were formidable citadels and their swift corsairs were manned with daring and pugnacious seafarers.

The American Naval “presence” got off to an embarrassing start on October 31, 1803, when the fast frigate Philadelphia went hard aground on a Tripolitan reef.

Captain William Bainbridge tried his damnedest to free his ship – even rolling his precious cannons overboard – to no avail. The Tripolitans captured ship, captain, and crew – over 300 Americans, including 43 Marines.

On the night of February 16, 1804, Sergeant Solomon Wren and seven other Marines joined Navy Lieutenant Stephen Decatur in a volunteer raiding party. They boarded Philadelphia, surprised and cut down the enemy crew, and burned the great ship to the waterline without losing a man.

With equal daring, Marine Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon led his handful of Leathernecks in support of Naval agent William Eaton and a few hundred mercenaries during a bold, cross-country strike against the coastal stronghold of Derna.

Their 600-mile march across the Libyan Desert from Alexandria, Egypt, was the stuff of legend.

On April 27, 1805, Tripolitan sentries manning the fortified gates of Derna could scarcely believe their eyes.

Like a mirage, a ragged band of armed men suddenly

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In January 1815, Major General Sir Edward Pakenham, brother-in-law to the legendary Lord Wellington, led 9,000 veterans against New Orleans. There General Andrew Jackson assembled a hodgepodge force.

Captain Daniel Carmick’s 300 Marines joined frontiersmen, pirates, adventurers, and Army regulars in one of the greatest underdog victories in American military history, cutting down half the invading force and slaying its major general. Carmick, shot in the head, later died of his wounds.

The Seminole War presaged America’s involvement in the Vietnam War 120 years later – an endless guerrilla campaign against an elusive foe, one that quickly lost public support. Most of [Commandant Archibald] Henderson’s Marines remained in Florida for five miserable years.

James K. Polk accepted the offer and ordered the Marines to join General Winfield Scott’s army in its campaign against Mexico City.

Lieutenant Colonel Samuel E. Watson commanded the Marine battalion; Major Levi Twiggs served as second-in-command. Both officers had served in the War of 1812 and were now long in the tooth.

In the crucial assaults on Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City on September 13, 1847, Twiggs was killed and Watson showed no initiative.

Only a handful of officers – notably Captain George Terrett and Lieutenants John Simms and Charles Henderson (the Commandant’s oldest son) – took the bit in their teeth and fought with conspicuous valor. The Marines who sprang up to follow these officers attacked in the highest traditions – battering down the gates to the ancient citadel, coolly shooting onrushing Mexican lancers out of their saddles, even raising the American flag.

When the citizens of Washington presented Henderson with a commemorative flag inscribed with the words “From Tripoli to the Halls of Montezuma” the legend was immortalized. A rousing song would soon follow.

The Mexican War: 1846-1848 At the outbreak of the Mexican War, Henderson again tendered the services of a provisional battalion of Marines for quick deployment with the Army. President

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Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

One of the primary missions of Marines in their early years: delivering accurate fire against the personnel of an enemy ship, as these Marines in the rigging of USS Wasp are doing. USS Wasp VS HMS Reindeer, by Staff Sgt. John F. Clymer, USMCR, 1945, oil on canvas.

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Main mission or not, Marines conducted fully a half hundred armed landings “under conditions short of war” during the Henderson Era. These small landing excursions occurred all around the globe, from the Falkland Islands to Liberia, and from Sumatra to Uruguay.

In fact, Marines splashed ashore at far distant places called Tarawa and Okinawa in this era, islands to which they would bloodily return nearly a century later.

Archibald Henderson may have lacked a vision for amphibious warfare, but in his steadfast way he did worlds to establish formal legitimacy and informal legacy for his small Corps. He accorded special status to Marine noncommissioned officers, many of whom would command Marine detachments on the smaller ships of war without benefit of an officer’s rank or privilege. He made Marine NCOs the heart of the Corps, a hallmark of its success.

Admiral Nimitz Museum National Museum of the Pacific War

Manifest Destiny (1859-1914) While the combat role for fighting Marines on warships declined, the Marines still proved useful in battle. In declared wars, the nation always found a need for an instantly available, rigorously trained force of relentless fighters. But in the “extra-curricular” fighting of the imperial age they were especially handy, presenting a powerful national military presence in something of a seagoing constabulary role, always politically easier to commit than the Army.

The Marines had a pivotal role in a crucial moment in the countdown to the Civil War. When abolitionist John Brown seized the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry with an insurrectionist force, took hostages, and barricaded himself in an engine house as he sought a general uprising of slaves, the situation represented a national tinderbox. The Marines got there first.

It was November 1859. Lieutenant Israel Greene mustered a full company of regulars from Marine Barracks Washington in short order – armed, equipped, and aboard the first train to Harper’s Ferry in three hours. Greene led two columns of his Marines in a storming attack against the barricaded engine house at daybreak.

Two Marines fell. Greene flattened John Brown with a back-handed slash of his sword. His troops killed or captured the other kidnappers with deadly efficiency. All hostages survived.

Nice work. But the Corps faced deep problems.

While all armed services suffered the loss of Southern officers resigning their commissions, the Marine Corps arguably lost its best and brightest.

The U.S. Marines also missed a ripe opportunity to provide the spearhead in forcible amphibious assaults along the entire Southern coast, as well as in thousands of miles of inland rivers. Instead, [Commandant Colonel John] Harris clung mutely to the old ways, providing “penny packets” of Marine detachments for outdated 1812-era functions on the major warships. His few attempts to organize larger fighting forces were disastrous.

The fighting heart of the Corps continued to beat, quietly and effectively, in a thousand close-range naval engagements. At Drewry’s Bluff on the James River below Richmond, Confederate Marines and Union Marines dueled each other with muskets while the forts and the federal ironclads swapped thundering broadsides. Hardest hit was USS Galena, whose gun decks quickly ran red with blood. Through all the death and destruction strode U.S. Marine Corporal John Mackie, who pulled the wounded to shelter and matched his Rebel counterparts round for point-blank round until Galena could extricate herself from the firestorm.

Abraham Lincoln personally awarded John Mackie the Medal of Honor, the first such award ever earned by a Marine.

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THE ADMIRAL NIMITZ FOUNDATION AND THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE PACIFIC WAR FREDERICKSBURG, TEXAS CONGRATULATE THE NATIONAL MUSEUM THE MARINE CORPS

OF

FOR ITS TRIBUTE TO ALL

MARINES PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE. WE WISH YOU THE BEST OF LUCK WITH ALL YOUR PLANS.

George Bush Gallery National Museum of the Pacific War

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More Marine citations followed. Eight Marines earned the Medal of Honor for extraordinary bravery under fire during the Battle of Mobile Bay with its close encounters with the mammoth Confederate ironclad Tennessee.

Other Marines were frittered away in valiant but disorganized operations which achieved little but casualties.

At no time during the war did Marine Corps strength exceed 4,000 men, truly a drop in the bucket compared with the hundreds of thousands who served in the Union Army or Navy.

In truth, the only shining achievement for the Corps during this cataclysmic war was the enhancement of its traditions of strong NCO leadership. These men proved to be highly responsible, technically proficient, tough-asnails fighters. And they carried the Corps through its doldrums.

Fifteen of the seventeen enlisted Marines to receive the Medal of Honor during the Civil War wore the stripes of corporals or sergeants.

Small detachments of Marines, led by junior officers and NCOs, continued to spearhead landing parties around the world: China in 1866; Formosa, Japan, and Nicaragua in 1867; Japan again and Uruguay in 1868; Mexico in 1870. “A ship without Marines is like a garment without buttons,” said a grateful Admiral David Dickson Porter.

In 1871, Commodore John Rogers’ Far Eastern Squadron launched a battalion-sized landing party to

seize a series of forts from pugnacious Salee River pirates in a land the Marines would visit again for mortal combat – Korea.

Naval gunfire paved the way for the landing. Marines and sailors lugged field pieces through the mudflats, charged with abandon, scaled the walls, overwhelmed the garrison, and came away with huge Korean flags as souvenirs.

The Marines rode into the new century on the bowwave of public enthusiasm for Imperialism.

On the evening of February 15, 1898, the proud new armored cruiser Maine, moored in Havana harbor to “show the colors” during Spain’s unpopular repression of its Cuban colony, erupted in a violent explosion and sank, killing 260 Americans, among them 28 Marines.

“Remember the Maine” became the national cry.

Congress soon recognized Cuba’s independence and authorized military action against Spain.

Lieutenant Colonel Robert Huntington, a bearded, bristling Marine … assembled a large, well-armed battalion of troops from posts and stations throughout the east.

With most of the Spanish fleet holed up in Santiago Harbor, Admiral William Sampson ordered the forcible seizure of Guantanamo Bay as an advance naval base and coaling station.

Eight thousand Spanish troops occupied the rugged hills around Guantanamo, but none opted to oppose Huntington’s landing on June 10, especially after a pelting bombardment by the cruiser Marblehead.

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Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

While Lt. Israel Greene and his men performed well in capturing John Brown and safely releasing all his hostages at Harper’s Ferry, the aftermath, in the form of the Civil War, was not a good time for the Corps. Harper’s Ferry, Col. Charles H. Waterhouse, USMCR (Ret.), 1987, acrylic on masonite.

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Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

Huntington soon realized that Guantanamo’s fate remained inextricably linked to access to fresh water.

Spaniards and Marines alike had their eyes on Cuzco Well, several miles away.

Huntington sent two Marine rifle companies under Captain George Fielding Elliott to seize the well.

Supporting fire would come from the gunboat Dolphin steaming along the coast.

Elliott maneuvered into position and launched his attack. Spanish riflemen of the 6th Barcelona Regiment returned a brisk fire.

Dolphin, lying offshore, began dropping shells into the Marine lines. In the middle of this unwelcome chaos, Sergeant John H. Quick scrambled to an exposed overlook to wave an emphatic semaphore message to Dolphin.

The ship abruptly shifted its fire to the nearby Spaniards, as directed by Quick, and the Marines resumed their advance with a growl.

Intense fighting ensued in the thick vegetation, but the Marines had the advantage of momentum and the corrected fire of the gunship. The Spaniards yielded the precious well.

Later that month, the U.S. Army’s 5th Corps landed east of Santiago. Soon Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders battled their way into history at San Juan Hill, and the “Splendid Little War” petered out.

Commodore George Dewey, victor over the Spanish fleet in the Battle of Manila Bay, later confessed to Congress that many of the subsequent problems of the Philippine Insurrection (1899-1902) could have been

avoided “had I had five thousand Marines embarked with my Naval force.”

The violent Philippine Insurrection foreshadowed the American War in Vietnam sixty years later: a jungle war against shadowy guerrillas – a protracted, brutal campaign increasingly unpopular on the American home front.

Washington responded to the guerrillas’ challenge by sending overseas the Army’s VII Corps and an entire regiment of Marines, the largest organized body of Leathernecks to take to the field in their history.

[Filipino guerrilla chieftain] Emilio Aguinaldo’s capture by U.S. Army forces in March 1901 led to an uneasy peace throughout the Philippine Islands, except for Samar in the southeast. There, six months later, rebel tribesmen attacked an outpost of the 9th U.S. Infantry at breakfast, killing forty soldiers, mutilating their bodies obscenely.

Major Littleton Waller Tazewell Waller – short, stout, and fierce – commanded the provisional brigade to “pacify” Samar.

By mid-November, Waller’s scouts located the rebel jungle headquarters in a series of fortified caves in a 200foot cliff over the Sohoton River.

Waller executed a brilliant three-pronged attack against the heavily jungled cliffside caves.

The insurrection on Samar effectively ended with this battle.

Unknowingly, the Marines had commenced a full century of combat in the Pacific. The first of several conflicts to come

The Marine Corps emerged from the Boxer Rebellion with a greatly enhanced reputation after their heroics at Peking and Tientsin. Defense of Peking – 1900, Staff Sgt. John F. Clymer, USMCR, 1945, oil on canvas.

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menced a ten-day overland march to Peking, arriving in force before the massive gates on August 14. The next day, after a brief bombardment, the Marines led the attack, scaling the wall south of the Tung Pien Gate to open fire on the Boxers inside.

Smedley Butler, newly promoted to captain for his heroism at Tientsin and barely healed from his first wound, received another bullet wound in a repeat performance at Peking, climbing the wall to open the main gate to the British compound. Thousands of fighting men, their various uniforms now a quilt of different colors, swarmed inside.

The fifty-five-day siege had been broken.

In 1914, in a final period of naïveté before the monstrous world war, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for approval to employ armed force in Mexico for “affronts and indignities committed against the United States.” The target, first Tampico, shifted to Veracruz.

The Marines mobilized half the entire Corps to deploy five provisional regiments in Veracruz within the first ten days. They raced to the scene in anything that would float – transports, warships, coal ships, a target ship, even a chartered commercial liner. They stormed ashore in surfboats, launches, tugs, or scows. And they gleefully beat the more heavily laden Army to the fight by a full week.

[Lieutenant Colonel Wendell “Whispering Buck”] Neville’s Marines streamed ashore throughout a very hot June afternoon, fanning out to seize the customs house and cable office.

Organized Mexican forces pulled back, but sufficient militia, cadets, and armed civilians remained to put up a stiff resistance.

A day and a half of this close-range fighting cost the Americans nineteen dead and seventy-five wounded.

Hundreds of Mexicans died.

Now Wilson agreed to mediation, and the Mexican crisis would go away, to be replaced very shortly by a war where desperately fighting Marines would lose more men in an hour than they had lost in all of these far-flung forays on behalf of “Manifest Destiny.”

with the Chinese began in 1900 with the so-called Boxer Rebellion. Marines fought in north China to rescue Western diplomats from the murderous, xenophobic “Society of the Righteous Harmonious Fists,” the Boxers.

In May 1900, Captain John “Handsome Jack” Myers led a contingent of U.S. Marines to Peking to help protect the legations. Within hours, Marines and Boxers began exchanging fire.

On June 5, Britain’s Sir Edward Seymour led a multinational force, including 112 U.S. Marines and sailors, north by train from Tientsin to relieve the beleaguered legations at Peking. Heavily armed Boxers stopped Seymour’s advance, then surrounded him in an arsenal at Hsiku.

On June 18, Major Waller led ashore at the Chinese port of Taku a battalion of Marines, fresh from fighting in Luzon. Joining with a battalion of Russian infantry, Waller’s Marines set off for Tientsin to relieve Seymour’s encircled group at the Hsiku Arsenal.

Meanwhile the famous “Fiftyfive Days at Peking” began with the Boxer siege initiated on June 20.

Thousands of foreigners, mainly noncombatants, jammed the besieged Legation Quarter, an area less than three quarters of a mile square. There was little food or water, and the Boxers kept the enclave under constant bombardment.

Marines under Captain Myers held the Tartar Wall, a critical position at the southern end of the Quarter.

Nowhere did the Marines take a backward step along the perimeter.

They were indeed in their element: helpless women and children depending on them, professional counterparts from a dozen nations eyeing them critically, a savage, implacable enemy to fight.

Back at Tientsin, with even more U.S. Marines swelling its ranks, the International Army launched its attack against the towering walls.

Feisty Lieutenant Smedley Butler fell wounded as he led his Marines against the fortified city’s gates. Tientsin finally fell.

The International Army com-

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Army historian Gen. S.L.A. Marshall called the Marine Brigade in World War I “without a doubt the most aggressive body of diehards on the Western Front,” a reputation paid for in blood and sacrifice. Belleau Wood, Frank Earle Schoonover, ca. 1920s, oil on canvas.

The fighting in the last year of WWI – the American year – was everything the Marines were created not to do.

Their expeditionary doctrine was thwarted. The immobility of bogged-down, mud-slogging trench warfare negated all hope of surprise and slashing maneuver.

Barbed wire, the machine gun, and massed artillery turned shock tactics into mass graves.

Yet the savage three-week Battle of Belleau Wood in that war eclipsed everything the Marines had achieved in their first 143 years. And that was just the beginning. The price in flesh and lost innocence was hideous, but it was the making of the Marine Corps as a lethal, murderously tenacious weapon in the big-unit battles of modern, protracted war.

America went to war with Germany with an unprecedented 22,000 Marines under arms; the total would double before year’s end.

The Leathernecks who sailed for France on June 14 with Army Major General John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), were the 5th Marines, led by Colonel Charles Doyen. But when they arrived at St. Nazaire, Pershing assigned Doyen’s regiment the decidedly unglamorous task of rear-area security and labor details. It would take months of top-level intervention to get Pershing to relent and commit the Marines to the same pre-combat training being given Army troops by French veterans.

General Erich Ludendorff, the German commander, had launched a massive new offensive, and the AEF would soon be called to play its first major role. Pershing assigned his chief of staff, Army Brigadier General James Harbord,

to take command of the Marines, saying sternly, “Young man, I’m giving you the best brigade in France – if anything goes wrong I’ll know whom to blame.”

When Ludendorff reached the Marne at Chateau Thierry, he stood just fifty miles from the French capital.

General Ferdinand Foch, the Commander-in-Chief of Allied Forces in France, had little confidence in the largely untested American military. Foch and Pershing had clashed over the initial combat assignments of the AEF. Foch wanted to feed small units of American forces piecemeal to reinforce the shattered French and British divisions; Pershing fought to preserve the tactical integrity of the AEF, demanding the right to fight as an American army.

But the crisis at the Marne demanded quick action.

Pershing reluctantly released his five American divisions to Foch.

On May 30, 1918, Pershing ordered the U.S. 2d Division to join French General Joseph Degoutte’s Sixth Army in desperate fighting along the Marne front. The Marines boarded camions – covered French trucks with seats along either side – and raced toward Chateau Thierry for their first major confrontation with the German Army and the greatest crossroads in their battle history.

Ahead, the Germans had seized a line of villages – Vaux, Bouresches, Torcy – and in this sector the 461st Imperial German Infantry, a 1,200-man regiment reinforced with plentiful Maxim machine guns, occupied a wooded area for a brief rest before resuming their drive on Paris.

The mile-square region, a game preserve, was known as Bois de Belleau, Belleau Wood.

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Left: Casualties were high for the relatively short time the Marine Corps spent fighting in World War I, but the Marines left a legacy of courage, excellence, and esprit de corps that would endure forever. Flare, Front Line, Champagne … , Colonel John W. Thomason, Jr. USMC, ca. 1918-1928, watercolor on paper. Right: Legend has it the name teufelhunden, or “devil dogs,” was given to the Marines by the Germans during World War I. It didn’t hurt recruiting.

The camions screeched to a halt, discharging thousands of stiff-legged members of the 2d Division along the shoulders of the crucial Paris-Metz highway.

Sergeants ordered their men off the exposed thoroughfare and into positions along both sides. The Leathernecks assumed responsibility for a long stretch of line to the north, the 5th Marines on the left, the 6th Marines on the right.

A half-mile away, through a ripening wheat field, lay Belleau Wood, dark and brooding. The few French pickets out front seemed overmatched.

On June 2, Ludendorff resumed his attack with a new fury. The already battered French Sixth Army began falling back.

The Marines watched in silence as the demoralized soldiers retired through their lines. A passing French officer suggested that they join the retreat. Captain Lloyd Williams answered for every Marine when he said, “Retreat, hell! We just got here.”

At last, the German infantry appeared, long lines of men approaching rapidly across the fields, shoulders hunched, weapons low. The rookies in the Marine lines swallowed hard at the sight; the veterans smiled grimly, adjusted the folding-leaf rear sights on their Springfield “‘03’s,” and settled into steady firing positions. Never again in this bloody war would the Marines have such lucrative targets.

The brigade opened sustained fire at 800 yards, more than three times the accepted combat range. The

Springfield’s 30-06 bullet impacted like a mule’s kick, even at that extended range, and German soldiers spun and tumbled with the fusillade.

Incredulous, the survivors wavered, then went to ground. Their officers harangued them into resuming the attack; another hail of rifle bullets struck the exposed men with sickening thuds. [Major E.B.] Cole’s massed machine guns began raking the lines. A third advance fared little better, and the Germans, no fools, flowed back into the shelter of the woods. There would be no breakthrough along the Paris-Metz highway this day.

The assault of the 4th Marine Brigade against Belleau Wood would resemble the exposed, bloody landing of the 2d Marine Division against fortified Japanese positions on Tarawa twenty-five years later.

At Belleau Wood, with field artillery brave but ineffectual, infantry was forced to undertake a very long haul through the wheat fields in the face of a terribly relentless machine-gun fire. The Marines had not faced such a formidable force of combat veterans since Bladensburg and New Orleans in 1814-15.

There they had delivered a hot defensive fire against advancing troops in the open. Now the tables were reversed.

The 1st Battalion, 5th Marines were the first to go “over the top,” spilling out of their foxholes for a dawn attack against Hill 142, an intermediate objective on the left flank.

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“Johnny the Hard” (another Medal of Honor awardee from Veracruz) held the bloody ground, his eyes swollen shut by the gas. His laconic message to Harbord at the height of the counterattack should have given the Germans pause: “Have had terrific bombardment and attack … everything is OK … Can’t you get hot coffee to me?”

Legend has it that the survivors of the 461st Imperial German Infantry, who had fought the Marines tooth and nail since the third of June, had a fitting, one-word description of their relentless foe: Teufelhunden or “Devil Dogs.”

In the end, the Devil Dogs triumphed. On June 26, twenty days after his battalion had stormed across the terrible wheat field to begin the battle, Major Maurice Shearer of the 5th Marines wiped out the final German strong point and sent a crackling message: “Woods now U.S. Marine Corps entirely.”

“The grateful French, convinced the Marines had removed the threat against Paris, renamed the milesquare wood Bois de la Brigade de Marine.

Belleau Wood gave the Marines invaluable confidence and experience. Among the survivors were men who would lead the Corps in distant battles for the next four decades, including future Commandants [Wendell] Neville, [Thomas] Holcomb, [Clifton] Cates and a lionhearted young lieutenant named Lemuel Shepherd.

The Marines’ war pressed on. General Ludendorff launched one final German offensive on July 15, 1918.

This time the Marines fought as part of the French XX Corps.

Ludendorff ’s offensive created a huge bulge in the Allied lines. General Foch decided to counterattack in the Aisne-Marne region, near a place called Soissons.

The 2d Division Marines joined the XX Corps veterans – Moroccans, Senegalese, Foreign Legionnaires – in the Forest of Retz. It was urgent that the Americans reach their line of departure before daybreak. The Marines executed a nightmare of a forced march in a driving rainstorm – some rifle companies having to double-time the last mile to kick off the assault in time.

Soissons was two days of desperate fighting. The 5th Marines, under Colonel Logan Feland, led the way the first day; the 6th Marines, now commanded by Colonel Harry Lee, took over the second. In effect the attack forcibly throttled the final offensive spasm of the Imperial German Army. Both units fought bloody, exhausting battles.

At Soissons, Private First Class Carl Brannen, a replacement in the 2d Battalion, 6th Marines after the Belleau Wood brawl, experienced the terror of his first combat this hot July day in the wheat fields. “The Germans turned loose everything they had,” he said. “It seemed to rain shells.”

Brannen eventually linked up with Lieutenant Clifford Cates, but the incessant shelling and machine gun fire had ripped the 6th Marines to fragments. Cates refused to give in to despair. In a message since immortalized in Marine legend, Cates reported, “I have only two men left out of my company and twenty out of others … I have no one to my left and only a few to my right.

I will hold.”

Advancing the half-mile to their hill, and wresting it from the German defenders, took until noon and cost 410 casualties, a sobering first step in the prolonged battle to come.

Harbord launched the main assault at 5 P.M. on June 6.

Now German machine gunners feasted on the massed targets, enjoying a turkey shoot of their own.

The first ranks of Marines fell in appalling numbers.

The others hit the deck and, in the dubious shelter of the wheat, continued the advance on their hands and knees – junking their French training with the same cynical adaptability which would help them seize Pacific atolls in the war to come.

This improvised assault – one small group popping up to blaze away with rifles while another rushed forward a few dozen yards – also had its price. The veteran German machine gunners had the range and the deflection – and plenty of ammo. Bands of interlocking Maxim machine gun fire scythed down wheat and Marines alike. The final 50 yards seemed impassable.

War correspondent Floyd Gibbons lay surrounded by the dead, pinned down and terrified. At this critical point, one of the Old Breed Leathernecks leapt to his feet with a curse. Gibbons stared in awe as Gunnery Sergeant Daniel Daly, the double Medal of Honor awardee from the Boxer Rebellion and Haiti, swept by. “The sergeant,” Gibbons reported in his dispatch, “swung his bayoneted rifle over his head with a forward sweep, yelling at his men, ‘Come on you sons-of-bitches, do you want to live forever?’” With a roar, the survivors in the wheat surged forward and overran the first line of German machine gun nests in the woods.

June 6, 1918, had become the bloodiest single day in the Corps’ history. The 4th Marine Brigade had suffered 1,087 casualties, losing more men in a single day than in all preceding 143 years combined.

During the night and into June 7, the Marines inside Belleau Wood repeatedly challenged the German defenders in savage, close-in combat. But closing to bayonet range took countless Marine lives. They had few grenades, no signal flares, and little experience coordinating with divisional artillery, and were still unhappy with their overweight Chauchat automatic rifles.

Then, just when it appeared the Germans were on the ropes, Ludendorff ordered a major counterattack.

At dawn on the thirteenth of June, the Germans clobbered the American positions with heavy artillery fire, saturated Bouresches with mustard gas, and sent fresh storm troops into the smoldering ruins. The arrogant newcomers had much to learn about these unknown American Marines.

German infantry approaching the embattled woods began to drop by the score to uncannily accurate longrange rifle fire. The 2d Division’s field artillery, rapidly gaining combat proficiency, shredded the ranks of the survivors with hot shrapnel.

In the reeking woods, Major John “Johnny the Hard” Hughes and his 1st Battalion, 6th Marines withstood the loss of 450 casualties to poison gas and high explosives, then rose up to greet the attackers with a fury, their bayonets bristling like the quills of an enraged porcupine.

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Lejeune’s first combat operation in France was the two-corps assault against the German salient at St. Mihiel. While Army troops spearheaded the attack, the Marines rushed forward on the second day to take out a powerful series of fortifications along the Hindenburg Line. Doing so took four days of stubborn fighting. The salient fell. So did 700 Marines.

Lejeune’s 2d Division now supported the French Fourth Army, commanded by General Henri Gouraud.

The Germans retreated sullenly, taking full advantage of the rugged terrain and excellent observation afforded by their prepared defenses along the heights above both sides of the Meuse River.

By late September they had slowed the French advance to a crawl. The strongly fortified position at Blanc Mont (“White Mountain”) blocked further progress.

On October 3 the 2d Division demonstrated to the skeptical Allies that its replacements had been imbued with the same fiery vigor as their fallen predecessors at Belleau Wood, Vaux, and Soissons.

Following a violent, five-minute bombardment by 200 guns, the division surged forward on the run, the 3rd Infantry Brigade on the right, the 4th Marine Brigade on the left. Harry Lee’s 6th Marines claimed the crest of the dominant ridge by noon; the soldiers swept the right shoulder. On the left, with the French flattened by German defenders in the Essen Hook, the 5th Marines of Logan Feland wheeled and took the position from the flank.

The following day, October 4, proved to be one of the bloodiest in Marine Corps history. The 5th Marines took the lead, advancing briskly toward the village of St. Etienne, just as the Germans launched a fierce counterattack. The Marine regiment soon came under galling fire from three sides, topped by the fiercest artillery bombardment they had ever experienced in the war.

One battalion of a thousand Marines charged through a fire-storm of enormous explosives to drive the enemy back to the town. Nine hundred men fell in this endeavor. By day’s merciful end, 1,100 Marines lay killed or wounded.

Four days of bitter fighting followed before St. Etienne was taken and the area secured. In the action, the Marines had suffered more than 2,500 casualties; one company lost 90 percent of its men. Even the seemingly indestructible Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly fell wounded.

By the tenth of October the Germans were in full retreat.

The French government awarded the 5th and 6th Marines (and the 6th Machine Gun Battalion) their third citation for gallantry, thereby entitling members of those outfits to wear the scarlet and green fourragere on the left shoulders of their uniforms. (This distinction, won at such a painful cost, continues today among the Marines of those historic regiments.)

Imperial Germany was clearly on the ropes.

Politicians frantically negotiated to attain an armistice.

But the killing continued.

Fighting proved particularly bitter in the Argonne Forest and along the Meuse, the river of death. On November 1, 1918, Black Jack Pershing’s First Army surged forward, the Marines with them.

The 4th Marine Brigade was by this time a combatcagey outfit, despite its heavy losses and constant replace-

DE HAVILL AND DH-4 Although the de Havilland DH-4 hanging above Legacy Walk might lack the grace or beauty of other aircraft in the museum, it embodies two major milestones in Marine Corps air operations.

The DH-4 was the first aircraft used by the Marines’ fledgling air arm, in World War I. Designed by the British specifically for day bombing, the DH4 had the unenviable nickname of “Flaming Coffin,” earned in part for the unfortunate feature of a fuel tank housed in the center section of the upper wing, above the red-hot exhaust stacks of the engine. But it was all that was available to the Marines, and it was flown in 57 bombing raids by the 9th and 10th Marine Squadrons, based at Dunkirk. Four Marine aviators were killed, but they shot down 12 enemy planes, and two Marines, 2nd Lt. Ralph Talbot and Corp. Robert Robinson, earned Medals of Honor for their action of Oct. 14, 1918, when they shot down two German fighters despite their wounds on their return from a bombing raid. Legendary Marine aviation commanders like then-Capt. Roy Geiger also cut their teeth on the DH-4.

On July 16, 1927, a small force of Marines supporting the government of Nicaragua were surrounded in Ocotal by approximately 500 of rebel Augusto Sandino’s guerrillas. With reinforcements at least a week away, the Marines and their Nicaraguan compatriots were in a near hopeless situation.

Maj. “Rusty” Rowell, of Marine squadron VO-1, on hearing of their plight, loaded his DH-4Bs with ammunition and 17-pound bombs and arrived over the town the next afternoon. A pioneer on the new method of dive-bombing, Rowell had trained his squadron in the tactic, and in repeated attacks with bombs and machine guns, routed the enemy forces. It was not only arguably the first organized dive bombing attack on an enemy, but an early blossoming of Marine Corps air-ground tactics. Rowell was the first Marine to earn the Distinguished Flying Cross for this operation.

The museum’s DH-4 was acquired through the trade exchange program from Mr. Frank Tallman, and is a compilation of original metal components. The balance of the aircraft is a reproduction.

DH-4 TECHNICAL DATA Manufacturer: Dayton-Wright Airplane Company; The Fisher Body Corporation; Standard Aircraft Corporation; Naval Aircraft Factory Type: Fighter-Bomber Accommodation: Pilot and Observer/Gunner Power plant: One 400 hp Liberty 12 Dimensions: Span, 42 ft 5 in; Length, 29 ft 11 in; Height, 9 ft 8 in; Wing Area, 440 sq ft Weights: Empty, 2,391 lbs; Gross, 3,582 lbs Performance: Max Speed, 125 mph; Rate of Climb, 0-10,000 ft in 14 minutes; Service Ceiling, 19,600 ft; Range, 270 miles Armament: two fixed .30-cal. Marlin machineguns; two flexible mount .30 Lewis machineguns; two 230 lbs bombs or four 112 lbs bombs or depth charges Held Cates and his Marines did, and the 2d Division and the XX Corps drove the Germans from the field.

But the Marines at Soissons paid another fearsome price for their part in this victory, sustaining 2,000 more casualties. Occurring so shortly after Belleau Wood, this meant that the original 4th Marine Brigade, which had hurried up the Paris-Metz Highway in such high spirits on June 1, had lost in seven weeks just about its total original number.

General Pershing gave [Major General] John Lejeune command of the 2d Division, with its depleted 4th Marine Brigade, on July 29.

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Whether their de Havilland DH-4s were “Flaming Coffins” or not, Marine aviators were not going to be stopped from fighting in the air war. Two Marine aviators earned the Medal of Honor for their actions during the very first bombing raid, on Thielt, Belgium. Raid on Thielt, 14 October 1918, James Butcher, 1985, oil on canvas, 30” x 40”. Gift of British Aerospace Inc., in Commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of Marine Corps Aviation, 1986. ments. The Marines assaulted, expertly hugging a “rolling barrage” of heavy artillery, and hit the Germans in their trenches just as they began lifting their heads from the bombardment.

The battalions leapfrogged forward, helping each other smother the German strong points, and maintained the assault. By mid-afternoon Marines swarmed over the dominant Barricourt Heights. The Germans bailed out, abandoning the Hindenburg Line, scuttling across the Meuse, blowing the bridges behind them.

At Letanne, on the night of November 10, 1918, the one hundred and forty-third birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps, the 5th Marines stormed across bridges successfully floated by U.S. Army engineers and prepared to assault the Germans along the high ground beyond.

The rest of the Marines took a deep breath the next morning and prepared to make their mad dash across the narrow spans, when – in a final spasm of artillery fire – the armistice went into effect. It was eleven o’clock on November 11 – the war was over.

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“SKILLED WATERMEN AND JUNGLE FIGHTERS, TOO”

Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

(The Interwar Years, 1919-1941)

Smedley Butler led Marines and sailors in an assault on Fort Riviere that effectively ended the Caco rebellion in Haiti during one of the “Banana Wars.” Unpopular at home, they helped forge a new generation of Marine Corps officers and NCOs. Fort Riviere, Haiti – 1915, Colonel Donna J. Neary, USMCR (Ret.), 1989, oil on canvas.

T

he Marines returned from Europe after World War I to national acclaim for their sacrifices and valor. Yet the Corps would soon be in dire straits because they still lacked a unique warfighting mission, a distinctive role that would satisfy national security interests without unduly competing with the Army.

In the doldrums ahead, a shadowy prophet would illuminate the path – the brilliant and doomed Lieutenant Colonel Earl “Pete” Ellis.

In the immediate postwar years, when most Marines envisioned their future role simply as renewed service in another continental campaign, Pete Ellis perceived a radically different naval mission.

Ellis foresaw a major war in the Pacific with Japan and projected the use of Marines as amphibious shock troops to forcibly seize advanced naval bases along the island stepping-stones leading to Japan.

Then came the nine-year commandancy of John Lejeune in the 1920s. Very much akin to his nineteenthcentury predecessor Archibald Henderson, Lejeune managed to return the Corps to its naval roots and ensure his officers and NCOs gained meaningful combat experience around the world.

Lejeune proposed the principal future focus of his fighting men as “a mobile Marine Corps force adequate to conduct offensive land operations against hostile Naval

bases.” The key distinguishing word in this concept: offensive.

At Lejeune’s insistence, the Navy and Marines conducted experimental fleet landing exercises in the Caribbean in the winter of 1923-1924. The results were not pretty.

Offensive landing operations turned out to demand the solution of significant problems that Marines were far from ready to handle. These involved command and control, communications, fire support, and – desperately – the challenge of moving men and their major weapons ashore.

Lejeune was hamstrung in conducting further amphibious tests in his tenure because he had virtually no field forces left at home. The Marine Corps, reduced to less than one third of its WWI strength, became heavily committed for years in “limited wars” in Haiti (19131934), the Dominican Republic (1916-1924), and Nicaragua (1926-1933). These were the so-called “Banana Wars,” unpopular at home and among the native populations. The fighting, small in scale, savage in execution, was ugly and relentless.

The no-quarter fighting in these nasty little undeclared jungle wars had as their sole undisputed reward the training and hardening of many superb Marine officers who would command significant forces in the Pacific War to come.

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report in a dead file, annotated with the comment that it had been submitted by “some nut out in China.”)

Krulak’s experience with the Naval bureaucracy notwithstanding, the Marines and the Navy in the 1930s were finally merging along a similar path leading toward amphibious warfare.

Amphibious warfare, they discovered, had certain inviolable principles. Of these, unity of command was paramount. There could only be one man, naval or ground, in command at any one point in time. There was a logical sequence of transfer of this command from sea to shore as the assault progressed. Also, there had to be at least temporary command of the seas – and the air and the subsurface – in the objective area for the assault to proceed. Good communications would be absolutely vital.

The most galling challenge was how to overcome the amphibious assault’s inherent weakness, the fact that the whole affair begins with a single man – the first man ashore – facing the combined might of the defenders.

There was a crying need for specialized landing craft to get great bunches of men, in tactical order, through the surf and on the beach as quickly as possible.

Tanks and howitzers would have to land right behind the assault troops. Solving the vulnerability of the shipto-shore movement would prove the greatest hurdle.

Having digested all these corollaries and believing there was a future for amphibious warfare after all, the Navy and Marines resumed their annual fleet landing exercises.

But each exercise from 1934 to 1941 simply proved the point that amphibious landings are the most difficult of all military operations to execute.

A caustic, scowling figure emerged from these annual nightmares of chaos and recrimination – Marine Brigadier General Holland M. (soon to be nicknamed “Howlin’ Mad”) Smith, the nation’s leading authority on amphibious assault.

As Smith struggled to teach amphibious warfare to the Army, Navy, and his own Marines, he vented his sulfurous spleen against the snail’s pace of the Bureau of Ships in developing suitable ship-to-shore craft for the landing force. Holland Smith began to look elsewhere.

The search for the ultimate landing craft finally brought the Marines to Andrew Higgins. Higgins, an enterprising New Orleans boat designer, modified his proven, flat-bottomed, shallow-draft Eureka boat, used in bayou waters by oil-drillers and trappers, to include a retractable bow ramp and a protected propeller. It would be a world-shaking innovation, one that would defeat Germany and Japan as ineluctably as any other technology.

Inventor Donald Roebling’s “Swamp Gator,” a tracked amphibian designed to rescue downed aviators in the Everglades, caught the Marines’ eye just before the new war erupted. Roebling modified his prototype to meet naval specs, leading to production of the ubiquitous LVT (Landing Vehicle Tracked). Known almost universally as “Alligators,” they would serve all over the world, initially as logistics haulers, then – beginning with Tarawa – as the troop-carrying cutting edge of amphibious assault.

The so-called “dead” years between the world wars had been anything but that for the Marines. They had bled and learned prodigiously, developed their unique role, and prepared with amazing foresight for the Pacific cauldron ahead.

National Archives

U.S. Marines with Nicaraguan guerrilla leader Augusto Sandino’s flag, 1932.

The Marines’ new role as suppressors of unfriendly unrest didn’t end with the tiny nations. Most Marines in the interwar years rotated between overseas duties in not only Haiti and Nicaragua but also China, another nation rent by civil disorder and threatened by strong neighbors.

Although not involved in combat, the Leathernecks assigned to the Legation Guard at Peking or to the 4th Marines in Shanghai learned the ways of the Orient, which would prove invaluable in World War II. Both [Lieutenant Lewis] “Chesty” Puller and [Captain Merritt] “Red Mike” Edson [who had served in the Marines’ “banana wars”] scrutinized the Imperial Japanese military forces that occupied Shanghai and other major cities after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937. Edson was particularly interested in the rikusentai, the Special Naval Landing Forces.

Captain Evans Carlson, who with Edson would soon form the first Marine raider battalions, learned to speak Chinese, then boldly asked permission from Mao Tsetung to spend a winter learning guerrilla warfare tactics from the masters of the art, the Communist Chinese Army in Yenan.

Another China Marine who developed combat instincts in the interwar years was First Lieutenant Victor Krulak. While assistant intelligence officer of the 4th Marines in 1937, Krulak observed a Japanese amphibious assault conducted against Liuho near the mouth of the Yangtze River. The amphibious expertise displayed by the Japanese impressed and alarmed “The Brute.” “What we saw was that the Japanese were light-years ahead of us in landing craft design,” he said.

Krulak photographed the Japanese’s sturdy, bowramped landing craft and telegraphed a full report to the Navy’s Bureau of Ships. (Two years later, puzzled at the lack of response, he visited the bureau and found his

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231 years, 12 wars, 1 museum Pioneer Services Representatives salute a museum worthy of the Marine Corps.

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Japanese attack on Dutch Harbor, June 3, 1942. Group of Marines on the “alert” between attacks. Smoke from burning fuel tanks in background had been set afire by a dive bomber the previous day.

The United States Marine Corps, in effect, fought two WWIIs. The first as an outmanned, outgunned, sorely underequipped force whose audacious attacks and defenses could reasonably hope to do little more than sting the relentless onslaught of an overpowering foe.

The second as a juggernaut of tactics, courage, and technology against which the most heavily defended bastions in the Pacific could not stand.

Yet it was this second stage of the Pacific amphibious war that produced the most shocking casualties for the Corps. The Marines landed, again and again, into the teeth of massive defensive forces that had used long months to tunnel and fortify strategic islands of terrifying terrain.

They faced every defensive weapon, structure, and stratagem that a seasoned, cunning enemy could devise.

No one would ever attempt to decide in which of these stages of a deadly war the Marines exhibited a more reckless and magnificent bravery.

The last weeks of 1941 would present a disheartening series of hopeless defenses for the Marine Corps. American islands far into the Western Pacific stood in the middle of a

Japanese lake. There was no fragment of the United States Pacific Fleet ravaged at Pearl Harbor that could stand against a full-strength Imperial Navy flushed with victory.

Island defenses were frail, only partially in place, and with hardly the faintest possibility of reinforcement.

Allied forces gave way at all points. Swept up in this tidal wave were the small detachments of United States Marines in China and Guam.

In China, the Legation Guard in Peking and Tientsin never had a chance.

In the port city of Chinwangtao, the rear echelon of the 4th Marines was within a day’s labor of completing its embarkation aboard a transport, when the Japanese seized the ship and the Marines.

Within hours of the Pearl Harbor raid, the Guam garrison, which included 153 Marines, came under air attack from Saipan-based Japanese aircraft.

Their futile predicament reached a climax on December 10 when 5,500 Japanese soldiers made a successful predawn landing at Tumon Bay, southwest of the capital at Agana, while 400 Japanese naval infantry, the storied rikusentai, stormed ashore at Dungcas Beach to the

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National Archives

ISSUE IN DOUBT (World War II, 1941-1942)

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Library of Congress

After the courageous last stands at Wake Island, Bataan, Guam, and other U.S. possessions across the Pacific, there was little doubt what kind of war was going to be fought, and against whom, as this recruiting poster makes evident with its jungle background. north. Soon Guam’s governor, Navy Captain George McMillan, ordered the fruitless resistance to end.

Like the doomed defenders of the Alamo, looking for relief that never came and having no idea that their defense would have any long or resounding memory, the Marines of Wake Island dug in for the worst the enemy could throw.

The small sand spit, lightly garrisoned and remote from relief by the now-crippled U.S. Fleet, would provide the Empire with one more outpost in the north-central Pacific, a stepping-stone to Midway.

On December 11, the day after they steamrolled Guam, a Japanese invasion force approached Wake,

expecting another easy conquest.

But Wake Island would not die easily.

The Marines ambushed the Japanese invasion force with a scorching fire from their handful of 5-inch and 3-inch coast defense guns. [The 1st Defense Battalion’s fiery Major James] Devereux made his gunners wait until the ships had steamed into the “can’t miss” range.

Every round splattered Japanese steel and blood into the Pacific. The destroyer Hayate went down, the first Japanese surface craft to be sunk by Americans in this enormous Pacific War. As the Japanese ships steamed away in disarray, Major [Paul]

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Putnam’s stitched-together Wildcats chased them with 100-pound bombs. Captain Henry Elrod planted one squarely on the fleeing destroyer Kisaragi, a beautiful shot, which exploded with great violence, sending the ship to the bottom.

Now Wake became a matter of national pride on both sides. The Japanese, stung and embarrassed by this setback, doubled their air raids and dispatched a larger assault force for Wake.

From Pearl Harbor sailed a small American relief force.

Spirits were high. But the naval high command was in disarray. The Pacific Fleet commander had been relieved of command in disgrace. The new designee, Admiral Chester Nimitz, was still en route, and the temporary commander was unwilling to risk his three remaining carriers at extreme range against unknown Japanese threats.

To the utter disgust of all hands, the American relief force turned back. The Wake garrison was doomed. But the Marines would go down fighting.

On December 21, the twelfth and last Grumman Wildcat crashed, and the survivors of Marine Fighter Squadron 211, less than a third of their original

numbers, reported to Major Devereux as auxiliary infantrymen.

At 2:35 A.M. on December 23, the Japanese rikusentai poured out of their landing craft onto the island. U.S. Marines, sailors and civilians opened up a hot fire. The fighting ashore raged for hours. In one sector, the remaining aviators fought off several hundred Japanese until every pilot fell to overwhelming fire. Among the slain: Captain “Hank” Elrod, whose sustained bravery in the air and on the ground would make him the first Marine aviator to receive the Medal of Honor in this war.

Just before dawn, [Navy Commander Winfield Scott] Cunningham sent a taut message to Pearl: “Enemy on island; issue in doubt.”

The Marines fought on desperately beyond hope.

Unwilling to preside over the wholesale slaughter of his exhausted garrison – and now aware that the relief expedition had turned back – Cunningham ordered his men to surrender.

Forty-nine Marines, three sailors, and about seventy civilians died in the fight for Wake Island. The garrison inflicted about 1,100 casualties against the Japanese

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Photo courtesy of Dr. Diosdado M.Yap

American prisoners of war under guard by Japanese troops after the surrender of Bataan, April 1942.

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In a painful midnight broadcast, Wainwright ordered his forces to lay down their arms. The heroic defense of the Philippine Islands passed into history. The war was five months old.

Imperial forces controlled the air and seas throughout an enormous arena ranging from the Kuriles to the Gilberts to the Solomons and on past Southeast Asia into the Indian Ocean. They had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams of conquest. But now Japan’s top military and naval leaders succumbed to “Victory Disease,” believing themselves invincible in any distant theater.

Thus was born the ambitious plan to seize Midway and the Aleutians and threaten Hawaii.

Luckily for the Marines, Admiral Nimitz, rich in codebreaking intelligence, commanded the Pacific Fleet with a brilliant mixture of nerve and common sense, engineering a masterful carrier ambush. But it would be a near thing.

The small atoll suffered the brunt of the early action of the ensuing Battle of Midway (June 3-6, 1942), even though the crucial fighting took place between opposing carrier forces hundreds of miles to the northwest.

On the morning of June 4, the approaching Japanese carriers launched 108 planes to strike the atoll. Alerted by radar, the fighters of Marine Fighter Squadron 221 streaked aloft and met the raiders head-on.

It was a turkey shoot for the skilled, veteran Japanese Navy pilots flying against Marine fighters that ranged from obsolescent to antiquated. The Japanese formation continued, although now disorganized and behind schedule. Midway’s patient Marine antiaircraft gunners knocked several bombers spinning into the sea, but the island sustained a terrific pounding. Fires raged at all points. Yet through the smoke and flames came the steady throb of AA batteries seeking targets among the enemy formations.

Ground fire was so spirited, in fact, that a Japanese flight officer radioed, “There is need for a second attack wave.” The fateful decision to execute that strike would lead to the turning point of the battle.

While the Japanese were rearming and refueling their planes for this unplanned second attack, the carrier planes of Admiral Raymond Spruance caught them flat-footed, sinking four fleet carriers and changing the balance of power in the Central Pacific.

On June 14, 1942, five weeks after the fall of the Philippines and barely a week after the Battle of Midway, the 1st Marine Division arrived in New Zealand from its stateside training bases. Major General Alexander Vandegrift, a veteran of combat at long-ago Veracruz, held command.

The division was not, in Vandegrift’s considered opinion, fully trained or equipped for offensive combat (in fact, the 7th Marines had been detached for defense of Samoa), but he hoped that six more months of intensive field training in New Zealand would provide the necessary boost.

But just eleven days after arriving in New Zealand, Vandegrift got the shock of his life. An emergency in the Solomons would require his understrength division to execute an amphibious assault within the next six weeks, ready or not.

His objective was a strange-sounding place he had never heard of – Guadalcanal.

invaders. Marines had gotten their first chance to show what they could do, and it had been magnificent.

If the American defense of Wake Island illuminated the darkness on the home front like a bolt of lightning, the five-month battle to hold on to the Philippines was more like a lingering sunset – breathtakingly spectacular, full of hope, but doomed as well.

MacArthur would prove his brilliance in the years to come, but his defense of the Philippines reflected little of his later military forethought or decisiveness. His bomber force caught on the ground, MacArthur swiftly faced a confident, veteran invasion force advancing from five directions.

Having been defeated on all fronts, MacArthur declared Manila an “open city” and funneled his forces southward into the narrow, more-defensible Bataan Peninsula for a final stand.

In late January 1942, when 900 men of the Japanese 20th Infantry landed behind the American lines at Quinauan Point, the Marines at Mariveles joined the counterattacks.

Providing a brief lift to sagging morale, the GIs, Marines, and Filipinos actually thwarted the imperial landings, winning the so-called “Battle of the Points” and throwing the invaders back into the sea – something the Japanese were never able to do to the Marines.

On March 12, President Roosevelt ordered General MacArthur to leave Corregidor for Australia, there to undertake the rebuilding and reorganizing of Allied forces in the Southwest Pacific.

On April 3, as Japanese forces launched a renewed offensive on Luzon, the weakened American-Filipino line crumbled.

Bataan fell six days later. There were 105 members of the 4th Marines among the 75,000 defenders who stumbled forward on the infamous Death March toward the POW camps.

Meanwhile, the Japanese quickly turned the full force of their field artillery and tactical aircraft against Corregidor. The small island now contained an interservice concentration of 11,000 Americans and Filipinos, survivors of the mainland fighting, all of them sickly, halfstarved, and grim-faced.

Colonel [Samuel L.] Howard’s 4th Marines, reinforced by stalwarts of every service, braced for the inevitable. For twenty-seven dreadful days, the garrison sustained a terrible pounding from Japanese gunners and aviators. The Marines dug in, scanning the bay for signs of the invasion force, almost welcoming the chance for one last grapple with the enemy. The emaciated survivors resembled walking skeletons.

The Japanese now called all the shots. On May 5 they commenced their most fierce bombardment of the campaign. Tiny Corregidor trembled and smoked. After dark, a Japanese battalion landed at North Point. A second battalion arrived before midnight.

The Marines greeted each landing party on the beach, and the battle raged all night at extremely close range.

By noon, the battle for Corregidor was over. Two Marines carried General Jonathan Wainwright’s flag of truce into the Japanese lines. The surviving Leathernecks smashed their rifles and machine guns against rocks.

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GUADALCANAL FIRST OFFENSIVE

Seventeenth Army contained many veterans of the conquests of Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, currently the best jungle fighters in the world.

The 1st Marine Division in August 1942 included about one man in ten who had seen previous combat, typically in Central America. The great majority of the Marines were green recruits or newly commissioned lieutenants who had joined the Corps in the wave of patriotism that swept the nation at the news of Pearl Harbor.

Vandegrift figured to divide his landing force on D-Day. The 1st Marines and most of the 5th Marines would seize Guadalcanal’s airfield. The 1st Marine Raider Battalion, 1st Parachute Battalion, the 2d Marines, and the remainder of the 5th Marines would capture Tulagi and the nearby islets of Gavutu and Tanambogo.

The airfield became the first and final key to the battle for Guadalcanal, and Vandegrift never wavered in his appreciation of its operational value.

He would hold on to the grassy strip against the howling forces of hell.

Shortly after 6 A.M. the cruisers and destroyers opened a noisy fire against both sets of landing objectives.

Eight months to the day after Pearl Harbor, the United States Navy and Marines had launched a major amphibious offensive against the startled Japanese garrisons in the southern Solomons.

The 5th Marines led the way at Guadalcanal, splashing ashore at 9:09 A.M. from their hodgepodge assortment of landing boats. An eerie silence prevailed. So total had been the surprise that only a handful of rikusentai guarded the whole island.

The 5th Marines, hardly trusting their good fortune, pressed on, crossed the river by means of an improvised bridge thrown along the broad backs of LVT-1 Alligators, then headed guardedly toward the airfield.

As General Vandegrift studied his crude maps of the area, he could vividly see the emergency that prompted the Joint Chiefs of Staff to order an amphibious assault so precipitously. New aerial photographs revealed ominous evidence of Japanese construction troops busily carving a long runway out of Guadalcanal’s jungles.

Japanese bombers flying out of Guadalcanal would jeopardize tenuous American positions for hundreds of miles, from New Caledonia to New Guinea. Such a forward base would create a giant “bulge” in the vital sea-lanes between the United States and Australia, further constricting the flow of war materials being shipped to the South Pacific.

Vandegrift’s division, the cutting edge of the Fleet Marine Force, would go into combat equipped with World War I weapons and equipment – the same Springfield ’03 rifles, tin hats, and crude gas masks that their fathers may have worn at Belleau Wood.

The Imperial Navy had suffered an irreversible defeat at Midway, but the Combined Fleet still commanded the sea and air in the South Pacific. Attaining strategic surprise in launching the attack would be crucial to the Marines’ success since the unsuspecting Japanese currently maintained only modest forces in Guadalcanal and Tulagi.

The problem was this: The islands could be reinforced rapidly by the Imperial Navy forces steaming down a line of islands (The Slot) from the great naval fortress at Rabaul. Likewise, from its welldeveloped circle of tactical airfields around Rabaul, the Japanese air arm could launch day and night attacks throughout the Solomons.

Rabaul also served as headquarters for the Seventeenth Japanese Army, commanded by Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutake. The

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The 1st Marines soon landed, crossed the bridge, and followed in trace. “Hot damn – a cakewalk!”

Things were much different to the north across Sealark Channel. Edson’s Raiders had landed smoothly on Tulagi, but soon the shocked rikusentai of the 3rd Kure Special Naval Landing Force began a grim defense, fighting the Marines with all they had.

Gavutu and Tanambogo proved even harder nuts to crack.

Coral reefs channeled the landing boats into one predictable approach. Naval gunfire proved inadequate and insufficient. The Japanese allowed the first wave to touch down to mask the supporting shipboard fires, then cut loose on the succeeding waves.

The parachutists scrambled ashore and bravely fought uphill to the fortified caves, but this was a small, lightly-equipped battalion, and the job was too much

for them. Reinforcements from the 2d Marines helped, but the Japanese machine guns still swept the beaches and ravines.

It took another battalion of the 2d Marines and point-blank fire from destroyers before the landing force could overwhelm the diehard defenders on the second day.

The savage fighting on Tulagi and the islets contrasted markedly with the quiet progress experienced by the bulk of the 1st Marine Division on Guadalcanal. By the second day the 5th Marines had seized the airfield intact.

Admiral [Frank Jack] Fletcher had greater concerns.

He worried – some would say obsessively – about the vulnerability of his carriers.

On the second day he startled the amphibians by announcing his decision to withdraw his force out of

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First Division Marines storm ashore across Guadalcanal's beaches on D-Day, Aug. 7, 1942, from the attack transport Barnett (AP-11) and attack cargo ship Fomalhaut (AK-22).

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range “to refuel.” [Amphibious Task Force Commander Admiral Richmond Kelly] Turner and Vandegrift protested. Debarkation of the Marines and their combat cargo was still far from complete – the thin-skinned amphibious ships were terribly exposed in their anchorages. Fletcher reminded them that the Marines still had the protection of the four large cruisers (three American, one Australian) in Sealark Channel.

On the night of August 8-9, a Japanese naval force under Vice Admiral Gunishi Mikawa moved undetected down The Slot, caught the American screening force by surprise, and launched a violent attack.

Within half an hour, all four of the Allied cruisers sank in flames.

Admiral Turner, now truly defenseless, had no choice but to evacuate his amphibious ships hundreds of miles to the southeast, out of harm’s way, his transports still holding thousands of troops and tons of critical materiel. The Marines were ominously alone.

The situation demanded a major reorientation of landing force objectives. Instead of pushing aggressively through the jungle to expand the beachhead perimeter, Vandegrift would conserve his thin forces along the ridges and beaches surrounding the airfield.

Vandegrift’s engineers worked night and day to make the 2,000-foot grass strip suitable for flight operations.

In a simple flag-raising ceremony, the captured and dearly guarded airstrip became “Henderson Field,” in

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Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

Even before Henderson Field on Guadalcanal was secure, it was already becoming a thorn in the side of the Japanese. Several Marine aces made their names here, including Joe Foss. Joe Foss’ Wildcat, First Lieutenant Howard Hugh Laidman, USMCR, 1943, watercolor on paper.

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GRUMMAN F4F-4 WILDCAT The pugnacious Grumman F4F Wildcat was the primary fighter aircraft employed by the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Navy during the early stages of the Pacific War through the Guadalcanal campaign. In battle against the superlative Japanese Zero fighter, the Wildcat proved inferior in terms of outright performance, but it also had superior qualities. As the legendary Lt. Col. Joe Bauer put it to his Cactus Air Force pilots: “A Zero can go faster than you can, it climbs faster than you can, and it can outmaneuver you.

Aside from those things, you’ve got a better airplane.” Pilots found that the Wildcat could take tremendous punishment and bring them home, its four or six .50-caliber machine guns could quickly shred a Zero, and its heavy weight in comparison to a Zero meant it could dive away and maneuver at high speeds that the Zero could not follow.

Whatever its attributes and shortcomings, the Wildcat was what Marines had to fly when they were at the center of the Japanese whirlwind in the early days of the Pacific War, and they compiled a distinguished record. At Guadalcanal, five Marine pilots shot down 77 Japanese planes between them: John Smith, Marion Carl, Jim Swett, Bob Galer, and Harold W. “Coach” Bauer. Six Medals of Honor were awarded to Marine Wildcat pilots out of a total of 11 awarded to Marine aviators during the entire course of World War II. Those pilots were: Lt. Col. Harold W. Bauer (VMF-212); 1st Lt. Jefferson J. DeBlanc (VMF-211); Capt.

Henry T. Elrod (VMF-121); Capt. Joseph J. Foss (VMF-121); Maj. Robert E. Galer (VMF-224); Maj. John L. Smith (VMF-223; and 1st Lt. James S. Swett.

The museum’s Wildcat, an F4F-4, BuNo: 12114, was delivered to the Naval Air Station New York on Dec. 17, 1942. The aircraft flew with various Navy squadrons until it was stricken from Navy records on Nov. 30, 1944. On Sept. 16, 1968, the Marine Corps acquired the aircraft from The Seattle Community College through a trade/exchange program. Once the aircraft arrived at the Marine Corps Museum’s Branch Activity Quantico, it underwent a full restoration by the museum staff headed by Mr. Joseph Payton, head of Restoration. The aircraft remained on display in the Marine Corps Air-Ground Museum until its closure in November 2002. The F4F-4 has undergone some recent renovation by Blastoff Inc.

F4F-4 TECHNICAL DATA

A full service Value-Added Reseller, Systems Integrator and Total Solution Facilitator.

Developers of the Field Hospital Assist Management System.

Manufacturer: Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation, Bethpage, Long Island, New York Type: Carrier-based Fighter Accommodation: Pilot Power plant: One 1,200 hp Pratt & Whitney R-1830-86 Radial Engine Dimensions: Span, 38 ft.; Length, 28 ft. 11 in.; Height, 11 ft. 9 in.; Wing Area, 260 sq. ft.

Weights: Empty, 5,895 lbs.; Gross, 7,975 lbs.

Performance: Max Speed, 318 mph at 19,400 ft.; Cruising Speed, 190 mph; Initial Rate of Climb, 2,050 ft/min; Service Ceiling, 34,800 ft.; Range, 1,650 st. miles Armament: Six fixed forward-firing .50-caliber guns and two 100 lbs. bombs

honor of Major Lofton Henderson, USMC, killed while leading his dive-bombers against the Japanese carriers at Midway.

Less than two weeks after DDay, two squadrons of MAG-23 flew ashore to stay: Captain John Smith’s fighter squadron of Grumman F4F-4 Wildcats and Major Richard Mangrum’s scoutbombing squadron of Douglas SBD-3 Dauntless dive-bombers.

They would cover the island with Marine glory.

Marine pilots … learned that the sturdy Wildcat’s best tactic for coping with the more maneuverable Zeros was to climb high and wait – helped immeasurably by the early warnings of the Coast Watchers –

then dive on the approaching Japanese formations from above.

Some help started to trickle in for the tireless Marine aviators.

Army Air Force P-400 Bell Airacobras reinforced the Marine squadrons on August 22. Assorted Navy fighters came ashore, many “orphaned” when their carriers were sunk in the great sea battles taking place all around Guadalcanal. Soon Army medium bombers and more fighters arrived.

“Cactus,” the radio call sign for the island, led the aviators to dub their interservice ad hoc group the Cactus Air Force.

The Cactus Air Force did not take long establishing its composite lethality in the air. The number of

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In the two-day Battle of the Tenaru, the Americans had virtually annihilated his force, killing 800, capturing 15, scattering the stragglers into the jungle.

Vandegrift strengthened his thin lines around Henderson Field by transferring Edson’s Raiders, the parachutists, and the detached battalion of the 5th Marines back from Tulagi.

These reinforcements proved critical. General Hyakutake, baffled at the fate of the Ichiki Detachment, ordered another, larger, veteran outfit, the Kawaguchi Brigade, to recapture the aggravating Henderson Field.

On the night of August 31 they landed undetected at Taivu Point, the same location where Ichiki had come ashore so arrogantly less than two weeks before. There Kawaguchi assimilated the recently arrived (but now leaderless) second echelon of Ichiki’s regiment, and took off into the jungle.

He himself would lead the largest force, some 3,000 men, against the vulnerable southern perimeter of the Marines.

Japanese day raids dropped drastically. So did the willingness of Imperial Navy surface commanders to approach Guadalcanal in broad daylight.

Surface task forces would race down The Slot to seek battle with U.S. ships, or, finding none, they would lay off the island and pummel Henderson Field in the darkness.

But, like vampires, they had to exit the scene by dawn when Henderson Field sprang to life.

The Japanese at Rabaul soon recognized that Henderson Field represented an unholy thorn in their side. When nightly pounding by air and surface units failed to take it out, they concluded that an amphibious counterlanding would have to do the job.

Hyakutake selected the crack 28th Infantry, commanded by Colonel Kiyono Ichiki, to recapture Henderson Field. He accompanied his assault force of about 900 men equipped with light weapons and minimal rations. His follow-on echelon of 1,200 men would join him on turnaround shipping.

Landing twenty-five miles east of the airfield’s perimeter at night from a half-dozen destroyers, Ichiki

The brunt of the assault fell on Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Pollock’s battalion of the 1st Marines. Pollock’s men stood their ground, cutting loose with everything they had.

Vandegrift worried most about his weak southern perimeter and placed Red Mike Edson in charge of a composite force of Raiders and parachutists. Edson deployed his meager forces along a grassy ridge south of the airfield and waited for the night.

This lively spot was about to take a permanent place in Marine fighting history as “Bloody Ridge,” although some would prefer “Edson’s Ridge” after the battle machine who would lead the defense.

Shortly before 10 P.M. on September 12, Kawaguchi’s howling infantry surged forward in a massive charge. The Raiders and parachutists, their backs to Henderson Field and under terrific stress, opened fire at the thousands of oncoming Japanese. All knew that loss of the ridge would doom Guadalcanal.

Edson’s left flank took the first blow, wavered, then fought back, often at bayonet point. The battle dissolved into hundreds of individual duels and skirmishes.

Heeding Edson’s calm assurances, the Marines stayed low, teamed up, and drove the attackers back. Twice more Kawaguchi’s men came boiling up the slopes. Each fight seemed more desperate than before. But by 2:30 A.M. Edson advised Vandegrift that he thought he could hold.

Kawaguchi pulled back to regroup.

At 6:30 P.M. on the thirteenth, Kawaguchi’s main force swept forward in a renewed, more powerful assault.

This was a near-run thing.

Wave after wave of frenzied Japanese fell upon the Marine lines.

The Japanese lapped near, through, and sometimes over the Marines on the ridge like a tidal wave.

[Colonel Pedro del Valle’s 11th Marine 75mm pack howitzers] fired throughout the hellish night, delivering such devastating fire that the surviving Japanese marveled at the Marines’ “automatic artillery.”

quickly led his advance force into the jungle. He saw no need to wait for his second echelon. His hand-picked veterans would make short work of the green Americans.

The truncated 1st Marine Division was about to face its first major trial by fire.

The division stood on full alert.

At 1:30 A.M. the silence turned to sheer bedlam as Ichiki’s veterans came screaming out of the jungle with fixed bayonets.

The brunt of the assault fell on Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Pollock’s battalion of the 1st Marines. Pollock’s men stood their ground, cutting loose with everything they had.

Very few of the first wave of attackers survived this charge.

Colonel Ichiki screamed at his troops, directed a barrage by his 70mm howitzers and 50mm “knee mortars” (technically: grenade throwers) against the Marine lines, then ordered out his next assault force. These soldiers fared worse than the first wave. The Marine machine guns maintained their disciplined fire, now reinforced by their M3A1 37mm antitank guns, versatile little weapons that proved ideal for Pacific combat. This night the gunners used canister rounds against Ichiki’s clustered attackers, blowing great holes in their ranks.

At daylight, Colonel [Clifton] Cates sent another battalion across the Ilu upstream to catch the Japanese in the flank. And above them came a cloud of Marine Wildcats, roaring over the treetops and raking Ichiki’s positions with a terrible fire.

Later in the afternoon Vandegrift sent five Stuart light tanks across the river. The remnants of Ichiki’s force knocked out two of the attacking vehicles, but on their heels came hundreds of yelling Marines. Colonel Ichiki could only shake his head at this inexplicable disaster, burn his regimental colors, and shoot himself in disgrace.

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The Sendai troops were seasoned combat veterans, and the battles that raged in late October were as bloody and desperate as those of the preceding assaults.

The climax of the ground battles for Guadalcanal occurred during October 24-26. This was jungle nightfighting at its most brutal.

Major General Masao Maruyama chose to lead the bulk of his Sendai Division, some 7,000 strong, against the same distinctive landmark that had broken the back of the Kawaguchi Brigade in September – Edson’s Ridge. Now the 7th Marines guarded the sector – specifically the battalions of [Lewis “Chesty”] Puller and [Herman “Hard Head”] Hanneken – plus the new but gutsy 164th Infantry.

The Sendai troops sprang out of the jungle in the pitch black of night during a driving rainstorm. Puller’s men swept away the first attack with steady marksmanship, but the battalion commander could tell by the discipline and numbers of his attackers that he was in over his head.

Puller did not hesitate to call in the National Guardsmen of the 164th Infantry, whose rifle squads integrated quickly with their Marine counterparts along the fire-swept crest of the ridge.

Soldiers and Marines fought with equal tenacity, the Marines more than a bit envious of the GI’s new M-1 Garands – this was a night when a clip of eight rounds fired semiautomatically proved far superior to the fiveround, bolt-action Springfields of the Marines.

Maruyama continued these sudden, large-scale assaults against the strategic ridge for two bloody nights.

In several threatened sectors the thin margin of victory came only through superhuman exertions of rocksteady Marine NCOs, who simply refused to retreat in spite of all the furies of hell.

Bravest of all the brave were two machine gun section chiefs who distinguished themselves on successive nights.

Sergeant “Manila John” Basilone of the 1st Battalion 7th Marines, proved to be the unshakable anchor of Puller’s sector the first night. Then it became the turn of Platoon Sergeant Mitchell Paige of Hanneken’s battalion.

Virtually the last man alive at his post, Paige kept firing, then climaxed the night by cradling the red-hot weapon in his bare arms to lead a charge down the slope to clear the last toehold of Sendai troops.

General Maruyama had to retreat back down his jungle trail, now missing half of his assault force, nearly 3,000 slain.

The Marines and soldiers lost but a tenth that number.

The Japanese were now on the ropes, but so was the 1st Marine Division. On December 9, after four months of constant combat, the “Old Breed” stood down.

Early in February 1943, after a dogged pursuit, Army and Marine patrols reached the western end of the island to find that General Hyakutake and 11,000 of his soldiers had been spirited away by the resourceful “Tokyo Express.”

The American victory at Guadalcanal, dangerously risked and dearly bought, was more of a turning point in the Pacific War than even Midway.

At Midway, the Japanese could blame the fates for their carriers being caught while rearming the air groups.

But at Guadalcanal, in a half-year campaign, the best of the Empire’s veteran soldiers, sailors, and aviators had been fought to a standstill and eventually overwhelmed by the inexperienced American forces.

Kawaguchi had lost well over half his main force in the desperate fighting, but Bloody Ridge remained in Marine hands. Two uncoordinated Japanese supporting attacks became sideshows – but so thinly were the Marine lines stretched that both nearly broke through in their sectors.

As ferocious as were the irreplaceable combat losses, the troops were suffering just as badly from the effects of malaria and malnutrition and exhaustion. They needed reinforcements as badly as any Marines ever had.

Then, at last, Kelly Turner boldly managed to run in a small convoy with the 7th Marines, finally relieved from Samoan defense duties.

Vandegrift would need all the fighters he could get.

Intelligence sources advised that General Hyakutake had finally realized the nature of the American Marines defending Guadalcanal and was now committing his major combat force, the elite Sendai Division.

The advent of October brought the full weight of the Imperial Navy as well.

The battleships Kongo and Haruna steamed into Ironbottom Sound the night of October 13, anchored leisurely, and for the next eighty minutes delivered hundreds of fourteen-inch shells against the field, its workhorse planes, and the troops in their bunkers and foxholes.

Yet somehow, Marines and soldiers endured, survived, and rose up with the dawn to shake it off and strike back.

General Roy Geiger had only a handful of operational aircraft left, but these he dispatched with a vengeance to catch and punish the Japanese ships still delivering the Sendai Division up the coast.

As the battles continued, Marine fighter pilots of the Cactus Air Force continued to earn their spurs the hard way, wrestling the utmost performance from their tubby Wildcats, respecting but not fearing the vaunted Zeros.

Now the Sendai Division landed with 150mm guns.

These had the range to punish the Marine and Army perimeter around the clock. More Japanese cruisers and destroyers steamed in at night to pound the field. The U.S. Navy was still fighting for its life. Ironbottom Sound claimed more victims each week.

Admiral Chester Nimitz stepped in quickly. He flew to Noumea, sacked Admiral [Robert L.] Ghormley from command of the South Pacific Area, and replaced him with the aggressive [Admiral William] “Bull” Halsey.

Marines on “the Canal” whooped for joy at the news.

The great sea battles of October and November 1942 were bloody and costly and not altogether victorious for the Americans, but Halsey kept the pressure on his Imperial Navy counterparts.

The fighting ashore grew in intensity as the whirlwinds of sea and air battles swept nearby. The Sendai Division proved an abler opponent than the Ichiki and Kawaguchi forces. General Hyakutake, observing the situation firsthand, rued his earlier piecemeal attacks. Now Halsey’s ships and Geiger’s planes made the delivery of reinforcements to Guadalcanal extremely hazardous.

Thousands of Imperial Army troops drowned; many more straggled ashore minus their heavy weapons or rations. “Starvation Island” now applied more to the attackers than the “Raggedy-Ass Marines.”

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Among the most courageous of the many brave Marines on Guadalcanal was Sgt. John Basilone, who with his machine gun section anchored a vital part of the line. Medal of Honor, Sgt. John Basilone, United States Marine Corps, Cecil Calvert Beall, 1944, mixed media on illustration board. Gift of Miss Mary Basilone, 1983.

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Strangling Rabaul (1943) Easily a hundred thousand Japanese

Bougainville. In the wild melee that ensued, Walsh shot down four enemy fighters before being forced to crash at sea. Walsh survived, received the Medal of Honor, and returned to the air campaign, eventually claiming twentyone authenticated kills.

Lieutenant Robert Hanson became the greatest Corsair ace of the war, achieving twenty-five kills from his F4U in the South Pacific. He shot down twenty Japanese planes in an incredibly brief six days. Hanson’s luck ran out at the end. On the day before his twenty-fourth birthday, and just days before he was due to be rotated back to the States, Hanson lost a duel with antiaircraft batteries at Cape St. George on New Ireland. His Medal of Honor was a posthumous award.

Flamboyant and indomitable Major Gregory “Pappy” Boyington was the most widely known Corsair pilot to receive the Medal of Honor. “Pappy” accumulated his Corps-best twenty-eight kills in several different aircraft (he shot down his first six Japanese planes while a volunteer

occupied Rabaul in 1943.

MacArthur wanted to conquer Rabaul directly; Halsey had huge doubts. The Joint Chiefs of Staff decided for them: Neutralize and eventually bypass Rabaul in 1943 by a series of low-budget half-steps – working sequentially “up the ladder” of the Solomons and Bismarcks. Doing so would entail a very hazardous year’s work for a still underequipped, understrength Marine amphibious force: a full-scale air war and three major assault landings.

Rabaul lay 560 air miles northwest of Guadalcanal.

Since the island-studded seas posed a hazard to Halsey’s two carriers, the air war against Rabaul would be waged predominantly by land-based aviation, which meant a significant role for the Marines. Thirty-three squadrons of Marine tactical aircraft would fight in the skies over Rabaul and its protective network. Their principal mission: defeat of the formidable Imperial Naval Air Force.

Marine night fighters made their debut in the South Pacific in 1943, early pioneers of a tactic which would grow in value as technology improved.

Marine Brigadier General Francis “Pat” Mulcahy, one of the few Leatherneck aviators to shoot down a German fighter in World War I, commanded the 2d Marine Aircraft Wing. Mulcahy’s immediate concern became the new Japanese airfield built at Munda Point on New Georgia. Munda would have to be seized by a landing force.

Concurrently, the savage air war raged unabated.

Marine pilots engaged in desperate air-to-air battles each day, making the most of the limited attributes of their F4F Wildcats with “hit and run” tactics against the superbly maneuverable Zeros. Then, on February 12, 1943, the first squadron of USMC F4U Corsair fighters arrived in the theater. The tables were about to be turned in the air war.

In the right hands, the Corsair became such an efficient flying and killing machine that a new generation of Marine fighter pilots emerged as legendary aces in the skies surrounding Rabaul. Lieutenant Kenneth Walsh became the first Corsair ace on May 13, 1943, shooting down his fourth, fifth, and sixth Zeros in a hectic morning. Walsh had earned his pilot’s wings in 1937 as a Marine private and proved absolutely fearless in aerial combat.

On August 30 he stormed single-handedly into a formation of fifty Zeros attacking USAAF B-24 bombers over

P-40 pilot for the “prewar” Flying Tigers in China), but he attained his greatest renown as skipper of VMF-214, an F4U squadron nicknamed “The Black Sheep.”

While colorful Corsair pilots like Walsh, Hanson, and Boyington captured the public’s admiration, Marine divebomber and torpedo bomber pilots played equally critical roles in the sustained air battle for Rabaul.

Marine night fighters made their debut in the South Pacific in 1943, early pioneers of a tactic which would grow in value as technology improved.

The few night kills came at the hands of extremely brave pilots at outrageously short ranges.

Close air support in the jungles of the South Pacific was an imprecise art.

To do the job right – and avoid killing friendly ground troops – required reliable communications between an experienced aviation ground party, hunkered at the side of the infantry commander. It was a hell of an investment, taking seasoned pilots out of their beloved cockpits and deploying them with “the grunts,” but the value of having a seasoned dive-bomber pilot on the ground, assessing the target and talking his former cohorts into the attack, could not be beat. The 3d Marine Division at Bougainville

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experimented with ground-based air liaison teams with considerable success, an encouraging start.

The joint amphibious campaign to seize New Georgia and wipe out the nettlesome Japanese airfield at Munda Point bogged down because of inexperience, inadequate resources, and deadly enemy resistance. No Marine divisions were available for Operation Toenails.

Thirty thousand Army troops would provide the bulk of the landing forces, beefed up by the Marines’ 9th Defense Battalion. Marine Raiders and parachutists would execute special operations missions behind Japanese lines.

Two companies of Marine Raiders jump-started the New Georgia operation on June 21, 1943, landing at Segi Point, rescuing an endangered Coast Watcher, then crossing the island in four brutal days to surprise and destroy the Japanese coast defense guns at Viru Harbor.

Admiral Kelly Turner landed the Army’s 43d Division and the 9th Defense Battalion on Rendova Island on June 30, scattering the handful of Japanese defenders.

Then came Japanese air raids from Rabaul. The first evening a Japanese pilot hit Turner’s flagship, the McCawley, with a well-aimed torpedo.

On D+2 (the second full day after the D-Day landing) a flight of eighteen Mitsubishi “Betty” bombers and Zero escorts surprised the amphibious force and

bunker-busting weapons. The Japanese stonewalled the Raiders’ advance less than 300 yards from Bairoko.

Munda Field eventually fell to three Army divisions and the 9th Defense Battalion after five weeks of steady fighting. Admiral Halsey helped restore morale by his commonsense decision to bypass heavily defended Kolombangara and strike Vella Lavella. There an Army regimental combat team and the Marine 4th Defense Battalion landed on August 15. The Marines withstood a dizzying succession of 121 Japanese air raids, knocking forty-two enemy planes out of the sky.

The Allies were grinding inexorably north and west.

New Georgia was under new management. The 9th Defense Battalion’s big guns now defended Munda Point airfield, allowing Pappy Boyington’s Black Sheep Corsairs to roar aloft in fighter sweeps against Rabaul, now 440 miles away.

Mountainous, wildly jungled Bougainville, northernmost island of the Solomons, was the next objective. The presence of five Japanese airfields on the island underscored the enemy’s strategic appreciation for Bougainville. Ashore, Lieutenant General Haruyoshi Hyakutake, the wholesale loser of Guadalcanal, commanded 35,000 troops.

At best Halsey hoped to use his Marines to catch Hyakutake by surprise, seize a foothold along the

Mountainous, wildly jungled Bougainville, northernmost island of the Solomons, was the next objective. devastated the congested beachhead, bombing and strafing at will. Marine 90mm gunners wheeled into action, eventually driving the raiders away, but the beach resembled a charnel house.

The star-crossed campaign struggled on. Army troops landed on northwestern New Georgia on July 2-3. Across the island, at Rice Anchorage on the Kula Gulf coast, Marine Colonel Harry Liversedge led a composite regiment of Raiders and Army infantry ashore.

Fighting through the jungle in a driving rainstorm, Liversedge’s force crossed the Giza Giza River on improvised rafts of logs and ponchos, then drove the Japanese from the villages of Maranuso and Enogai on the east side of the Dragon’s Peninsula. Liversedge led the rest of his men against the port of Bairoko.

Opposing Liversedge in the thickly jungled Dragon’s Peninsula was Rear Admiral Minoru Ota, commanding one of the largest concentrations of rikusentai to fight the Americans in the war. For two weeks the Kure 6th Special Naval Landing Force slugged it out toe-to-toe with the Raiders and soldiers. Both sides suffered heavy casualties in vicious, point-blank jungle fighting.

The rikusentai defending Bairoko had time to construct sturdy pillboxes of coconut logs and coral. The Raiders, light infantry in the truest sense, lacked artillery or

southern coast, then defend the enclave desperately while the Seabees carved a pair of landing fields out of the jungle.

Halsey assigned the Bougainville mission to the I Marine Amphibious Corps, commanded by General Vandegrift, the victor of Guadalcanal. Vandegrift would use Major General Allen Turnage’s highly trained 3d Marine Division to spearhead the assault landing, followed by the Army’s 37th Division and fully supported by fifty-two squadrons of Allied land-based aircraft (including fourteen USMC squadrons).

But Vandegrift knew his landing would incur violent and immediate Japanese counterattacks from every point on the compass. Achieving even the modest mission of landing, building airfields, and holding on for dear life would require of Vandegrift uncommon luck, guile, and fortitude. Vandegrift opted to lead with guile.

Here was the ideal mission for Lieutenant Colonel “Brute” Krulak’s 2d Parachute Battalion. Vandegrift ordered Krulak to execute a diversionary landing on nearby Choiseul Island and make the Japanese think he had a division on the rampage. The combative Krulak executed this to perfection.

The parachutists stormed ashore on Choiseul at midnight on October 28. Before the astonished Japanese could react, Krulak’s well-trained warriors raided enemy

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Deemed unsuitable for carrier use, and with a reputation inspiring nicknames like “the ensign eliminator,” the Chance Vought F4U Corsair was passed off to the Marine Corps.

For the Marines, the Corsair was a godsend and welcomed with open arms when it first arrived at Henderson Field with VMF-124. Corsairs at Henderson Field, 1st Lt. Howard Hugh Laidman, USMCR, 1943, watercolor on paper. installations along a twenty-five-mile sector. The 650 Marines raised holy hell throughout Choiseul for nine days.

General Hyakutake took the bait, dispatching reinforcements from Bougainville even after the main landing there.

Against such numbers, the final firefights became desperate. Krulak, wounded himself, sought aid in evacuating his casualties. Two Navy PT boats, led by Lieutenant John

Fitzgerald Kennedy, USNR, lent a hand. One of Krulak’s corporals died on Kennedy’s bunk. The raiding force withdrew intact, mission accomplished.

Krulak’s diversion seemed to rattle Hyakutake. When the real American landing occurred at Bougainville, he withheld his counterattack orders a fatal week, worrying that these U.S. Marines were just another diversion.

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F4U-4 AND FG-1D CORSAIR The Marine Corps had long been accustomed to receiving cast-off equipment from the Navy, but the Corsair was perhaps the best hand-me-down the Corps ever received. Navy carrier acceptability tests had found that the Corsair bounced too much on its landing gear, provided poor pilot view in the landing pattern, and exhibited dangerous low-speed handling characteristics. The Navy shifted its attention to the F6F Hellcat, a more tractable aircraft for carrier duty, and passed off the Corsair, now in full production, to the Marines.

When the first F4U Corsairs arrived at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal with VMF-124, Marine pilots finally had an aircraft that was superior to the Japanese Zero. The engineer’s dictum that “form follows function” was embodied in the Corsair. The aircraft’s distinctive inverted gull wings, designed to allow for shorter, stronger landing gear necessary for carrier landings while also providing clearance for a 14-foot diameter propeller, and its long nose, providing space for a vital fuel tank forward of the cockpit, also made it one of the more beautiful machines in the air.

Faster than the Zero in level flight, without peer in a dive, and possessed with range, maneuverability, and devastating firepower, the Corsair quickly proved to be a war-winner. VMF-124 acquired a record of 68 kills with only four losses. Among the Marine aces who flew Corsairs were Lt. Kenneth Walsh, the first Corsair ace in 1943, who received the Medal of Honor and finished the war with 21 kills; Lt. Robert Hanson, the greatest Corsair ace of the war, who shot down a total of 25 Japanese planes, including 20 in six weeks, before being killed and awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously; and Maj. Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, with a total of 28 kills, who received his Medal of Honor after being shot down and enduring a prisoner of war camp.

Perhaps more importantly, the Corsair was soon adapted to a ground attack role, able to carry a heavy load of bombs or 5-inch rockets. The Japanese called it “Whistling Death,” and Corsairs supported Marines on the ground through World War II and Korea, some examples serving in the Reserves into the 1960s.

The museum’s two Corsairs are an FG-1D, the Goodyear-produced equivalent of an F4U-1, and an F4U-4, a later development.

Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

F4U-1A/FG-1 TECHNICAL DATA Manufacturer: Chance Vought Corporation; Goodyear; Brewster Type: Fighter-Bomber Accommodation: Pilot Power plant: One 2,000-hp Pratt & Whitney R-2800-8 radial piston engine Dimensions: Span, 41 ft; Length, 33 ft 4 in; Height, 16 ft 1 in; Wing Area, 314 sq ft Weights: Empty, 8,982 lbs; Gross, 14,000 lbs Performance: Max Speed, 417 mph; Rate of Climb, 3,120 feet per minute; Service Ceiling, 36,900 ft; Range, 1,015 miles Armament: Six wing-mounted .50-caliber machine guns Less than 300 Japanese troops opposed the November 1 landing at Cape Torokina – Halsey had indeed “hit ‘em where they ain’t” – but the defenders and the hydrography combined to make the landing difficult.

As the landing force struggled to clear the near-shore jungle of Japanese defenders, the skies overhead erupted with screaming waves of Marine dive-bombers, taking advantage of the rare opportunity for both Leatherneck air and infantry to operate together. This one-two punch combination helped the assault units advance the beachhead line well into the swampy terrain behind the high-water mark, clearing the way for supporting waves.

While General Hyakutake withheld his reserves to determine whether the Torokina landing was another American feint, the Japanese command at Rabaul mounted a furious and immediate series of counterattacks. Four waves of bombers and fighters attacked the vulnerable beachhead and the exposed amphibious task force on November 1 alone, but Halsey had plenty of Allied fighter squadrons aloft to give battle.

Twenty-six of the raiders went down in flames, the others scattered.

With the night a Japanese surface force swept south from Rabaul seeking to achieve another Savo Island victory against the American invasion fleet. This time the U.S. Navy stood

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ready. The ensuing Battle of Empress Augusta Bay resulted in a stinging defeat for the Imperial Navy.

Nearly 500 Japanese troops fought their way through the surf in the rear of the force beachhead line, took up firing positions along the Koromokina River, and raised hell with Turnage’s support echelons. Killing them one by one took the Marines several anxious days.

Japanese air raids materialized each day and night.

Hyakutake finally released his main combatant units, the 2d Infantry Division and a very good force of rikusentai, the Kure 7th, and these troops engaged the Leathernecks and GIs in a series of sharp brawls under hellacious conditions of terrain and foul weather. In six grueling days the 3d Marines fought as many skirmishes, collectively called the Battle of Piva Forks, losing a hundred men but killing a thousand Japanese.

The battle for the American beachhead at Cape Torokina continued unabated into December. The 21st Marines took the lead, fighting savagely to control the high ground known as “Hellzapoppin Ridge.”

Marine dive-bomber squadrons lent a hand.

Given this support, the 21st Marines took and held the high ground.

On the twenty-eighth, General Turnage turned over his positions ashore to the Americal Division; overall command of the campaign ashore passed from General Geiger’s IMAC to the Army’s XIV Corps. The Marines left steaming Bougainville with pleasure.

Marine casualties in the bruising campaign totaled 423 killed and 1,418 wounded. The operation completed the conquest of the Solomons, neutralized the five Japanese airfields on the island, and placed Rabaul within range of every tactical Allied aircraft in the South Pacific.

It became time for the 1st Marine Division, the Old Breed, to reenter the fray. The Marines’ objective: the Japanese airfield at Cape Gloucester. Their principal opponent: Major General Iwao Matsuda, commanding the 65th Brigade, Imperial Japanese Army.

The amphibious landing on Cape Gloucester on December 26, 1943, was nearly flawless.

The surprise thrust caught the Japanese command in Rabaul off guard.

The Old Breed readjusted to close combat quickly.

Two battalions cleared the airstrips of the disorganized defenders on the fourth day.

The Japanese pulled back sullenly toward Aogiri Ridge, an elevation not even shown on Marine maps. The fighting became savage and point-blank as the jungle grew thicker on higher ground. Chesty Puller fought magnificently in this advance, at one point taking command of two infantry battalions, and garnering his fourth Navy Cross. But the breakthrough at Aogiri Ridge would result from the inspired leadership of a new legendary warrior.

the 3d Battalion, 5th Marines, which had lost two commanding officers in the previous day’s fighting. The battalion had stumbled upon Aogiri Ridge, the heavily defended terrain feature that dominated the sector, and had received the brunt of the fire. The troops had neither tanks nor artillery available, only a single 37mm gun. This weapon had been promising earlier, but now half the crew lay dead. Walt asked for volunteers to push the weapon up the steep ridge. No one moved. Walt’s blue eyes flashed angrily, then he dashed for the gun, putting his shoulder to the muddy wheel, legs churning. The surviving crew members joined. They humped the weapon upward a dozen yards, fired a canister round, reloaded, pushed upward again. Machine gun fire rattled against the gun shields, striking down more crewmen. Walt kept pushing.

His riflemen sprang to life; some opened a hot fire and others scuttled uphill to put their own shoulders next to Walt’s. In this way, pushing upward, firing canister, advancing again, Walt got them to the top of the ridge.

Walt hustled to get every available man up on the crest, dug-in and tied in. He rushed an artillery forward observer team up the ridge, just in time. The Japanese launched five major attacks throughout the night, each masked by the pouring rain. The fighting for the crest was as desperate and savage as any Marines ever experienced in the war.

As they had done so well at Edson’s Ridge the previous year, the 105mm gunners of the 11th Marines plastered the reverse slope of Aogiri Ridge all night long. With the dawn the high ground became “Walt’s Ridge.”

One last obstacle remained, the Japanese fortified positions on Hill 660. This became the objective of Lieutenant Colonel Henry Buse’s battalion of the 7th Marines. Buse’s first assault failed, but his enterprising riflemen slid to the flank, assaulted the hill’s steepest face, pulling themselves up hand-over-hand among the roots, and drove the surprised defenders down the slope – squarely into the killing zone of Captain Joseph Buckley’s concealed tanks and half-tracks.

This defeat broke the back of General Matsuda’s brigade. Colonel Oliver Smith’s 5th Marines leapfrogged down the coast, conducting a fifty-seven-mile shore-toshore landing on the Willaumez Peninsula. The 5th Marines seized yet another key airfield at the cost of 130 casualties.

In April 1944, General MacArthur finally released the 1st Marine Division from “The Green Inferno.” By then, New Britain had cost the Old Breed 1,400 casualties.

The Allied strategy of encircling, pounding, and then bypassing Rabaul (and Kavieng, its outlying base on New Ireland) saved many lives and made the most of the modest amphibious assault resources available in the South Pacific. The aviators had delivered the most telling blows – and sustained some of the most grievous losses. One hundred Marine airmen died over Rabaul itself, and hundreds more over the long watery stretches of the Solomons and Bismarcks. The exchange rate was still favorable: Marine pilots shot down 1,520 Japanese planes in the long campaign.

The Battle of Walt’s Ridge General [Lemuel] Shepherd sent Lieutenant Colonel “Lew” Walt to the front on January 8 to take command of

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The profound shock of the bloody amphibious assault at Tarawa provided a sobering preview of what was to come in the Pacific war, as well as the lessons that would be learned and heeded by the Marine Corps and Navy leading to ultimate victory. Some measure of the horror is depicted in Tarawa, 20 Nov 1943, by Col. Charles H. Waterhouse, USMCR (Ret.), 1975, acrylic on canvas.

Across the Reef at Tarawa Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

For its duration, the short, savage Battle of

Smith, in turn, picked Colonel Merritt “Red Mike” Edson, hero of Tulagi and Guadalcanal, for his chief of staff and – acting on a shrewdly perceptive hunch – kept the unknown, unproved Lieutenant Colonel David Shoup as his amphibious planner. Later, just before the battle, Smith would follow another hunch and give Shoup command of the assault regiment (promoting him to colonel in the process), wisely making his talented subordinate both the architect and executioner of the forcible seizure of Tarawa.

Sobered by Betio’s [one of Tarawa atoll’s five main islands] elaborate fortifications, Julian Smith, Edson, and Shoup requested a preliminary seizure of an offshore island as an artillery fire support base, three days of combined naval, air, and artillery pounding, a diversionary landing, and full use of the 2d Marine Division’s three regimental combat teams. Nimitz and Spruance had to reject all of this. Speed of execution would prevail.

Tarawa was the bloodiest amphibious assault of the war.

When it shuddered to a halt, seventy-six hours after the initial landing, nearly 6,000 men lay dead in an area smaller than the space occupied by the Pentagon and its parking lots. Eleven hundred were United States Marines.

Few amphibious battles in the Pacific would levy such terrific demands on Marine leadership. Every man would be tested in this fiery crucible, but none more so than those at the front of the shock troops.

Commandant Thomas Holcomb had selected Major General Julian Smith to command the 2d Marine Division. Some considered Smith too soft-spoken and inexperienced to lead a 20,000-man division into brutal combat. But Holcomb, who had seen war at its worst in France, knew Smith to be fearless under fire and a superb trainer of men.

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crew of tinkerers and scroungers to convert the best seventy-five of his beat-up Guadalcanal vehicles for tactical use. They applied lightweight, bolt-on armor to the cabs, festooned the topsides with machine guns, and made field-fixes to the exhaust and bilge pump systems to better survive the extended ship-to-shore movement.

But seventy-five old LVTs were too few to do the job.

That’s when Julian Smith energized Howlin’ Mad Smith to “howl” at “Terrible” Turner to ensure delivery of at least fifty of the new LVT-2 Water Buffaloes. “No LVTs, no landings,” Smith barked.

Major Drewes dispatched a provisional company of “amtrackers” (LVT crewmen) to Samoa. There, very late in the preliminary stage, they received delivery of the new vehicles, quickly mastered them, and just as quickly took off in three LSTs (tank landing ships) to join the Tarawa task force off Betio on the early morning of D-Day, in the very nick of time.

The Navy promised to “obliterate” Betio in its allotted three hours of preliminary bombardment.

The red dawn on D-Day brought swift, deadly reality.

The command ship’s principal radio net became the first casualty. Each time the battleship Maryland fired her main guns, the concussion knocked more landing force radio nets out of commission. Julian Smith would suffer from marginal to nonexistent communications with Shoup, his tactical commander ashore, for the next thirty critical hours.

The vaunted prelanding bombardment never came close to “obliterating” Betio. Nor were the carrier pilots effective in their two strafing and bombing missions. One arrived late, the other early; neither did any real damage.

The eagerly expected mission of USAAF medium bombers with 2,000-pound “daisy-cutter” bombs failed to materialize. It turned out they never got the request submitted by the Marines weeks in advance. This error would cost scores of lives.

[Japanese commander Admiral] Shibasaki may have been poorly served by his coast defense guns, but his dual-purpose (antiair, antiboat) gun mounts had a field day shooting horizontally at point-blank ranges against the U.S. landing craft.

These deadly guns, ranging from 75mm to 127mm, sat in open emplacements, fully vulnerable to air-burst munitions that had not been used. Now the Marines would have to overrun each position by direct assault with rifles.

Incredibly, despite the interminable ship-to-shore movement and the hot reception provided by Shibasaki’s gunners, the first three assault waves of Marines in their LVTs made it ashore in wholesale numbers. Japanese gunners, perhaps flustered by the LVTs, knocked out only eight of the eighty-seven assault vehicles. David Shoup’s great gamble had paid off in spades. In ten minutes he had 1,500 Marines hugging the seawall along Betio’s north shore.

Then the wheels came off the assault. The Marines hoped by mid-morning to have enough water over the reef for their Higgins boats to cross with ease. But something was terribly wrong. The fourth and fifth waves, mounted in Higgins boats, crashed to a halt all along the

LANDING VEHICLE, TRACKED (LVT) During the 1920s, as visionaries in the Marine Corps were redefining the Marine Corps’ role into an amphibious force assaulting from the sea, they were searching for the pieces of vital equipment they would need to make their vision possible.

One such piece was discovered in south Florida, invented by Donald Roebling to work in the Everglades rescuing hurricane victims and downed aviators. Roebling’s “Swamp Gator” was a tracked vehicle that could negotiate heavy surf, climb reefs, and move over marginal terrain while carrying a heavy payload. The Marines and Roebling made many improvements to what was officially named an LVT (Landing Vehicle, Tracked) but was more popularly known as an Alligator.

First used in the Pacific as a logistics vehicle, the LVT was called into service as an assault vehicle at Tarawa. With hastily-added armor and armament, the LVTs performed magnificently, though sustaining heavy casualties. Without them, every single Marine attacking Tarawa would have had to wade in unprotected under murderous fire.

As the war went on, LVTs were modified through several versions, using different engines, adding a stern ramp, and even turrets housing cannon or howitzers to provide immediate direct-fire support to the landing waves.

The Alligator’s ancestors live on today in the AAAV-7 and the future Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle.

The museum’s two LVTs are an LVT-1, the earliest model, seen in the Tarawa tableau in Leatherneck Gallery, and an LVT-3, first employed during the landings on Okinawa.

LVT-3 TECHNICAL DATA Combat Weight: 38,600 lbs Dimensions: Length: 313 in Weight: 38,600 lbs Height: 10 feet Primary Armament: .50 caliber M2 Browning machine gun Secondary Armament: Two .30 caliber M1919A4 Browning machine gun Crew: 3 Fuel Capacity: 191 gal Mileage: 150 miles on road; 75 miles in water Speed: 17 mph on roads; 6 mph in water Manufacturer: Borg-Warner Co.; Ingersoll and Graham Production Period: 1944 to 1949

The strength of the Japanese garrison on Betio came as no surprise to Julian Smith, Red Mike Edson, or David Shoup. The landing force knew a month in advance the location and field of fire of 95 percent of Betio’s 500 pillboxes and gun emplacements.

The concept of converting the thin-skinned, unarmored, logistical amphibian tractors (LVTs) into reefcrossing, assault landing craft to carry storm troops ashore over a fringing reef originated with Lieutenant Colonel Brute Krulak in an earlier “crash test” elsewhere in the South Pacific, but the 2d Marine Division troops at Tarawa were the pioneers who gambled with the idea when all the stakes were on the line.

Shoup favored using LVTs to assault Betio from the git-go. Major Henry Drewes, commanding the 2d Amphibian Tractor Battalion, organized an enterprising

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Marines take cover behind the coconut palm sea wall on Red Beach 3, Tarawa. partially exposed reef. The troops were still 500 to 600 yards from the beach, and the water was already dotted with crisscrossing machine gun bullets, the air rent by terrifying near-misses from the antiaircraft guns.

Shoup’s “Plan B” called for the empty LVTs to return to the reef, transfer troops from the boats, and recycle to the beach. This worked only momentarily. Then the big, untouched, dual-purpose guns began to spout their deadly fire against the thin-skinned LVTs, blowing them up, setting them ablaze.

The Marines in the follow-on waves could only curse, scramble out of their grounded boats, climb across the razorsharp coral, and begin the agonizingly slow wade ashore.

Here was the first day of Belleau Wood reincarnated. The blue-green waters of the lagoon turned a milky crimson.

Japanese fire was particularly vicious on the right flank, where Red Beach One included a dangerous concave reentrant, soon called “The Pocket.” Here a battery of four Japanese 75mm dual-purpose guns butchered the approaching landing craft.

So ghastly was the slaughter that Major John Schoettel honestly believed he had witnessed the loss of his entire 3d Battalion, 2d Marines. When Shoup radioed him to slide left, land near the pier, then work his way back west, Schoettel replied bitterly, “We have nothing left to land.”

Unknown to Schoettel, one of his company commanders, Major Michael “Mike” Ryan, had survived the bloodbath with at least half of his force intact by staying low and shifting westward, beyond the killing zone.

Dozens of soaked stragglers, the human debris of four different landing teams, many weaponless, gravitated to Ryan.

These would become “Ryan’s Orphans”; collectively they would win this dreadful battle.

Colonel Shoup’s personal ship-to-shore odyssey took four hours, during which he lost two thirds of his regimental staff and suffered minor wounds and a badly wrenched knee. In spite of the absolute hell that was Betio – and in spite of the total collapse of his intricate assault plan – Shoup kept his head and his blazing will to win.

With a handful of aides he established a command post on the lee side of a still-occupied Japanese bunker near the base of the pier. He would not budge from this spot – nor even sit down – for the duration. The Rock of Tarawa was ashore and in command.

Four hours after his assault waves stormed ashore on Betio Island, Julian Smith realized his division was in the fight of its life. The “heaviest preliminary bombardment of the war to date” had failed to diminish the firepower and fighting spirit of the Japanese rikusentai who infested the little spit of an island like a hive of deadly bees.

And Smith sensed that something was freakishly wrong with the tide. Each of Smith’s reinforcing infantry units was hung up along the exposed reef in their boats – forced to wade ashore against that murderous machine gun fire. He had just committed his last reserves.

Smith sent a terse message to his superior officer, Major General Howlin’ Mad Smith, commanding V Amphibious Corps, ninety-five miles away at Makin: “Request release of Combat Team 6. Issue in doubt.”

Julian Smith did not exaggerate. The Battle of Tarawa would truly hang in the balance for its first thirty hours.

There were no LVTs left by the time Shoup ordered Major Robert Ruud’s 3d Battalion, 8th Marines, to land

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on the left flank. Hundreds were shot down while wading in, despite [Major Hendry] Crowe’s frantic efforts to provide covering fire. The majority would get ashore, somehow, but the process took a day and a night and cost Ruud his unit integrity and most heavy weapons.

That goddamned tide.

Shoup was never more vulnerable than that first night at Betio.

Five thousand of his Marines had crossed the Line of Departure.

At least 1,500 lay dead or wounded.

Many of the others were badly disorganized. Very few crew-served weapons had survived the disorderly wade from the reef.

Each Marine unit expected a major counterattack during the darkness. A gut-wrenching anxiety hovered over the riflemen in their shallow holes.

Where the Americans long believed that their D-Day bombardment had left Shibasaki too disorganized to attack, the impassioned admiral was in fact dead before dark.

Unaware of Shibasaki’s death, Shoup and Julian Smith were extremely glad to greet sunrise of the second day. Yet the issue remained in doubt.

The Marines could still not get an organized unit ashore.

The 1st Battalion, 8th Marines, tired and seasick from spending the night in their Higgins boats, tried to land on line in the center (another communications failure: Shoup wanted them to come ashore in column along the pier as [Artillery Commander Lt. Col. Presley] Rixey had done). They hit the reef hard, discovering in shock that the tide had not varied a foot in the last twenty-four hours, and proceeded to catch hell from every Japanese gunner on the island.

The sight of this slaughter caused Lieutenant Deane Hawkins to run amok along the pillboxes still dominating Red Beach Two. This hellish morning, armed only with a handful of grenades and supernatural courage, Deane Hawkins attacked bunker after bunker. Hit several times, Hawkins raged against one emplacement after another,

stuffing grenades through firing slits, down vent tubes, into rear entrances.

No man could survive the snapping cross fire that chased him across the open spaces. One Nambu machine-gunner put a 7.7mm round through Hawkins’ armpit, into his chest. He died in 10 minutes, surrounded by his brokenhearted scout-snipers.

But Hawkins’ personal vendetta diverted a lot of fire from the troops struggling ashore and inspired [Major Wood] Kyle’s shorthanded battalion to leap up and race across the island, runway and all, cutting Betio in two.

Shoup credited Hawkins with winning the battle.

A posthumous Medal of Honor went to his family. Julian Smith insisted the Navy name the captured airstrip “Hawkins Field,” the only infantryman to earn such a distinction.

Unknown to Shoup and Smith at the time, the greatest breakthrough of the battle was taking place along the western coast. There, in one brilliant hour, Mike Ryan led his “Orphans” in a carefully executed drive from north to south.

Making the most of his precious two Sherman tanks, and blessed with a shore fire control team whose radio still worked, Ryan swept south behind a protective wall of supporting fire, exterminating an entire company of rikusentai and a daunting tangle of pillboxes.

Suddenly – finally – Smith had a covered beach over which to land the 6th Marines, the combat team he had beseeched Holland Smith and Kelly Turner to release the day before.

The 1,000-yard transit [of Major William “Willie K” Jones’ 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, in rubber boats] took an hour, during which they were helpless targets, vividly backlit by the setting sun.

But so thoroughly had “Ryan’s Orphans” cleared the coastline that not a single Japanese could uncork even a rifle shot in their direction.

Shoup, buoyed by finally having a fully organized and

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equipped battalion in the fight, released a situation report which quickly became a classic: “Casualties many; percentage dead unknown; combat efficiency: We are winning!”

The Marines now had the momentum. The third day of the battle bore little resemblance to the chaos of the first day and a half.

Willie K. Jones led his powerful battalion east down the length of the airfield, covering 800 yards before noon and relieving Woody Kyle’s encircled troops on the south coast. Shoup led a violent attack by his 2d Marines eastward against The Pocket. Jim Crowe and the 8th Marines continued to beat against the large sand-covered bunker to their left front.

By dark on D+2, the 8th Marines and Willie K. Jones’ 1/6 occupied parallel positions along opposite sides of the runway, two-thirds down the island. Julian Smith had come ashore to take command of his division, though sick at heart on viewing his appalling losses.

That night the surviving rikusentai organized a series of sharp attacks against Jones’ forward positions,

culminating in an all-out charge by 600 to 700 riflemen.

Jones lost 40 killed and 100 wounded, but his disciplined companies held the line.

The fighting on Betio ended quickly the next morning. The 6th Marines swept to the eastern tail; the 2d Marines finally overran The Pocket.

Seizing heavily fortified Betio cost the 2d Marine Division 3,407 casualties. One man died for every three hit, reflecting the savagery of the fighting.

Tarawa provided a treasure trove of operational lessons. Under the lead of Holland Smith and Kelly Turner, the amphibians identified critical improvements needed in radio communications, naval gunfire, close air support, hydrographic intelligence, and assault weapons.

Encouragingly, many of these changes came about fast enough to be on hand for the Marshalls campaign six weeks later.

More than anything, the sacrifices of Tarawa had proven conclusively the validity of the doctrine of offensive amphibious assault first proclaimed by the handful of Marine and Navy pioneers at Quantico ten years earlier.

Island fighting became, if anything, worse as the war went on for the Marine Corps, with the Japanese resisting more and more fanatically as the Marines drew nearer to the Home Islands. Mop Up in the Marshalls, by Col. Donald F. Dickson, USMCR, 1944, watercolor on paper.

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Westward to the Marshalls and Marianas

Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

With the Gilberts in hand, Chester Nimitz had turned

quickly to the Marshalls, a far-flung scattering of 1,000 islands and 32 atolls.

Nimitz boldly decided to open the campaign with a knife-thrust into the heart of the Marshalls – leapfrogging the heavily defended perimeter atolls and striking Kwajalein, 620 miles west of Tarawa.

Nimitz ordered Spruance to seize Kwajalein Island in the south, a regional enemy headquarters, and the twin islands of Roi-Namur to the north, site of a valuable airfield.

For the assault on Kwajalein, Smith’s expeditionary troops consisted of the 7th Infantry Division, Army veterans of the seizure of Attu Island in the Aleutians the previous year, and – making their combat debut – the new 4th Marine Division, which had sailed from San Diego loaded for bear.

The invasion group also included the reinforced 22d Marines, a separate regiment fresh from eighteen months of guard duty on Samoa, well led by Colonel John Walker and spoiling for a fight.

While [Admiral] Marc Mitscher’s fast carriers throttled the vaunted Japanese air attacks, Turner’s gunships began their preliminary bombardment of the main objectives in Kwajalein Atoll. Here the lessons of Tarawa shone like a bright lamp.

The bombardment – three times as long, twice the weight of shells, and infinitely better executed than Tarawa – flattened most Japanese positions ashore.

Compared to Tarawa, the capture of Roi-Namur came at a bargain cost. The 4th Marine Division seized both islands and the northern arc of Kwajalein, dispatched 3,500 Japanese defenders, and suffered less than a thousand combat casualties.

Nimitz, well pleased, decided to increase [Operation] Flintlock’s momentum. He ordered Spruance to strike next at the far western edge of the Marshalls, seizing isolated Eniwetok Atoll, 330 miles beyond Kwajalein.

As at Kwajalein, Captain [James] Jones’ Force Recon Marines landed stealthily on neighboring islands the day preceding D-Day to seize advance fire support bases for Marine and Army artillery units. These batteries combined their steady fire with spectacular naval and air bombardment on Engebi on DDay to pulverize exposed Japanese positions.

Under an awesome umbrella of fire the 22nd Marines stormed Engebi and advanced swiftly inland.

Eniwetok Island presented a more difficult objective. Counter to intelligence reports, Japanese soldiers occupied the position in force, and the preliminary naval bombardment proved inadequate.

No one had an easy time on Eniwetok. When the GIs continued to wrestle with strong resistance, [Marine Brigadier General Thomas] Watson committed his reserve, the 3d Battalion, 22d Marines. The Marines had their hands full.

Securing the thickly wooded island took three gruesome days.

Thanks to Tarawa’s priceless lessons, Operation Flintlock succeeded at a speed and overall economy almost beyond belief to strategic planners.

In the Central Pacific, the Joint Chiefs ordered Nimitz to execute Operation Forager, a giant, thousand-mile leap westward to seize Saipan, Tinian, and Guam in the Marianas.

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Thirty-two thousand Imperial Army and Navy rikusentai awaited the V Amphibious Corps on Saipan, by far the largest concentration of forces the Central Pacific drive had yet encountered.

Command of the Saipan defenders devolved to Lieutenant General Yoshitsuga Saito, commanding the 43rd Division.

Holland Smith’s invasion plan called for the two Marine divisions to storm ashore along Saipan’s southwest corner. The 2d Division, now commanded by Major General Thomas Watson, would land on the left, while Major General Harry Schmidt’s 4th Marine Division would hit the beach on the right. Rocky, wooded Afetna Point separated the two invasion sites.

Despite … losses in leadership and nearly 2,000 casualties in their ranks, the assaulting Marines wrested a modest slice of shell-blasted Saipan from its defenders.

Bold in concept, enormous in scale, Forager would literally take the war to Japan’s front yard, provide suitable airfields within range of the home islands for the USAAF’s new B-29 Superfortress bombers, and – surely – lure the Combined Fleet out of hiding for a climactic sea fight.

Three veteran outfits comprised this force: the 2d and 4th Marine Divisions and the Army’s 27th Division.

Tarawa’s tiny Betio Island – barely a half-square mile of sand and coral – had been bad enough. Saipan, by comparison, had seventy-two square miles of mountains, volcanic rock, cliffs, thick woods.

Holland Smith, ever the realist, called it right in advance. “We are through with flat atolls,” he told reporters. “Now we are up against mountains and caves where the Japs can really dig in. A week from now there will be a lot of dead Marines.”

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Two U.S. officers plant the American flag on Guam eight minutes after U.S. Marines and Army assault troops landed on the Central Pacific island on July 20, 1944.

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Holland Smith had 20,000 men ashore by nightfall, spread unevenly along a beachhead four miles long and maybe a mile deep.

Japanese night counterattacks epitomized the opening weeks of the battle. The most dangerous attack occurred shortly after the landing and included the first armored night assault the Marines had faced.

Some forty Japanese medium tanks roared out of the darkness toward the beach. By coincidence, Lieutenant Colonel “Willie K.” Jones and his 1st Battalion, 6th Marines, defended the threatened sector and bore the brunt of the attack.

Jones as usual had prepared his supporting arms like a maestro. His Marines hit the onrushing tanks with not just the kitchen sink, but the stove and the washing machine. Those dazed tanks that survived the torrent of

naval gunfire, artillery, and mortar fire ran into a wall of direct fire from Jones’ bazookas and rifle grenades.

The 4th Division Marines and the 27th Division soldiers broke out of the beachhead and attacked east and south, the Leathernecks reaching Magicienne Bay on the far shore, the GIs capturing Aslito Airfield.

Holland Smith’s assaulting forces had sustained 6,000 casualties. Saipan was already proving to be one of the costlier amphibious battles.

The three divisions now swung northward abreast, the Army’s 27th in the center, flanked by the Marines.

The fighting was particularly fierce in the town of Garapan, midway up the west coast, where the Japanese fought tenaciously from the rubble of destroyed buildings. The devastated city finally fell to the 2d Marine Division on July 3.

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Marines, crawling under enemy fire, pass each other as they move to their assigned positions. In the background are LVT(A) 4s, their turrets housing short-barreled 75mm howitzers for fire support.

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Guam Still Life, Donald F. Moss, USMC, 1945, watercolor on paper, gift of the artist, 1980.

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The American advance pushed inexorably northward, the Japanese doggedly resisting from caves and camouflaged bunkers. Marines used flamethrowers, tanks, artillery, air strikes, and naval gunfire to snuff out these strong points, one by one.

By July 5, D+20, all of Saipan’s airfields and towns were in U.S. hands. On that evening, after ordering a final banzai attack, General Saito knelt outside his cave and committed suicide. His final order was carried out with bloody consequences early the next morning.

Nearly 4,000 Japanese soldiers poured out of the highlands to fall upon surprised elements of the 27th Division in the greatest banzai attack of the war.

Savage fighting swirled in every ravine and cane field throughout the day. The terrifying but futile banzai attack ended the battle for Saipan.

Tinian loomed next, too soon for the weary Marine riflemen.

Nine thousand Japanese troops defended the fiftysquare-mile island, loosely commanded by Colonel Keishi Ogata, Imperial Army.

D-Day at Tinian came on July 24, 1944. The 2d Marine Division executed such a convincing amphibious feint against the Tinian Town beaches that Colonel Ogata was signaling Tokyo of his success in repelling the American landing attempt at the same time that the 4th Marine Division began streaming ashore through his unguarded “attic door”… [tiny landing points near Tinian’s northwest tip].

Incredibly, in view of the difficulties imparted by the tiny “beaches,” [Major General Clifton] Cates had 16,000 Marines ashore, tied in, and on full alert by sunset.

Everything Cates had learned at Guadalcanal indicated his toehold on Tinian would be challenged that night

by Ogata’s surprised but veteran troops. Ogata did not disappoint Cates.

Here, as at Tarawa, the Japanese probed the American lines smartly, marking the automatic weapons, finding the seams between regiments.

A hail of mortar fire blanketed Cates’ front lines; Japanese tanks clanked into action; and with a great yell Ogata’s Manchurian veterans swept forward. A battle royal developed throughout the rest of the night. Cates would later state that, “This was the real battle of Tinian.”

He would also add, “Here we broke their backs.”

The 2d Marine Division wasted no time pouring ashore the next day.

The two divisions shouldered into line, swept across the first airfield, and attacked south.

Everything clicked. Fire support by field artillery, aircraft, and ships battered and confounded the disorganized Japanese. Enemy mines, booby traps, and snipers took their toll, but the Marine juggernaut proved unstoppable.

When the fighting finally ended on August 1, Schmidt proclaimed the island “secure.” His two divisions of Marines had destroyed Ogata’s mixed forces and captured the invaluable island in nine days at a “steal”: 2,355 casualties.

The battles for Tinian and Guam overlapped each other. While General Schmidt’s V Amphibious Corps ran roughshod over Tinian, General Roy Geiger’s III Amphibious Corps engaged in bitter fighting to liberate Guam.

Compared to Saipan, Guam was three times the size, with bigger mountains, much more jungle, and fewer suitable landing beaches. The island’s convoluted topography favored the defender, and Geiger knew Lieutenant General Takeshi Takashina’s combined force of 13,000 soldiers and 5,000 sailors would provide stiff opposition.

Fortunately Roy Geiger and his Naval counterpart, Admiral [Richard L.] “Close-in” Conolly, got along like sugar and spice.

General Takashina expected the Americans to land at Tumon Bay, site of the principal Japanese landing in 1941, and concentrated his defenses in that area. But Geiger fooled him, divided the landing force to hit two smaller beaches, five miles apart.

Close-in Conolly blasted western Guam for thirteen days, the best bombardment of the entire war.

On W-Day, July 21, 1944, Marc Mitscher’s carrier pilots swarmed low along the coast, spitting fire and dropping bombs. Under this protective shield, the Marine LVTs swept over the barrier reef and onward toward the smoking beaches.

Despite this unprecedented pounding, enough Japanese survived to man their guns and contest the landing.

The fighting on Guam would be characterized by foolish mistakes by senior Japanese officers, offset by spirited and often improvisational tactics on the part of their troops.

Takashina squandered most of his forces in a fierce but ultimately futile counterattack the night of July 25.

Takashina’s all-or-nothing night counterattack inflicted 600 casualties on the American landing force but achieved no lasting penetrations and cost him 3,200 of his best fighters.

By August 4 Marine Aircraft Group 21 began flight operations from Orote Field, reuniting Leatherneck aviators and riflemen in combat for the first time in many months.

Bitter fighting continued as Geiger’s Marines and soldiers drove resolutely northward, but the end was in sight.

A Marine tanker killed General Takashina with his turret-mounted machine gun. Eleven thousand other Japanese lay dead along the ridges and ravines.

On August 10, the twentieth day, Geiger declared Guam secure.

The forcible recapture of Guam cost the III Amphibious Corps 8,000 casualties among Geiger’s Marines and soldiers.

Theater-wide, Admiral Nimitz’s high-rolling offensive thrust had marched 2,500 miles across the Central Pacific in seven months, beginning with the Gilberts. His increasingly potent Fleet Marine Forces had led the way – and suffered the heaviest casualties. Nearly 7,000 Marines died and more than 19,000 fell wounded in forcibly wresting the Gilberts, Marshalls, and Marianas from Imperial Japan. Yet the worst was yet to come.

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Two Marine Pfcs take time out for a cigarette on Peleliu Island in September, 1944.

Heading for the Philippines (1944)

National Archives

Just when it seemed the Navy and Marines

Most of Nakagawa’s defenders, hunkered down in their caves in the Umurbrogol [a heavily-fortified spine of steep hills running north and south], had no fear of the bombardment, but even the one battalion Nakagawa left deployed to disrupt the landing suffered little from the lightweight pounding.

D-Day was September 15, 1944.

As preplanned naval gunfire petered out “for lack of suitable targets,” the steel doors of the Umurbrogol rolled open and Nakagawa’s heavy artillery began raining hellish fire on the approaching waves of LVTs. Well-concealed 47mm antiboat guns opened up with enfilade fire from coral promontories on either flank. Heavy machine guns stitched the laboring craft without mercy. It was as deadly and ferocious an opposed landing as the Marines would ever face.

D-Day ended with the 1st Marine Division occupying an irregular beachhead two miles long and ranging in depth from a mile in the south to a few feet along [an island promontory called] The Point on the north.

The day had been rife with nasty surprises for General Rupertus, and the cost had been much greater than expected: 1,100 casualties, including 200 dead. Total losses were less than D-Day at either Tarawa or Saipan, and Rupertus figured the Japanese were sure to crack now that their perimeter had been so forcibly penetrated.

For all his combat experience General Rupertus could never accept the reality that the Japanese had changed tactics, that this Colonel Nakagawa intended to lay low and fight smart for the next ten weeks.

Rupertus would keep butting his head against the Umurbrogol in the misbegotten belief that the Japanese defenders would soon degenerate into their traditional self-sacrificing banzai charge, leading to the routine mopup. His three fine regiments would sequentially come to

had perfected the difficult art of amphibious assault against fortified islands, the Japanese abruptly junked their doctrine of perimeter defense and adopted a deadlier strategy.

Disrupt rather than oppose the landing; develop “honeycomb” protective positions well inland; avoid the wasteful banzai attacks in favor of small, stinging counterattacks; “bleed” the Americans in a costly, time-consuming battle of attrition. “Disrupt, honeycomb, and bleed” became the blueprint for Japanese tactics at Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa – the three costliest battles of the war for the U.S. Marines.

The Marines stormed Peleliu because of an earlier promise Admiral Nimitz made to General MacArthur in the presence of President Roosevelt. It was a questionable military commitment from the onset, and changing events would render the seizure of Peleliu bloodily superfluous.

The small, wretched island, the drooping tail of the Palaus, the westernmost appendage of the far-flung Carolines, had no redeeming graces. Peleliu’s oven-hot climate was matched only by its convoluted terrain, the most ungodly scramble of coral cliffs and reeking mangrove swamps a defensive force could pray for. Defending it were some of the most proficient Japanese soldiers the Americans would face in the war.

Colonel Kunio Nakagawa commanded 10,000 Japanese troops on Peleliu, including his own infantry regiment, proud veterans of Manchurian border-fighting.

Nakagawa had a supreme eye for the land. He saw immediately how suitable Peleliu would be for the new Japanese doctrine of attrition warfare.

Major General [William] Rupertus, dour but experienced, still commanded [the 1st Marine Division]. Three veteran colonels led his infantry regiments: Chesty Puller had the 1st Marines, Harold “Bucky” Harris had the 5th, and Herman “Hard Head” Hanneken, the 7th.

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“Grasshoppers” of his VMO-1 and quickly commenced aerial spotting missions for both artillery and naval gunfire.

The morale of the embattled infantrymen took another boost on September 26 when the gull-winged Corsairs of Major Robert (“Cowboy”) Stout’s VMF-114 swooped out of the sky to land on the airfield.

Cowboy Stout and his Corsair pilots brought three welcome elements to the battle: rockets, napalm, and ferocious bravado.

The rockets proved better than dive-bombing against the steep cave fronts.

Napalm, first used experimentally at Tinian, served better at Peleliu, first to burn away the vegetation hiding cave entrances and spider holes, then to roast the occupants.

Delivering all of this close support required the pilots to risk everything on low-level attacks subject to heavy ground fire.

The 1st Marine Division, despite its dreadful losses, was learning valuable lessons about coordinating supporting fires to pulverize enemy strong points.

But Nakagawa continued to rule the high country, and the meat-grinding assaults continued to exact a heavy toll.

By October 15 the Old Breed had been shot up to the point that Geiger replaced them with the 81st Division.

The Army resorted to siege tactics against the Umurbrogol, but the costly battle raged on another six weeks.

The long-drawn-out victory at Peleliu cost 9,600 American casualties – 6,500 Marines, 3,100 soldiers. For all their bravery and sacrifice, the spoils of victory proved sparse.

None of the airfields in and around Peleliu provided any significant support for MacArthur’s return to the Philippines. Nor was Peleliu ever useful as a major staging base for further campaigns in the Pacific.

grief in the highlands the Marines quickly dubbed “Bloody Nose Ridge.”

Nothing came easy on Peleliu, but no sector was rougher than the Umurbrogol.

Here Chesty Puller led his 1st Marines in a gallant but fruitless series of frontal assaults. Even as proven a tactician as Puller could not prevail in the absence of maneuver room and in the teeth of Nakagawa’s artfully concealed, mutually supporting cross fires. The 1st Marines clawed forward, ridge by ridge, cave by cave, but sustained terrible casualties every day.

General Geiger endeavored to let Rupertus fight his own battle, but after six days he ordered in the first regiment of the Army’s 81st Division and directed Rupertus to relieve Puller’s 1st Marines.

Puller raged to stay and fight, but by now Bloody Nose Ridge had cost his regiment nearly 60 percent of its landing strength. In small groups, carrying their wounded, the survivors came down from the Umurbrogol’s bloodsoaked ridges.

“Hey, you guys the First Marines?” a correspondent shouted. “Mister, there ain’t no more First Marines,” one answered.

The 7th and 5th Marines, as well as the Army regiments, would have their own crack at the Umurbrogol, and in time they would encircle and overwhelm Nakagawa’s disciplined cave dwellers one by one.

One benefit of Nakagawa’s “honeycomb” defense in the highlands: It left the beaches and airfield relatively clear for U.S. operations. Logistic support for the Marines flowed smoothly ashore, despite the need for transfer line operations along the reef.

Meanwhile, the industrious Seabees had the airstrip ready for advance operations as early as D+3. Captain Wallace Slappey promptly flew in with the tiny

Sulfur Island (Iwo Jima, 1945) Iwo Jima was the largest Marine amphibious

The volcanic island reeked of sulfur, leaked steam, and looked evil – “like hell with the fire out, but still smoking,” said one unimpressed Marine.

The Japanese spared no expense in fortifying the island, using the Empire’s most gifted mining engineers.

They had plenty of big guns, heavy mortars, enormous rockets – and scores of the wickedly effective 25mm automatic machine cannons, emplaced to fire horizontally at troops and landing craft.

Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi commanded the Iwo garrison with an iron will and was well served by a brilliant artillery chief and several veteran infantry officers.

For the Marines, Iwo Jima would be the last battle for the old amphibious warhorse, Lieutenant General Howlin’ Mad Smith. One final time he would rage against the Navy’s parsimonious allocation of preliminary naval

battle of all time. It was also the costliest. The allLeatherneck landing force sustained more than 26,000 casualties – the equivalent of losing a division and a half of Marines. More than 6,000 died. So did 21,000 Japanese.

Seventy-two thousand U.S. Marines assaulted heavily fortified Iwo Jima island in February 1945 as the spearhead of a veteran amphibious force at the peak of its lethality.

The Marines expected a tough fight. Tokyo was 650 miles to the north, less than three hours flight time. The island itself was a defender’s dream – few beaches; broken, convoluted ground; a lunar landscape of cliffs, crags, and caves. With its pork chop-shaped area less than seven square miles, Iwo was bigger than Tarawa and Peleliu, but much smaller than the Marianas.

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The fine volcanic sand, lack of cover, and looming bulk of Mt. Suribachi in the background are all captured in Fourth Marine Division at Iwo Jima, by Col. Donna J. Neary, USMCR (Ret.), 2000, oil on canvas. bombardment. When Smith darkly suggested the island would cost 15,000 Marine casualties, his Navy counterparts thought he was out of his mind.

While Holland Smith battled the Navy’s top brass, real leadership of the Marines storming Iwo Jima devolved to Major General Harry Schmidt, commanding the V Amphibious Corps. The 3d, 4th, and 5th Marine Divisions would provide the landing force, each unit as well led, trained, and equipped as any outfit that ever crossed the Line of Departure in the Pacific War. The assault landing was an awesome spectacle, the pinnacle of the amphibious war, flawlessly executed by the veteran Navy-Marine team.

Within minutes General Schmidt had 8,000 Marines ashore, struggling through the soft, black sand of Sulfur Island.

Kuribayashi watched these developments intently, waiting for the beaches and inland terraces to become clogged with troops and equipment.

At his signal there was a barely perceptible stirring throughout the highlands – doors and hatches opening, enormous muzzles emerging. Another signal from the island commander, then all hell broke loose. Every gun, howitzer, and mortar on the island began pounding the exposed American Marines.

This was the bloodiest bombardment the Marines ever suffered in the war. The enormous 320mm spigot

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Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

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Above: Marine Corps combat artist Charles Waterhouse portrays himself as a wounded Marine on Iwo Jima over 40 years later in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Col. Charles H. Waterhouse, USMCR (Ret.), 1989, acrylic on masonite.

Left: Few people today are aware that the flag-raising on Mt. Suribachi captured in the famous photograph by Joe Rosenthal did not mark the end of the battle by any means. Even fewer know that Rosenthal’s photo actually captured the second flag-raising. Artist Howard Chandler Christy created a composite of both flag raisings in Flag Raising Iwo Jima, painted in 1945. Oil on canvas, Gift of the New York Detachment #1 Marine Corps League, June 1945. mortar rounds, visibly tumbling through the air like demonic fifty-five-gallon oil drums, blew groups of Marines to smithereens.

The 25mm machine cannons swept across the open spaces like giant scythes, leaving wide swaths of bloody bodies. There was no shelter, the volcanic sand too loose for digging, the terraces heavily mined. The Marines cursed and kept moving ahead, thousands of men lurching forward, nearly blinded by the fire.

The Fifth Fleet did not take kindly to this unwelcome ambush of their landing force by Japanese gunners in the highlands. Ships and planes reacted quickly, giving Kuribayashi a taste of his own medicine, stinging his exposed gun positions with shrapnel and napalm. The little island seemed to rock and quake, literally hell on earth.

The Marines suffered and bled but did not panic. The veterans in the ranks steadied the rookies, junior men took over from fallen leaders, and shot-up units merged quickly to maintain the attack.

Field radios crackled with urgent pleas to the fleet for plasma, stretchers, mortar shells – and sandbags.

The loose sand would allow no foxholes (“like digging a hole in a barrel of wheat!”).

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Schmidt and his marvelous staff filled each demand with an urgency of their own. The stuff flowed ashore – and somehow kept moving inland. So did the reserve battalions and regiments of the assault divisions. By dark Schmidt had an incredible 30,000 Marines ashore, well supported by tanks, half-tracks, and field artillery. Already the Marines outnumbered the Japanese on the island.

Just getting ashore was a bitch. Crossing the terrace minefields was a bitch. The Rock Quarry was a bitch (Jumping Joe Chambers lost 22 officers and 500 men from his 3d Battalion, 25th Marines, scaling those heights on D-Day alone!). And seizing Mount Suribachi was beyond a bitch.

But Suribachi had to fall. From its cave-dotted heights Japanese gunners continued to shoot Marines in their backs as they wheeled north to wrest the first airfield from Kuribayashi’s disciplined defenders.

[On the fourth day a patrol from the 28th Marines fought their way to the summit, raised a small flag under fire, then replaced it with a larger flag, one that could be seen by “every sonofabitch on the island.” Associated Press combat cameraman Joe Rosenthal immortalized the second event with his iconic snapshot. Staff Sergeant William Genaust took the stirring motion picture footage simultaneously.]

Three of the six flag-raisers in the historic Rosenthal photograph would die in the fighting to come; two others would fall wounded. Photographer Genaust would die in a cave shoot-out.

And the battle for Iwo Jima had only just been joined.

Dead ahead lay Kuribayashi’s main defensive belt and the island’s increasingly broken terrain, all uphill from the landing beaches. The island was too constrained for major flank attacks; towering cliffs along the northern shoreline ruled out any end-run amphibious landings.

Schmidt had no option other than attacking frontally into the teeth of the Japanese strength.

The fighting took a heavy toll of proven Marine leaders.

Five of the twenty-four infantry battalion commanders

who landed on Iwo Jima were killed in action; twelve others fell wounded.

Iwo Jima took such a toll on leaders that junior officers and enlisted men assumed roles of responsibility unimaginable in garrison.

Sunday, March 4, the end of the second week of the battle, seemed at first to be simply another day of the extended bad dream, another cold and drizzly day, another day of slaughter. The V Amphibious Corps had already sustained the loss of 13,000 Marines, including 3,000 dead. The thrilling sight of the flag being raised on Suribachi ten days earlier seemed like a lifetime ago.

But now two events occurred to turn the tide of battle – one unseen and only later realized, the other visible to every man on the island.

Without knowing it, the Marines had finally cracked Kuribayashi’s main defensive belt across the central highlands and killed Colonel Chosaku Kaido, the gifted artillery chieftain. Kuribayashi would this day abandon his well-sited command post and take refuge for the remaining three weeks in a cave in an ungodly gorge on the northwestern tip of the island, still in command, but considerably less in control.

The second key event of March 4 occurred unexpectedly that afternoon when the B-29 Superfortress Dinah Might, crippled in a raid over Tokyo, made an emergency landing on the fire-swept and still unconverted bomber strip on Iwo. Marines in every foxhole let out a resounding cheer.

“That’s why we are here!” said one.

The Marines renewed the battle with multiplied fury, led by their tanks.

Iwo Jima marked the largest deployment of Marine Corps tanks in the war, 150 Shermans, and they were invaluable. The tank battalions combined forces to lead the Marines’ assault across the hotly disputed second airfield against galling fire from Japanese 47mm and 57mm antitank guns, a spectacular, high-explosive firefight.

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Photo courtesy of Marine Corps Historical Center

Marine infantry and tanks attack Japanese positions on rocky Northern Iwo Jima during a direct frontal assault. The explosion seen is an enemy mortar shell. This advance gained 20 yards at a cost of 30 Marines.

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A brigade commander who had successfully withstood the assaults of the 4th Marine Division in the “Meat Grinder” for weeks gave in to despair one night and launched a traditional banzai attack.

The 4th Division, glad to have live targets in the open for a change, reacted calmly, set the stage with illuminating rounds from the ships offshore, laced the approaches with artillery and mortars, shredded the attacking columns with well-sited machine guns, then rose up with a vengeance to greet the survivors at bayonet point.

The Japanese brigade commander and 700 of his troops lay lifeless among the rocks at daybreak.

Given this windfall, the 4th Marine Division accelerated its advance to clear the east coast, finishing the job with a flourish two days later.

The 3d Marine Division reached the north coast on March 16, the advance patrol leader sending a canteen of seawater back to General Schmidt marked “For inspection – not consumption.”

On that date the top brass declared the island secured, a communique received with snorts and hoots by the 5th Marine Division, still fighting desperately against a wellarmed, intractable enemy near Kuribayashi’s final cave in what was now being called “The Bloody Gorge.”

Using time-proven but costly “blowtorch and corkscrew” tactics to clear the final gorge took the division another ten days of bitter fighting. [Major General Graves] Erskine’s 3d Division took over part of the sector for the final knockout blows.

Abruptly the great battle was over.

Admiral Chester Nimitz’s accolade would endure longest, now chiseled into the granite base of the enormous bronze statue of the Suribachi Marines and their faithful corpsman at Arlington Cemetery: “Uncommon valor was a common virtue …”

Eight of these tanks had been field-modified to mount an experimental flamethrower that could spout napalmthickened fuel at a range of 150 yards through a look-alike tube in place of its main turret gun. The “Zippo Tanks” became the weapon of choice of the landing force – and the target of most urgent priority for the Japanese 109th Division.

General Kuribayashi had exhorted each of his troops to kill at least ten Americans in exchange for their own lives. While few achieved this distinction, the ratio of 1.25 Marine casualties (killed, wounded, missing) for every Japanese killed was the highest in the war. It was the first and only time a Marine landing force suffered greater casualties than they inflicted on the defending garrison.

The Battle of Iwo Jima also featured the largest concentration of Navajo Code Talkers in the war to date. The Navajos spoke one of the most unique dialects in the world. They drove Japanese cryptologists crazy in their repeated attempts to break or translate U.S. tactical communications.

African-American Marines made their mark at Iwo Jima as well.

Black Marines at Iwo served as ammo humpers and stevedores by day – keeping the vital flow of combat cargo moving north into the lines – and fought the Prowling Wolves at night. Privates James Whitlock and James Davis received Bronze Stars for their valor in derailing a violent Japanese counterattack with unerring carbine fire at great personal risk.

Once the Marines forced General Kuribayashi to evacuate his headquarters in the central highlands for the northwest coast, the discipline of his principal subordinates began to crumble.

Amphibious Capstones (Okinawa to V-J Day) The Marines had seized Iwo Jima to

Like Tarawa and so many other Central Pacific islands, Okinawa enjoyed the protection of a barrier coral reef. Unlike Tarawa, the reef made no difference to the Marines.

Fourteen hundred new-model LVTs were on hand to land the assault elements of the Tenth Army – four divisions landing abreast, Marines to the north, Army to the south – covering eight miles of the Hagushi beaches.

Leading the way were hundreds of LVT-As, armored amphibians, the developmental grand-progeny of the long-ago Christie tank, firing on the move from their snub-nosed 75mm turrets.

And behind all the LVT-As and LVTs could be seen waves of 700 DUKWs bearing the first of the direct support artillery battalions. The amphibious assault plan was clicking on all cylinders.

enhance the strategic air campaign against Japan. But Okinawa would provide the essential springboard for the final invasion of the Home Islands.

Except for the kamikazes, Okinawa would be the only major “unopposed” landing of the war for the Marines – but it was a dubious distinction. Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, commanding the 100,000-man Thirty-Second Army, intended to wage the bloodiest possible defensive battle to buy time for the massed kamikazes to savage the American fleet.

Given seven months to prepare his defenses, Ushijima wisely forfeited the upper two thirds of the island, the obvious landing beaches at Hagushi, and the nearby airfields at Kadena and Yontan.

The American landing would be unopposed only temporarily.

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Image courtesy of Marine Corps Historical Center

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While kamikazes had been encountered before, there was a special horror in the massed kamikaze attacks during the invasion of Okinawa. Kamikazi Attack, Okinawa, Sgt. Richard M. Gibney, USMC, ca. 1991-1992, oil on canvas.

So great was the momentum of this invasion force, so well-oiled the mechanics of launching a massive assault from the sea, that the Tenth Army rammed 16,000 combat troops ashore in the first hour.

The 1st Marine Division seized the Katchin Peninsula on the third day, effectively cutting the island in two.

Meanwhile, General Shepherd’s 6th Marine Division swung north and engaged in a campaign of high mobility against what seemed to be a fleeing enemy. Troops rode tanks and self-propelled guns at breakneck speeds along country roads, having the time of their lives.

By April 7, the division had seized Nago, the largest town in northern Okinawa, and the Navy obliged by opening the port with minesweepers and UDT swimmers to bring in rations and ammo.

The 22d Marines continued up the spine of the island, reaching the northernmost point, Hedo Misaki, on April 13, having covered fifty-five miles through largely broken country since landing over the Hagushi beaches.

Abruptly, the honeymoon ended for the 6th Marine Division.

Their elusive foe, Colonel Takesiko Udo and his Kunigami regiment, finally went to ground in prepared positions in a six-square-mile area around 1,200-foot Mount Yae Take on the Motobu Peninsula, a few miles beyond Nago.

The five-day battle for Mount Yae Take was a demanding crucible for the 4th and 29th Marines.

Colonel Udo and his troops indeed fought to the death, and in doing so they bloodied the new division with nearly 1,000 casualties, including over 200 killed.

[Meanwhile, farther south, The] Old Breed began relieving the shot-up 27th Division on April 30, exuding a certain amount of disdain for the exhausted soldiers in the process. “It’s hell in there, Marine,” said one passing soldier to Private First Class [Eugene] Sledge, who replied saltily, “I know – I fought at Peleliu!”

Such was the Old Breed’s introduction to the Shuri defensive network, against which they would pound and scratch, one bloody yard at a time, for the longest month these veterans would ever experience.

General [Mitsuru] Ushijima’s hidden network of caves, bunkers, and tunnels extended across the island, but the battlefield was extremely compressed.

For now, it was the Old Breed on the right, or west coast, with two Army divisions on their left. Their first objective: the deadly Awacha Pocket, a broken country of rocky hills dotted with enemy caves and reeking with the bodies of the U.S. soldiers who had died in the first two weeks’ attempt to punch through.

The 5th Marines paid dearly for every cave and bunker they conquered in the Pocket.

And every night without fail came fresh Japanese infiltrators, looking for throats to cut, foxholes to grenade. Few Marines slept, despite their proven buddy systems.

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At this point General Ushijima foolishly made things easier for the Americans.

Yielding to his hotheaded subordinates, he agreed to launch a massive counterattack, even agreed to expose much of his field artillery from its subterranean positions to provide mass preassault fires.

But the U.S. Army veterans of the fighting at Leyte and the Old Breed veterans of Cape Gloucester and Peleliu simply leaned into their weapons, called for illumination, directed the firing of preregistered naval gunfire, artillery, and mortar barrages, and calmly shot the attacking Japanese to pieces.

On the coast along the right flank of the 1st Marine Division’s sector, the 1st Marines and the 3d Armored Amphibian Battalion intercepted an enemy amphibious envelopment attempt, shooting down 700 men before they even touched dry land.

Ushijima’s blunder cost him 6,000 first-line troops and fiftynine invaluable artillery pieces. He also lost real estate.

Marine air was in this fight big time.

A strange flip-flop ensued. Each dawn Marine Corsairs would take off from Okinawa to go fight Japanese pilots over the East China Sea, while a horde of Navy Hellcat pilots arrived from the carriers to provide close air support to the ground troops.

Colonel Ward Dickey’s MAG33 led the way with 214 confirmed kills. More than half of these came at the cool hands of Major George Axtell and his VMF-323 “Death Rattlers.” Axtell himself became an instant ace, downing five Japanese raiders in one whirlwind thirtyminute melee.

Back on the ground, the 1st Marine Division took a week to hammer through the Awacha Pocket, losing 1,400 men in the process. But ahead lay even tougher concentrations of Japanese defenses: Dakeshi Ridge, Wana Ridge, and the hell-to-pay Wana Draw.

Geiger saw that the Old Breed was spread too thin. He offered to

deploy Shepherd’s 6th Marine Division into the lines if [U.S. Army Lieutenant General Simon] Buckner would reassign the 1st Division back to his III Amphibious Corps. Buckner agreed.

Shepherd’s 6th Division had their collective eye on the prize port of Naha but found themselves abruptly yanked to a halt by a complex of three unimposing hills under observed fire from not-too-distant Shuri Castle.

The hills formed a triangle with its apex, Sugar Loaf, facing north toward the approaching Marines, while the flanks were superbly covered by fire from the two outlying hills, Half Moon and Horseshoe.

Colonel Seiko Mita and his 15th Independent Mixed Regiment defended the complex. An assault on one hill would subject the attackers to shredding bands of cross fire from the other two.

Heavy mortars blanketed all approaches from well-sited reverse slope positions. The 6th Marine Division’s own week of hell was about to begin.

Lumpy Sugar Loaf, rising steeply but only fifty feet above the plain, was no Mount Suribachi, but it effectively blocked the advance on Naha. Too small a target for big naval guns, the hump-shouldered hill also precluded an assault by anything larger than a rifle company. A half-dozen companies from the 22d and 29th Marines would be mangled in desperate fighting.

General Ushijima funneled fresh troops and more ammo into the Sugar Loaf complex each night. The Japanese gunners always seemed primed to unload on the next Marine assault.

Sugar Loaf would not fall until the eighteenth of May. By then, both the 22d and 29th Marines were badly shot up. Shepherd brought in Colonel Alan Shapley’s fresher 4th Marines to seize and defend the outlying hills, enduring a vicious 700-man counterattack on Horseshoe in the process.

The Battle for Sugar Loaf, then and now, gets the most attention from military historians, but the simultaneous Battle for Wana Draw

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“We’ll win the war with the M4,” went the saying during World War II, and although Army troops in Europe grew disenchanted with the Sherman, it performed sterling service for the Marine Corps.

Without significant Japanese armored forces, and with the typical terrain features of Japanese-held islands for the most part precluding tank vs. tank battles, the Sherman became an infantry support weapon for the Marines.

First used by Marine combat units during the battles for Tarawa and Bougainville in 1943, the M4 Sherman weighed 30 tons and used a variety of engines, including radial aircraft engines. It served as the Marine Corps’ main battle tank throughout the campaigns of 1944 and 1945 in the Pacific.

The Marine Corps perfected the tank-infantry team tactics, first introduced at Guadalcanal, during the Marianas campaign. Field telephones were installed at the backs of the tanks, enabling direct communications with the tank crew, and allowed Marine infantry to control and direct the fire of the main tank gun. Many Shermans were modified as flamethrower tanks, a role in which they were highly effective.

The museum’s 75mm cannon-armed M4A3 Sherman is displayed in the World War II gallery, standing before a cave entrance on Peleliu as it would have in combat on the island. The scene is supported by a Studio EIS cast figure Marine, calling commands into the telephone mounted on the back of the vehicle.

Sherman tank-borne infantry moving up to take the town of Ghuta, Okinawa, before the Japanese can occupy it. The men are members of the 29th Marines.

M4A3 SHERMAN MEDIUM TANK TECHNICAL DATA Combat Weight: 66,700 lbs Length: 19 feet, 4 inches Width: 8 feet, 7 inches Height: 9 feet Primary Armament: 75mm Gun M3 Crew: 5 men Fuel Capacity: 148-175 gallons gasoline Speed: 21-25 mph Mileage: 100-150 miles Manufacturer: Ford and Chrysler Motor Co.

by the 1st Marine Division was its equal in desperate fighting and high drama.

Wana Draw resembled the prototypical “Apache Pass” of B-grade movies: steep cliffs pocked with cave openings towering over a twisted, brushy streambed.

The Japanese 62d Infantry Division had strewn every possible approach with mines. From hidden observation posts in the cliffs they directed deadly cross fires from a hundred machine guns.

The division’s operational summary for May 18 reflects the agonizing pace of the struggle for Wana Draw: “Gains were measured by yards won, lost, then won again.”

The 7th Marines, which lost 700 men taking Dakeshi Ridge, lost 500 more the first five days at Wana.

In a single day during this battle the 1st Tank Battalion fired 5,000 75mm cannon shells, 173,000 .30-caliber machine gun bullets, and 600 gallons of napalm.

By such measures the Old Breed finally wiped out the Japanese defending Wana Draw and struggled southward in the heavy rains.

The rain and mud slowed the pursuit by the Tenth Army of the retreating Japanese. General Buckner’s propensity for preceding each movement with massive artillery prep fires further slowed the advance. By the time the Marines approached the Kiyamu Peninsula, the southernmost five miles of the island, they found the Japanese as well dug in as ever along “a series of cross ridges that stick out like bones from the spines of a fish.”

On the right flank, General Shepherd examined the looming Oroku Peninsula that blocked his final approach to Naha airfield.

Maybe Shepherd could skin the cat by executing a division-sized amphibious landing across the estuary, catching the defenders by surprise in the flank. Maybe.

K-Day for the Oroku Peninsula assault came on June 4 and produced a little jewel of an amphibious assault.

Everything clicked. Naval guns and aircraft provided magnificent support in spite of a looming typhoon. The thrust against his exposed flank surprised the hell out of Admiral Ota. As he reacted like a wounded tiger to confront the 4th and 29th Marines to his rear, Ota experienced another spearpoint when General Shepherd unbridled the 22d Marines to attack across the Kokuba. The three regiments converged.

Admiral Ota’s sailors took a particularly heavy toll of General Shepherd’s tanks, obliterating at least two with pointblank fire from a hidden eight-inch naval cannon. But the 6th Marine Division was now a well-oiled killing machine in its own right. Ably supported by naval gunfire from both flanks, Shepherd advanced ruthlessly against Ota on three fronts.

The old rikusentai sent one final message to Ushijima: “Enemy tank forces are now attacking our cave headquarters;

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National Archives photo by Pfc. Robert L. Keller, USMC

M4 SHERMAN MEDIUM TANK

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National Archives photo by SSgt. Walter F. Kleine, USMC

THE MARINES

the Naval Guard Brigade is dying gloriously.” With that, he donned his dress uniform and committed suicide.

The 6th Division now had the peninsula and soon Naha itself.

The ten-day operation had cost 1,608 Marine casualties and thirty tanks, but Shepherd’s men had killed 5,000 of Ota’s men and captured another 200. Nobody knew it at the time, but this would be the final opposed amphibious landing of the war.

For their part, the 1st Marine Division now faced the 32d Infantry Regiment defending Kunishi Ridge, a steep escarpment of coral and rock, which dominated the low-lying rice paddies. The ridge, much higher and longer than Sugar Loaf, was honeycombed with Japanese bunkers. Taking it by storm would be exorbitantly costly. General [Pedro] del Valle’s commanders sought alternatives.

Colonel Edward Snedeker, commanding the 7th Marines, hitched a ride in an observation Bird Dog and formulated a different scheme.

“I saw we would never capture Kunishi in daytime.

But a night attack might be successful,” Snedeker said.

Snedeker sent a pair of battalions against Kunishi Ridge at 0330 the next morning. It worked. The lead companies swarmed over the crest 90 minutes later, surprising the Japanese at their breakfast.

Now came the bad part. The Marines still lacked the numbers to ferret out the Japanese from their subterranean bunkers. All they could do was set up a 360-degree circle and wait for the next counterattack to come bubbling out of the rocks.

The fight for Kunishi chewed up all three regiments of the 1st Marine Division.

[When Japanese gunners killed General Buckner near the end of the battle, Command of the Tenth Army evolved to General Geiger.] Fittingly, Roy Geiger, the laid-back, highly competent, unconventional battle leader, became the only Marine, and the only aviator of any service, to command a field army.

The Battle of Okinawa officially ended on June 22, leaving the island a virtual charnel house. While exact numbers may never be known, estimates of Japanese deaths have ranged as high as 100,000 and of Okinawans as many as 150,000. [Marine Corps casualties overall - ground, air, ships’ detachements - exceeded 19,500]. An additional 560 members of the Navy Medical Corps attached to Marine units became casualties.

Ten Marines and three Navy corpsmen received the Medal of Honor. Eleven of the thirteen awards were posthumous.

For several worrisome weeks the Marines prepared for Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese home islands. The reward for the thinly spread Marine and Army infantry division in the Pacific seemed funereal: Those who survived Leyte and Iwo Jima would get to assault Kyushu; the invasion of the Tokyo plain awaited the Luzon and Okinawa survivors.

A Marine of the 1st Marine Division draws a bead on a Japanese sniper with his Thompson as his companion ducks for cover on Okinawa. The division was working to take Wana Ridge before the town of Shuri.

News of the atomic bombs and the unconditional surrender of Japan brought all planning to a standstill and the Marines to their knees in prayerful gratitude.

The Marine Corps had reached an undreamed-of peak strength of 476,709 in mid-1945 – a seventeen-fold increase over the prewar Corps of July 1940. The figure included 116,000 aviation Marines. Nineteen thousand women Marines served billets ranging from stenographers to motor mechanics, cryptologists to parachute riggers.

The Marine Corps sustained nearly 92,000 combat casualties in World War II. Those who paid the ultimate sacrifice (killed in action, died of wounds, missing presumed dead) numbered 19,215. In addition, 518 of the 2,220 Marine Corps POWs in the Pacific did not survive captivity – about one in every four. The Marines, who comprised less than 5 percent of all Americans who served in the armed forces in World War II, suffered 10 percent of all the nation’s casualties.

An average of 73 percent of all members of the armed forces served overseas in the war. Ninety percent of all Marines did so. A quarter of a million Marines were serving in the Pacific Theater at the war’s end.

Eighty Marines received the Congressional Medal of Honor in the war – forty-eight posthumously. [Delayed Medals of Honor for valor] went to Guadalcanal machine gunner Anthony Casamento in 1980 [and Sugar Loaf Hill rifleman James Day in 1998].

The war in the Pacific was girt with a special horror, but the Marines who fought there brought home a distinctive sense of achievement, an 8,000-mile, four-year campaign against a savage and relentless foe under some of the worst conditions imaginable.

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THE MARINES

The Fire Brigade

(Korea, Summer 1950)

Five years of demobilization, disengagement,

President Truman, the former Army artillery officer, professed no love for his Marines.

Popular Army wartime commanders like Omar Bradley and Dwight Eisenhower led the charge to downsize the Corps to a ceremonial naval guard force. Bradley announced the atomic bomb had rendered amphibious landings obsolete. Eisenhower admitted to Commandant Vandegrift he had resented the Marines ever since their publicity coup at Belleau Wood in far-off 1918.

There were other motives at work. The Army wanted the Marines’ weapons and manpower billets; the new Air Force wanted Marine aircraft. Number-crunching Washington bureaucrats eyed the Corps as a fire sale.

The Marines also took a hard look for themselves at the effect of atomic weapons on the future of amphibious assault.

Vandegrift convened the best and brightest combat commanders in the Corps, including Generals Lemuel

National Archives photo

and an overdependence on the promise of technology had left America woefully unprepared to fight a limited, unconventional war – the kind that would set the deadly tone and pattern for the rest of the century.

This was also the dawn of the Nuclear Age. In its early blush the U.S. Marines seemed abruptly antiquated, irrelevant, maybe even quaint. And ripe for massive “downsizing” or worse.

While the manpower levels of all armed forces shrank sharply from wartime peaks, the Marines were going down the tubes. Less than 75,000 Marines remained on active duty in mid-1950.

Secretary of Defense Louis Denfield made no bones of his dislike for the Corps (he abruptly banned the traditional celebration of the Corps’ November 10 birthday), and he vowed to cut another 10,000 Leathernecks by year’s end.

Secretary Denfield wasn’t alone in his hostility to the Corps.

A Leatherneck machine gun crew dug in for the night in Korea.

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Another example of the Marine Corps pioneering aerial innovation, the HO3S-1 Dragonfly is perhaps more famous for its portrayal in the movie The Bridges at Toko-Ri than for its achievements in action.

Nevertheless, the Dragonfly was the first aircraft on strength for the pioneering Marine Helicopter Squadron 1 (HMX-1), at Quantico, Va. HMX-1 conducted the first operational mission with the Dragonfly on Feb. 24, 1948, airlifting an amphibious jeep (Weasel) that had become mired down in a creek bed. In May 1948, HMX-1 flew Dragonflys from the decks of the USS Palau in the annual Navy/Marine Corps training exercise PACKARD II, marking the beginning of ship-to-shore troop movement. With the development of more advanced helicopters, troop and supply movements became more efficient, and the HO3S-1 was assigned to search and rescue missions during the next such exercise, PACKARD III. With a 450-hp radial piston engine, the Dragonfly could lift little more than its pilot and sometimes up to three passengers, and then at maximum speeds of 90 knots over a range of only 260 miles, but it helped pioneer Marine vertical envelopment tactics as well as battlefield rescue and medical evacuation operations.

The museum’s HO3S-1, BuNo: 124344, was accepted into Naval service on Oct. 10, 1949, and served with various Navy units until it was stricken in March 1958. The aircraft was then acquired by the museum through the exchange program from the Len-Aire Corporation in Hubbard, Oregon.

HO3S-1 TECHNICAL DATA

An HO3S-1 Dragonfly evacuates wounded Marines. Although the HO3S-1 was underpowered and underequipped, it still played an important role as a search and rescue and battlefield evacuation helicopter during the Korean War.

Manufacturer: Sikorsky Aircraft Division of United Aircraft Corporation Type: Helicopter, Utility/Observation Accommodations: Pilot and three passengers Power plant: 450 hp Pratt & Whitney R-985 AN-7 Wasp Jr 9 cylinder fan cooled Radial Engine Dimensions: Rotor Diameter, 48 ft 3 in; Length, 41 ft 1 in; Height, 12 ft 11 in Weights: Empty, 3,795 lbs; Gross, 5,300 lbs Performance: Max Speed, 103 mph; Service Ceiling, 13,000 ft; Range, 260 miles

Shepherd and Oliver Smith, and Colonels Victor “Brute” Krulak and Merrill Twining.

Dispersion of the assault force was the obvious solution, and the critical limiting factor was the short-range, slow-moving, surface ship-to-shore movement.

Transport helicopters, ferrying troops ashore from distant small-deck carriers, were the answer.

“Vertical assault” had become a reality in two years.

Could the Marines hold on long enough to prove it out?

Before the end of 1948 the Marines acquired their first true transport helicopters, the Piaseki “Flying Bananas.” The Corps’ detractors remained underwhelmed. Nobody wanted a war. But the one thing that was coming would arrive as timely as the old U.S. Cavalry for the Marines.

In the predawn darkness of Sunday, June 25, 1950, armored units of the North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) breached the 38th Parallel and roared into South Korea. Followed closely by 90,000 infantry troops, veterans of the Chinese civil war, the Communist tank forces raced for the capital of Seoul.

Officials in Washington were in an uproar throughout the first week of the North Korean invasion. One who

kept a cool head was General Clifton Cates, USMC, of Tiptonville, Tennessee, now the nineteenth commandant.

The NKPA overran Seoul in three days, then crossed the Han River and swarmed south toward Taejon, the fallback center for the disorganized Republic of Korea (ROK) forces. General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Allied Commander in the Far East, left Tokyo for Taejon to see the situation firsthand. He came back greatly alarmed.

MacArthur sought Truman’s permission for immediate deployment of American ground troops to help stem the tide. The president readily agreed. But the first U.S. Army troops to arrive were occupation troops, stale and softened by years of garrison duty in Japan, fed piecemeal into chaos.

The NKPA columns collided with the U.S. 24th Division at Taejon, shattered the green forces like an overripe melon, captured the division commander and the key city, and swept on toward Pusan, the last major port available for reinforcing U.S. and Allied forces. As American as apple pie was the old tradition of unreadiness at the beginning of a war. And here Marine Commandant Cates held an ace.

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National Archives photo by N.H. McMasters, U.S. Navy

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U.S. Naval Historical Center

THE MARINES

A well-trained, provisional air-ground brigade, the core of the 1st Marine Division, was fully armed and ready at Pendleton.

First he quietly alerted the 1st Marine Division to make all preparations for going to war. Then he got the message to MacArthur that a Marine brigade was ready to go – his for the asking. MacArthur responded immediately, requesting the Joint Chiefs of Staff to assign the Marine brigade to his beleaguered forces in Korea.

Three days after the JCS approved MacArthur’s request for the Marines, Brigadier General Edward Craig assumed command of the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade, an expeditionary force made up of whole cloth from 1st Division/1st Marine Aircraft Wing assets.

The brigade sailed on July 12, only five days after being organized.

The Marines debarked at Pusan on August 2, a month to the day after MacArthur’s initial request to the Joint Chiefs.

Army Lieutenant General Walton Walker commanded the Eighth Army, a thankless job. His force was in dire straits, having been hammered by the NKPA back into a 100-mile semicircle around the port of Pusan.

By the end of July, Walker had suffered 6,000 U.S. casualties; the ROK Army had lost 70,000. His only hope was to hold the perimeter to permit reinforcements to land at Pusan.

As the Marines debarked at the bustling Pusan docks, stiff-jointed and rubber-legged from their three-week sea cruise, word quickly spread that the enemy advance, now less than fifty miles away near Masan, was about to renew in greater strength. Walker told Craig his Marines would be going into the line immediately and could expect nigh-continuous commitment as the Eighth Army’s “fire brigade.”

The brigade’s aviators drew first blood. Corsair pilots of VMF-214, the fabled Black Sheep Squadron of Pappy Boyington fame, fired the first Marine rounds of the new war in anger, launching strikes from the carrier Sicily.

More Corsairs, these of VMF-323 flying off the Badoeng Strait, joined the fray. The third squadron, the night-fighters of VMF(N)-513, set up shop in Japan and commenced nightly raids across the Korean Strait, finding plentiful targets among the nocturnal resupply efforts of the NKPA. Symbolically, the ground war for the Marines kicked off on August 7, eight years to the day since the 5th Marines’ historic landing at Guadalcanal. Now the 5th Marines and North Korean soldiers began to take each other’s measure for the first time.

The Marines prevailed in these initial battles along the Chinju-Masan corridor, blunting the NKPA attacks, driving them back a good distance, but it wasn’t pretty.

That the Marines fought consistently as a combinedarms team made the difference between victory and defeat.

Their small tank and artillery components surpassed themselves in supporting the infantry. But what really saved the Marine Brigade’s bacon at Pusan was the bravura performance of their Corsair pilots.

Marines take a break along the Naktong River during the defense of the Pusan Perimeter. The Marines grew familiar with several sections of the perimeter as the UN command’s “Fire Brigade.”

After driving the North Koreans back almost twentytwo miles in the first significant UN offensive action of the war, the Marine Brigade’s advance on Sachon was interrupted by word of an emergency in another sector of the perimeter. Twenty-five miles away, in the area of Chindong-ni, two Army artillery battalions had been overrun by NKPA forces.

A major breakthrough seemed imminent.

General Walker called for his “fire brigade,” ordering General Craig to assist the beleaguered Army units. The promising Chinju-Masan counteroffensive had to be abandoned.

Craig rushed Lieutenant Colonel Robert Taplett’s battalion of the 5th Marines to Chindong-ni. Taplett arrived in good order, stanched the rupture, restored the lines. Craig, now operating on two fronts, shuttled back and forth effectively by helicopter.

But Walker now faced a far greater emergency. Near Miryang, seventy-five miles farther north, the NKPA 4th Division had forced a crossing of the Naktong River at several points, its troops now consolidating their strength among a nest of steep ridges before snaking eastward toward Miryang.

If Miryang fell, the provisional ROK capital of Taegu would almost certainly follow. Loss of Taegu would prompt the loss of Pusan and cause the withdrawal of UN forces from Korea altogether.

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On August 15, with the hole at Chindong-ni plugged, General Craig consolidated his brigade and quickly packed them aboard troop trains for the haul up to Miryang.

On the morning of August 17, the Leathernecks went into action against “the Naktong Bulge,” fighting alongside the 9th Infantry, their old comrades-in-arms from Samar and the Boxer Rebellion.

Forcibly squeezing the 4th NKPA Division out of the Naktong Bulge … cost the Marine Brigade 350 casualties, but the tide had decidedly turned.

The Marine Brigade inflicted 4,000 casualties on the 4th NKPA Division and captured thirty-four major artillery pieces. The threat to Pusan, for now, eased.

Back in Washington, General Cates struggled to fulfill Lemuel Shepherd’s optimistic promise of a full Marine division to MacArthur by September.

President Truman, a fast learner, helped all the services in their struggles to expand for the crisis by calling up the reserves.

Cates gutted Camp Lejeune to get the last of the current Fleet Marine Force into the 1st Marine Division.

In Camp Lejeune, Colonel Homer Litzenberg attempted to patch together the 7th Marines.

The raw and rambunctious 1st Marines sailed under Chesty Puller on August 15, the same day the Marine Brigade began its hasty redeployment north to the Naktong Bulge.

In the first week of September, the NKPA launched a 98,000-man offensive against the Pusan Perimeter in a final effort to close the port to Allied reinforcements.

Back to the Bulge came the “Fire Brigade,” this time operating under the 2d Infantry Division, their old World War I outfit.

Operating in a driving rain to zero the American air power, the T-34s took the measure of a couple of Marine Pershings before the combination of antitank infantry weapons and tank guns blew them apart.

The Marines suffered 250 casualties in the fighting of September 3-5, but the NKPA offensive sputtered to a halt. Pusan enjoyed a final reprieve.

In exactly one month of fighting, the Marine Brigade had launched four major counterattacks, sustained 900 casualties, and inflicted more than 10,000 casualties on the enemy. Not a single Marine had been captured. Marine aviators had flown nearly a thousand close air support missions, mostly controlled by Tactical Air Control Parties deployed with the infantry.

Colonel Ray Murray’s 5th Marines caught up with Puller’s regiment to form the nucleus of the bare-bones 1st Marine Division just in time for MacArthur’s master stroke at Inchon. The Marines were going back into the amphibious assault business.

The Great End Run (Inchon, 1950) Oddly, the landing at Inchon was so risky

time to train and rehearse for the complicated landing.

And it meant that the 5th Marines, fully engaged in urgent combat in the Pusan Perimeter, would have precious little time to catch their breath before leaping into even more desperate fighting.

“We’ll be ready,” Smith promised MacArthur.

First was the island of Wolmi-do, jutting out into the harbor of Inchon as an ideal combat outpost for NKPA defenders. No landing could be undertaken against Inchon without first overwhelming Wolmi-do, and because of the drastic tides, this meant a unique and risky division of forces.

Smith recognized that Inchon had no beaches per se, just miles of seawalls along an industrial waterfront.

Scaling ladders would help get the troops ashore from their assault craft, but Smith knew the bigger problem would be the convergence of two of the most difficult military operations in the book – an opposed amphibious assault, immediately followed by heavy street fighting in a major city.

Preliminary bombardment of Inchon began a healthy five days before the landing. The Marines did what they should have done at first on Peleliu’s deadly Umurbrogol Mountain: They employed Marine Corsairs to drop

that only General Douglas MacArthur and the Marines believed it would work – mere voices in the wilderness against the institutional wisdom of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other naysayers.

The approach to Inchon from the Yellow Sea was bad enough, requiring a dozen miles of precision navigation through the narrow Flying Fish Channel. Vast mudflats ruled the shoals and shallows of the port itself. But it was Inchon’s tides that proved so daunting to the U.S. Marine landing force.

Both port and channel were wildly affected by spectacular tidal ranges, up to thirty-two feet in height, among the highest in the world. Indeed, deep-draft warships could expect to attempt that passage only during three days in any month.

Because of the narrow tidal window, D-Day at Inchon had to go on September 15. MacArthur would not wait another month, and [Major General Oliver] Smith [Commander of the 1st Marine Division] fully agreed. But this meant that one of Smith’s three regimental combat teams, the brand-new 7th Marines, would not arrive in time.

It also meant that Colonel Chesty Puller’s newly formed and freshly arrived 1st Marines would have no

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National Archives photo by SSgt. W.W. Frank, USMC

THE MARINES

U.S. Naval Historical Center

Above: Leathernecks use scaling ladders to storm a “beach” at Inchon on Sept. 15, 1950. The need to use scaling ladders to assault the seawall cost time and momentum.

Right: Marines of Capt. Francis I. “Ike” Fenton’s B Company raise the American flag over the observatory in Inchon on Sept. 16, 1950. napalm on Wolmi-do’s hills to burn off the underbrush to reveal cave openings and gun positions.

And the Navy borrowed a page from Iwo Jima, sending four iron-hearted destroyers through the channel to pound Wolmi-do up close and entice NKPA gunners to return fire and reveal their positions. Both strategies worked. The napalm denuded the hills and spoiled the day for many defenders. The ships suckered the surviving gunners into opening up. Two destroyers took hits, but all four blasted back with telling accuracy. So far, so good.

At 0633 Lieutenant Colonel Robert Taplett’s 3d Battalion, 5th Marines, hit the Wolmi shore, shrugged off intermittent enemy fire, and streamed inland. Within twenty-two minutes, Sergeant Alvin Smith raised the American flag over Radio Hill, Wolmi’s highest point.

MacArthur smiled, put down his glasses, and said, “That’s it, let’s get some coffee.”

Ashore, the Marines fought across the humpbacked island, forcing the North Koreans from their fortified positions with demolitions and flamethrowers.

Taplett quickly mined and guarded the 600-yard causeway leading to Inchon City to hinder enemy reinforcements from the mainland.

By 0800, most of Wolmi-do was in Marine hands.

The assault troops watched as the receding tide drove the amphibious task force back up the channel to the sea, as expected. Taplett and his thousand Marines completed their seizure of North Korean gun emplacements, aware they were on their own until the rising afternoon tide.

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THE MARINES

The U.S. naval bombardment resumed at 1430, setting the Inchon waterfront ablaze. The late afternoon light began to fade. As the assault craft neared shore, Inchon City was barely visible through the smoky haze.

The invasion plan called for the remaining two battalions of Lieutenant Colonel Ray Murray’s 5th Marines to land in Higgins boats with scaling ladders at Red “Beach,” a stretch of stone seawall in the heart of the city. At the same time, Puller’s 1st Marines would land by LVTs over Blue “Beach,” three miles to the southeast, a suburban industrial area with few egress ramps from the shallow water.

After landing, the 5th Marines would collect Taplett’s Battalion from Wolmi-do and attack through the city while Puller’s regiment cut the highway to Seoul in the rear.

Their 5:30 P.M. landing occurred in good order, but the troops lost time and momentum having to rely on scaling ladders to debark.

The 1st Marines met less opposition but encountered more snafus in the smoke and growing darkness.

Order replaced disorder, the troops moved inland, and combat cargo flowed in on their heels.

MacArthur and the Marines had made their case. By midnight, Smith had 13,000 Leathernecks ashore, rampaging through town. The cost of this great gamble: no ships lost; 22 Marines killed, 174 wounded. Of all the major Marine landings in the Pacific War, only Guadalcanal and Okinawa had been less costly on D-Day. Smith was discovering that the quality of enemy resistance was increasing proportionately as the Americans advanced closer to Seoul.

The NKPA troops defending Inchon had been spirited but disorganized, second-echelon troops seeing their first real combat.

These were hardly a match for Murray’s 5th Marines, who had spent the previous month locked in combat with the first-line NKPA troops threatening the Pusan Peninsula. But now the North Korean high command in Pyongyang reacted to the surprise

Allied thrust at Inchon by redeploying experienced brigades and regiments to reinforce Seoul.

The night [of the second day], with the 5th Marines hanging on to one corner of the prized Kimpo Airfield, [a] North Korean tank attack erupted.

Fierce fighting raged throughout the remainder of the night, but the Marines held. With dawn they swept forward, and by mid-morning the entire 6,000-foot runway was back in American hands. Appropriately, the first U.S. aircraft to touch down that day was a Marine helicopter bearing General Lemuel Shepherd and his operation officer, Colonel Brute Krulak.

On the following day, Major General Field Harris deployed the first three squadrons of his 1st Marine Aircraft Wing ashore at Kimpo. With two more fighter squadrons flying from carriers just offshore and another night-fighter squadron providing the honors from Itazuke, Japan, Marine air was as closely committed to the campaign as their ground counterparts.

Now came time to cross the Han River. The 5th Marines would do so first, forcing a crossing west of Seoul to attack the capital through the rugged country in that quadrant.

The regiment would then take up positions to cover the crossing of the 1st Marines after they fought their way through the outpost city of Yongdong-po.

The preliminary efforts came to grief.

Ray Murray refused to be dismayed by the night’s misadventures. The Marines may have been novices in crossing rivers, he figured, but all they had to do was apply the principles of amphibious assault. Murray arranged for a comprehensive plastering of the east bank of the Han by Corsairs, tanks, and artillery. Even the heavy cruiser Rochester pitched in – lobbing highexplosive eight-inch shells on the commanding high ground from fifteen miles away.

Under this protective umbrella, the 5th Marines, organized into

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M26 PERSHING HEAVY TANK While the ubiquitous M4 Sherman served on all fronts during World War II, its limited armor protection and gun power meant it was outclassed by newer German armor and vulnerable to other direct-fire weapons.

Developed at the end of World War II to remedy these deficiencies and take on any tank in the world, the M26 Pershing saw only limited service before the end of the war. With the onset of the Korean War, however, the Sherman, still in widespread service, came up against the superb Russianmade T-34 and was found wanting.

During the summer of 1950, the Marine Corps replaced the M4A3 Shermans of the 1st Tank Battalion with the Pershing.

The Pershing was able to go toe-to-toe with the T-34, and proved a rude shock to North Korean forces that had heretofore thought the T-34 virtually invincible. At Obong-ni and other areas of the Pusan perimeter such as the Naktong Bulge, Pershings put paid to large numbers of T-34s. M26s also played major roles at Inchon, the capture of Seoul, and during the Chosin Reservoir breakout.

The National Museum of the Marine Corps’ M26 is depicted during street-fighting in Seoul, overrunning a North Korean position in close cooperation with Marine infantry, a necessity in urban street fighting, where a lone tank would be vulnerable to enemy troops with various anti-tank weapons.

Marine infantrymen take cover behind an M26 Pershing while it fires on Communist troops ahead. The Marine on the far left has liberated a Russian-made rifle from an enemy soldier. boat teams assigned to LVTs, took off in assault formations, one wave after another. Within minutes the east bank was breached. Minutes later there were Marines signaling from the tops of the nearby ridge lines. The Army observers raised their eyebrows appreciatively.

Murray pressed on, phasing his entire 5th Marines across the Han before dark on September 20. The infantry battalions consolidated, then formed assault columns, and moved out into the eight miles of broken country between them and the capital.

But some of Pyongyang’s best fighters now lay waiting for the Marine regiments on both sides of the river.

The truth was, the 5th Marines had a hell of a fight on their hands as they battled their way through the 25th NKPA Brigade to reach the capital. In one bloody day’s engagement, Dog Company of the 2d Battalion lost 178 casualties among their 206 Marines.

Murray’s weary legions maintained the offensive, arriving on the high ground above the river in time to cover Chesty Puller’s crossing.

On September 21 the orphan 7th Marines under Colonel Homer Litzenberg arrived in Inchon, completing their long collective odyssey from Camp Lejeune and the Mediterranean Sea. All the parts of the 1st Marine Division were finally in place.

Meanwhile, far to the south, General Walker’s Eighth Army broke out of the Pusan Peninsula and began chasing the fleeing NKPA forces northward.

The final assault on Seoul kicked off on the morning of September 25 with coordinated assaults by both the 1st Marine Division and the 7th Infantry Division, each augmented by their appropriate ROK regiments.

General [Edward] Almond’s exhortations for speed notwithstanding, the huge city had to be taken block by block in slow, methodical, deadly fighting. Enemy roadblocks blossomed at every corner.

M26 TECHNICAL DATA Fuel capacity: 191 gallons of gasoline Engine: V-8 Ford Motors Dimensions: length, 20 ft, 8 in; width, 11 ft, 4 in; height, 9 ft, 1 in Combat weight: 46 tons Max Speed: land, 17 mph; water, 6 mph Range: roads, 62 mi; country, 5-18 mi Crew: 5 Primary Armament: 90mm gun M3 Manufacturer: Detroit Tank Arsenal and Grand Blanc Tank Arsenal Production Period: Nov. 1944 to June 1945 Now the North Koreans and Marines collided in midnight meeting engagements in the burning streets.

The 1st Marines shouldered into Seoul’s main thoroughfare, fighting furiously for the government buildings.

Leathernecks raised the American flag over their United States Embassy with a great cheer. It felt so good they repeated the process at the French – and many other – embassies.

The battle for Seoul raged until September 28 when the collapse of the last enemy pockets ended the resistance. The charred and blackened South Korean city was at last in UN hands.

Fighting beyond Seoul sputtered on another week.

The new 7th Marines got bloodied in the three-day fight for Uijong-bu, north of the capital, but began to jell as a combat team.

The 1st Marine Division and 1st Marine Aircraft Wing had done themselves proud.

The price had been steep but acceptable. Among the Old Breed, 421 died, another 2,029 suffered wounds – about half of the casualties being incurred in the street fighting for Seoul. Enemy ground fire downed eleven Marine aircraft.

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National Archives photo by Sgt. John Babyak, Jr., USMC

THE MARINES

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Never had Marine infantry owed so much to their aviator brothers as during the Chosin Reservoir Campaign. The close cooperation between ground-bound Marines and Marine squadrons is depicted here in Close Air Support (Korea), by Master Sgt. John DeGrasse 1951, oil on canvas board.

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Frozen Chosin (North Korea, 1950)

Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

Ironically, the Marines’

there were undeniable signs that Red Chinese “volunteers” were crossing the Yalu in force, and there remained sizable NKPA units in the area to engage and defeat. While any redblooded Marine would take pride in being the first to reach the Yalu River, Smith would not permit any unwise “race” north.

While Chesty Puller’s [1st Marines] kept the last NKPA fighting units at bay, General Smith sent the main body of the division north along the mountain track that twisted and turned for seventy-eight miles from the port of Hungnam to the western shoreline of the Chosin Reservoir, site of a valuable hydroelectric facility.

The one-lane gravel road that wound north among the towering Taebaeks led first through the villages of Sudong-ni and Chinhungni, then threaded through tortuous Funchilin Pass to Koto-ri and Hagaru-ri, the latter on the southern shore of the reservoir. Smith didn’t like anything about this route.

While his infantry could, with difficulty, cover the mountainous ridges on both sides, his tanks, artillery, and supply trucks were hopelessly roadbound for most of the way.

Enemy destruction of any one of many bridges over otherwise impassable chasms would bottle up the Marine convoy dangerously. Evacuating casualties from that rugged country so far from the sea would be chancy at best.

Colonel Homer Litzenberg’s 7th Marines led the way north and almost immediately engaged a Chinese Communist division in a five-day battle around Sudong-ni.

Once again Marine Corsairs, these flown by the smart-mouth pilots of MAG-12 out of Wonsan, came slicing out of the clouds to chew up PLA formations with rockets, napalm, and machine guns.

greatest battle occurred during one of the nation’s most bitter military defeats, the routing of American and Allied forces in upper North Korea by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of Red China.

For the United States, top-level arrogance and an abysmal disregard of strategic intelligence very nearly led to the annihilation of the 1st Marine Division. China’s abrupt entry into the war placed the Old Breed Marines in desperate straits – seventy-eight miles from their sea base, surrounded by seven PLA divisions, and burdened with thousands of wounded and frost-bitten casualties at the onset of the coldest winter ever recorded along the Manchurian border. Many officials in Washington considered the Marines a lost cause – trapped, isolated, doomed.

Instead, there ensued a tactical masterpiece, an unlikely epic fighting withdrawal of the stuff of legends, two weeks of extraordinary hardship and valor. No Marines ever had to fight under worse sustained conditions.

At first it seemed so easy.

MacArthur, having succeeded famously with his celebrated “lefthook” landing at Inchon, decided to use his Marines again for a “righthook” landing at Wonsan, on the east coast of North Korea, creating another hammer-and-anvil scenario against the still-retreating NKPA forces.

These were heady days for the United Nations Command.

Suggestive phrases like “the race to the Yalu” and “home by Christmas” captured the fancy of correspondents and raised false optimism among some of the troops.

Smith suffered none of these delusions. The eastern sector of the Taebaek Mountains was nothing less than forbidding. Winter was coming,

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On the Road to Hagaru, Korea, December 1950, Col. Charles H. Waterhouse, USMCR (Ret.), ca. 1990, acrylic on masonite, depicts the fight to sweep the Chinese off the hills above the Main Supply Route, keeping it open for the Marine column to get through.

On November 7 the Chinese broke contact and simply disappeared.

The Marines would not encounter another organized PLA unit for nearly three weeks, when they would abruptly discover themselves surrounded by an entire PLA army group.

Almond continued to press Smith to get into gear, to truly “race for the Yalu.” Smith demurred, more worried than ever. He brought Puller’s 1st Marines up to guard the MSR (main supply route, a euphemism for the single-lane goat-track of a road), began staging extra supplies of ammo, rations, and fuel along the route, and directed his engineers to build emergency airstrips at the mountain villages of Koto-ri and Hagaru-ri. “What for?” asked Almond. “To evacuate my casualties,” replied Smith. “What casualties?” the corps commander inquired, still not getting it.

Almond urged Smith to press on past Hagaru-ri to Yudam-ni in preparation for a major cross-country jaunt to link up with the Eighth Army, eighty mountainous miles away.

With a heavy heart, Smith dispatched the 7th and 5th Marines west of Chosin. An Army regimental combat team worked its way up the reservoir’s east coast toward the Manchurian border, terribly exposed.

The freakish Siberian winter then hit with a fury.

Temperatures plummeted. Smith issued the division’s cold weather clothing, but there were not enough of the heavy parkas and gloves to go around. Smith demanded that his infantry troops get first priority.

The 7th Marines crossed 4,000 foot Toktong Pass on November 24, leaving Fox Company behind to defend it, and descended into Yudam-ni.

The next day came terrible news that the Eighth Army on the west coast had been overrun and routed by Chinese forces.

General Smith nervously slowed the 7th Marines’ advance, allowing the 5th Marines to link up with them in the hills around Yudam-ni.

The Chinese hiding in the eastern Taebaek Mountains waited until the night of November 27 – twenty below zero, blinding snow – to spring their trap. General Sung Shih-lun, commanding 120,000 troops of the PLA Ninth Army Group, saw his mission as that of annihilating the crack Marine division, so temptingly strung out along forty miles of bad road. At his signal, tens of thousands of quilted soldiers came screaming out of the storm to the blare of bugles and glare of green pyrotechnics, firing their snubnosed “Burp Guns” in disciplined bursts.

Scattered Marine outposts in the high ground above Yudam-ni were engulfed by these inhuman waves, but the Chinese attacks were not totally unexpected, and the Marines rallied and held. Toktong Pass, the crucial link between the forward regiments and the advance base at Hagaru-ri, came under heavy attack. Captain William E. Barber’s Fox Company settled in for a desperate defensive struggle to hold the pass. But no Fox Marines could then imagine they would have to man this post by themselves for the next five days.

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GRUMMAN F9F-2 PANTHER While Marine pilots and especially ground troops loved the capabilities of the F4U Corsair, by the time of the Korean War piston engine-powered aircraft were nearing obsolescence for some tasks.

The Grumman F9F-2 Panther was the aircraft that brought the Marine Corps into the jet age. The Panther, also flown by the Navy, flew from both airfields and carrier decks. It was equipped with a pressurized cockpit, an airbrake mounted on the bottom of the fuselage to reduce speed (aerodynamically clean jets could not decelerate as quickly as propeller-driven aircraft) and permanent wingtip tanks to carry the extra fuel needed by the notoriously thirsty jets of the era. It was armed with four 20mm cannon, but could carry an assortment of bombs and rockets to support Marines on the ground.

On Dec. 10, 1950, two F9F-2s from VMF-311 flew the Marine Corps’ first jet combat air strike, providing close-air support for the Eighth Army units 10 miles southeast of the Chosin Reservoir. The Panther’s superior speed enabled it to arrive more quickly when air support was requested, and also made it less vulnerable to ground fire. Once over the target, it was a more stable platform for accurate delivery of firepower, making it an excellent close air support aircraft. The aircraft displayed in the museum is one of the two actual aircraft flown by VMF-311 on that first Marine Corps jet combat air strike.

Marine F9F Panthers of VMF-311 are refueled and rearmed at a forward airfield in Korea.

Commando, reinforced with U.S. Marine tanks, trucks, and assorted troops, less than a thousand in all.

The enemy contested Drysdale’s hodgepodge force at each passage and every narrow gorge, and the odyssey lasted all night. In the end, Drysdale, most of the tanks, many of the Royal Marines, and a company of United States Marines made it through to Smith’s endangered base at Hagaru-ri.

But a full half of Task Force Drysdale came to grief en route.

The 5th and 7th Marines, bloodied but intact, were having a hell of a time blasting their way clear of the trap that surrounded them at Yudam-ni. And for all the importance of fighting for the immediate high ground to get their road-bound convoy moving, the whole force would be in deadly peril unless a relief column could be sent to the aid of Captain Barber’s survivors, still holding Toktong Pass by sheer guts and world-class supporting arms.

Colonel Litzenberg tried four times to reach Fox Company; each failed. Finally he called for Lieutenant Colonel Raymond Davis, commanding the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines. “Nothing works. You’ve got to get to them.

Come back in twenty minutes with a plan.”

Davis realized that any attempt to reach the pass by road would be doomed. So would any daytime maneuver.

He proposed to Litzenberg that his shot-up battalion strip to the essentials and take off cross-country, over the ridges, at night, approaching the encircled Fox Company lines from the north. “Go!” said Litzenberg.

Davis and his 500 Marines lurched painfully through the snow, making noise in spite of every effort. But the shrieking wind masked their movements. And the Chinese never expected a Marine battalion to leave their foxholes at night and mush cross-country behind their lines.

Lieutenant Joseph Owen left a moving account of the journey. “The trail became icy, packed by the feet of those ahead. Men slipped to their knees, staggered up, and slipped again … Exhaustion was telling on us … Under the heavy parkas our bodies sweated with the strain, but our hands and feet were frozen numb. The wind-borne cold attacked with terrible fury. We shivered violently.”

Hours later the slogging column encountered the outer ring of Chinese attacking Fox Company at Toktong Pass. At

F9F-2 TECHNICAL DATA Manufacturer: Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation, Bethpage, Long Island, New York Type: Carrier-based fighter Accommodation: Pilot Power plant: One 5,000 s.t. Pratt & Whitney J42-P-6 turbojet Dimensions: Span, 38 ft; Length, 40 ft; Height, 15 ft Weights: Empty, 15,750 lbs; Gross, 18,721 lbs Performance: Max Speed, 579 mph; Service Ceiling, 42,800 ft; Range, 1,300 miles Armament: Four fixed 20 mm guns, two 500 lb bombs or two napalm bombs or six 5 inch rockets or two 250 lb bombs on the inboard racks and six 100 lb bombs on the outboard racks The Chinese threatened Hagaru-ri, cut the MSR in a dozen critical places, and came close to destroying completely the isolated Army regiment northeast of Chosin.

Gray dawn brought enough light for the fearless Corsairs, and slowly the odds began to even.

General Smith assessed the crisis. He … had to reopen the MSR at least as far south as Puller’s outpost at Kotori. But he worried most about his two regiments at Yudam-ni, fourteen miles west of Chosin, whose escape route was jeopardized by the Chinese attacks on Fox Company at Toktong Pass.

The 5th and 7th Marines would have to fight their way back to Hagaru-ri along the mountains on both sides of the narrow road.

Unlike many other embattled United Nations forces, the Marines were coming out with their wounded and their dead.

Chesty Puller meanwhile tried to send a relief force north from Koto-ri to Hagaru-ri, despite the Chinese presence in strength at several critical stretches of the MSR. He formed “Task Force Drysdale,” named after [Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Drysdale] the commander of the Royal Marine

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first, the PLA forces thought the snowcovered troops were Chinese reinforcements and let them traverse unchallenged. Then the Marines unveiled bayoneted M-1 Garands and unmistakable BARs amid Chinese cries of surprise and delivered a pointblank volley. A vicious firefight ensued, but more Marines came up, now unmindful of the cold, ready to shoot.

Very quickly the battalion cleared a wedge in the circle of attackers.

Ray Davis raised Captain Barber on the radio. Barber, badly wounded, offered to lead out a patrol of his survivors to guide Davis into the perimeter. This brought tears to Davis’ eyes. “Thanks, but we know where you are, and we’ll fight our way in at daybreak,” he replied Both officers would receive the Medal of Honor for their respective roles at Toktong Pass.

Fox Company’s five-day defense of Toktong Pass rates among the greatest holding actions in Marine Corps history, one of the same magnitude as Wake Island, Quilali, or Edson’s Ridge. Captain Barber lost half his 240-man company in killed and wounded; another 40 could not walk due to severe frostbite. But Fox Company had dished out more pain than it had received.

Lieutenant Owen stared in astonishment at the battered perimeter at first light after the ordeal of getting there. Hundreds of Chinese bodies lay in crumpled heaps, dangerously close to the Marine lines. The Fox Marines had fought on borrowed time, fewer and fewer responding to each new charge. “We stood in wonder,” said Owen. “Men bowed their heads in prayer …Tears came to the eyes of the raggedy Marines who had endured bitter cold and savage battle to reach this place of suffering and courage.”

Extricating themselves in orderly fashion from the Yudam-ni trap and withdrawing the fourteen miles back to Hagaru-ri took the two regiments seventy-nine hours, an eerie equivalent in time to the Battle of Tarawa.

Almond, crestfallen and somber, ordered Smith to escape to the sea posthaste, leaving behind his heavy

weapons and equipment. “No, sir,” replied Smith quietly. “We’ll fight our way out as Marines, bringing all our weapons and gear with us.”

The distance to Koto-ri was “only” eleven miles, but fighting their way along that route would take the troops a day and a half and cost another 600 casualties.

The route twisted past a surreal landscape of snow-covered, burnedout vehicles – the wreckage of Task Force Drysdale – and through a dozen Chinese strong points.

Tiny Koto-ri now bulged at the seams. Ten thousand troops and 1,000 vehicles poured in from Hagaru-ri, swamping Chesty Puller’s meager facilities, providing crowded targets for Chinese heavy mortars. General Smith knew the column had to continue its momentum south immediately ...

Chesty Puller was the last senior officer to leave Koto-ri, striding defiantly afoot, his command jeep loaded with wounded and dead Marines.

The last Marines included more engineers, methodically demolishing the bridges so carefully laid at the head of the long column.

Between Koto-ri and Chinhungni lay Funchilin Pass, now held in great strength by the Chinese.

General Field Harris pulled out all the stops, sending his Corsairs in at ridgetop level, strafing, bombing, and dropping napalm. But then the weather turned sour again. Smith ordered Puller to direct his southernmost battalion to attack north into the pass from Chinhung-ni to clear Hill 1081, yet another critical terrain mass dominating the road and several bridges.

The battle for the pass took place during a howling snowstorm; the temperature started at fourteen below zero, then dropped another ten degrees. Into this storm came Captain Robert Barrow’s Able Company of the 1st Marines, the force that had almost single-handedly captured urban Yongdong-po three months earlier.

The storm was terrible to endure but worked in Barrow’s favor, masking his movements up the sheer-reverse slope of Hill 1081. Able Company caught the Chinese peering through

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the snow at the road from Koto-ri and surprised them painfully.

The Chinese recognized the hill was their last best chance to stop and slaughter the 1st Marine Division, and they counterattacked furiously throughout a long, stormy, confusing night.

The storm cleared enough for the Corsairs to return to action.

Never had any Marines been better served by their “airdale” brothers. Even the most earthbound rifleman knew how great a risk these pilots ran every time they swirled in low to deliver their ordnance right on the nose.

Chinese machine gunners were proficient against both two-legged and low-flying targets. In such extreme cold a parachute was little comfort to a stricken pilot.

Hypothermic death would be swift, whether the chute came down in the mountains or drifted out to sea.

The Chinese could not hold Funchilin Pass. The 1st Marine Division poured through, pausing to swap goodnatured insults with the 1st Marines who had swept away the final Chinese strong point on Hill 1081. The division, reunited at last, seemed absolutely invincible.

The Chinese began to melt away, leaving the Marines a clear path back to the port at Hungnam. Their oncepromising campaign against the single American division had become an unmitigated disaster. The PLA 9th Army Group sustained some 37,000 casualties, including 25,000 deaths to battle and extreme cold. Most of the seven divisions that attacked the Marines were so shotup they simply disappeared from the rolls of the PLA. The Marines suffered 4,400 casualties of their own in the Chosin campaign, including 730 killed, plus thousands and thousands of frostbite cases. But, God, what a sight the survivors made striding into Hungnam on December 12!

The Seesaw War (Korea, 1951-1953)

Marine on the ground calling for help from his buddies in the Wing lapsed overnight from an average of fifteen minutes to eighty minutes – a virtual lifetime in close combat.

Many times there was no response at all. The “JOC” was after bigger, more strategic targets.

This came as an unpleasant shock as the Marines returned to action.

Operation Killer began on February 21, 1951.

The 1st Marine Division jumped off from Wonju.

Advancing through rocky heights and narrow valleys, the Marines entered Hoengsong after three days of hard fighting.

Operation Ripper, aimed at the recapture of Seoul and restoring the 38th parallel, began on March 7.

The Marines, spared from another urban brawl in gutted Seoul, battled across broken country well east of the capital, their advance slowed as much by drenching spring rains as by enemy fire. After a week, UN forces captured Seoul for the second time in six months. Two weeks later the Eighth Army recrossed the 38th Parallel in force. Seesaw war …

Another North Korean reservoir, the Hwachon, loomed ahead for the Marines. Beyond it, the Chinese were busily fortifying a mountain-flanked region that protected the heart of their supply and communications network. The Marines called it “The Iron Triangle.”

Oliver Smith knew the Chinese would not abandon this territory. When he recognized signs that the Chinese were trying to lure him into another trap, he deliberately

The stirring records achieved by the Marines in Korea the first five months of that miserable war – the mobile “Fire Brigade” in the Pusan Perimeter, Inchon’s bold landing, the forcible seizure of Seoul, the fighting breakout from the Reservoir – represented the Corps at its high-maneuver, unrestricted best. Then the war changed, grew conservative. The Marines shouldered into line with the other land divisions, shackled and bound like Gulliver, engaging in pointless but deadly skirmishes against the North Koreans and Chinese.

Public opinions polls after the ignominious rout of most of the United Nations forces by the border-crossing Chinese revealed that Americans had turned sharply against the joint intervention. Two thirds of those polled said that the nation’s military should get out of Korea.

The 1st Marine Division returned to Pusan following the Chosin breakout to recuperate, treat its collective frostbite, and absorb replacements.

When President Truman subsequently sacked General Douglas MacArthur for blatant disobedience, the Marines also lost their strongest (if late-blooming) advocate in the Far East.

With MacArthur’s departure went his unofficial, long-ago promise to General Lemuel Shepherd that he would never separate his Marines from the “flying artillery” of their vaunted close air support, provided in Korea by the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing.

Now the Fifth Air Force consolidated all air assets in Korea. All requests for air support had to go through the snooty Joint Operations Center. Response time for the

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OP Frisco, 6 October 1952, by Ralph B. Sirianni, was commissioned in 1999 by Peter Bingheimer to commemorate his experience during the attack on Outpost Frisco. It is a vivid depiction of the savagery of human wave attacks on isolated Marine outposts. slowed the advance of his regiments, looked to his flanks, and called frequently for aerial reconnaissance of the high ground ahead.

General Oliver Smith’s sixth sense about the Chinese buildup proved eerily accurate. On April 22, a half-million Communist troops poured out of the Iron Triangle to begin a spring offensive aimed at the recapture of Seoul.

With their Hwachon Reservoir positions directly in line with the enemy attack, the 1st Marine Division weathered the brunt of the assaults. When an ROK [Republic of Korea] division on the flank gave way to the Chinese onslaught, the Marines suddenly faced a ten-mile-by-tenmile gap to their left. The Marines bent sharply back, their lines resembling a fishhook, but did not break.

Fighting became very intense, especially at night.

Once again, the Marines experienced the telltale green flares and bugles, smothering mortar barrages, and hordes of Chinese troops swarming up the rocky draws leading into their positions. Marine artillery, mortars, and automatic weapons cut down the attackers by the hundreds, but invariably enough would survive to penetrate the lines in wild, hand-to-hand fighting. Counterattacks and fresh charges would occur throughout the night, the battle raging back and forth along the ridgetops.

The Marines fought stubbornly, gave up ground only grudgingly, and prevented any major breakthroughs.

When the second phase of the Communist spring offensive began on May 16, the 1st Marine Division had a new commander. Major General Gerald Thomas, veteran

of Belleau Wood and Guadalcanal, relieved Oliver Smith, whose thoughtful stewardship had given the Old Breed a new definition of the motto “Semper Fidelis.”

This time 125,000 fresh Chinese troops welcomed General Thomas with a well-coordinated offensive which swept away several adjoining ROK divisions and opened a penetration thirty miles deep on the opposite flank.

Once again, the Marines hunkered down, bent (“refused”) their exposed flank, and used every bit of firepower they could muster to kill more Chinese.

This worked. The enemy offensive, weakened by heavy losses and lengthening supply lines, petered out.

The weary Chinese withdrew into North Korea, leaving NKPA forces behind to fight a costly rearguard action.

The 1st Marine Division pushed steadily northward, once more passing the Hwachon Reservoir. By late June, the Marines had successfully occupied a series of ridges overlooking a circular valley nicknamed “the Punchbowl.”

The Air Force never seemed to appreciate the integrated combat power the Marines traditionally enjoyed from their distinctive air-ground team.Without their organic air component the Old Breed was dangerously undergunned to be attacking fortified enemy positions in these northern mountains.

The fighting in September 1951 to take those steep ridges by infantry was as costly and bloody as the great battles of the previous year.

The cost in dead and wounded Marines in the battles for the northern Punchbowl got the attention of

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the so-called “stalemate” period of the conflict.

The Marines squared off against some 50,000 Chinese in their sector. These particular Chinese were formidable night fighters, diligent diggers, and not at all hesitant to go hand-to-hand against the Marines.

A typical Chinese night attack involved a terrifyingly accurate cloudburst of mortar or artillery fire – often as much as one round per second exploding on the outpost – followed by a feint against one sector, the main attack against the opposite side, and a cunning ambush to intercept Marine reinforcements rushing out from the MLR. Small-unit night-fighting had become the nature of warfare along the Jamestown Line in 1952-1953.

Patrols of some kind left the MLR every night – stealthy reconnaissance sweeps, larger “Cadillac” sorties looking to snatch a prisoner, the occasional big combat patrols, armed to the teeth and looking for a fight. Patrol leaders had no trouble filling their ranks with volunteers.

Most Marines would rather go out

Washington policy makers. With peace talks underway and the antiwar climate growing at home, General [James] Van Fleet received orders to knock off the high-intensity battles in the north. On such a sour note, the war of movement in Korea ended.

The Marines were redeployed 180 miles westward to occupy an enormous stretch of the static Jamestown Line, protecting the historic invasion approach to Seoul and, not coincidentally, overlooking Panmunjom, site of the intermittent peace talks.

The Marines defended their extended sector of the MLR (the Main Line of Resistance) by occupying a series of outposts on intermediate terrain features in no-man’s land. The Leathernecks were stretched thin. Most positions were defended at night by infantry squads, at best a reinforced platoon.

Risky business.

The “Outpost War” would prove inordinately costly. Fully 40 percent of Marine casualties occurred during the final fifteen months of the war,

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Col. Horace Avery Chenoweth, USMCR (Ret.), witnessed the first helicopter lift of troops in warfare in September 1951, when HMR-161 Sikorsky HRS-1s delivered troops to the line and moved division recon troops to a mountaintop, and depicted it years later in Landing Zone (Korea), 1978, acrylic on illustration board. and fight, even at night in the meandering minefields and stinking rice paddies, than die of boredom standing watch along the MLR. In late October, heavy fighting erupted for control of a critical Marine position known as the Hook, a salient at the western end of the division’s sector that dominated the Imjin River.

Chinese artillery and mortars delivered a staggering 15,500 rounds on the semiexposed positions. Hills were lost, then regained. The fighting, much of it at night, was as brutal and costly as any seen at the Pusan Perimeter or Chosin Reservoir.

The threat to the integrity of the MLR was so critical that the JOC for once provided ample close air support during the day. Seventy-two aircraft (sixty-seven of them Marines) circled and swooped, shooting rockets and dropping napalm. It was almost like old times. In the end, the Marines repossessed the Hook, having taken 500 casualties.

Against such effective siege tactics the Marines’ policy of defending undermanned outposts at dangerous distances from the MLR proved flawed. Marine valor and

derring-do could not indefinitely withstand the ability of the Chinese to surprise an outpost with smothering fire and overwhelming numbers at the point of attack.

In March 1953, a Communist offensive exploded against the Eighth Army’s outposts all along the MLR. Heavy concentrations of Chinese fell upon the right side of the line, in an area manned by the 5th Marines, ten miles northeast of Panmunjom. The attacks were centered on the “Nevada Cities” outposts – Reno, Vegas, and Carson. The PLA 358th Regiment attacked the outposts with great mass, firepower, and velocity, outnumbering the Marine defenders by as much as twenty to one.

Outpost Reno fell first, the Chinese sealing some Marines up in their caves with as much brutal efficiency as the Leathernecks had applied to the Japanese in the Central Pacific islands. The defenders of Vegas and Carson held on for dear life. Colonel Lew Walt led his 5th Marines out from the MLR. The Chinese bloodied the reinforcements with ambushes and hellacious mortar fire, but Walt kept the momentum, and the battle raged.

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In the end, Outpost Carson held, though only after a vicious round of close combat with knives and bayonets.

Vegas, lost, regained, lost again, was finally and convincingly recaptured on the fourth day. But Reno, closest to the original Chinese and 1,600 yards from the MLR, was lost for good.

A tattered American flag fluttered proudly over smoking, reeking Vegas, but Marines began to question the cost.

The Marines, no dummies in tactical combat, then abolished their exorbitant system of fortified outposts.

As the summer of 1953 bled on, the end of the damned war seemed almost palatably close at hand. Yet the Chinese unleashed a series of sharp attacks against the Jamestown Line in order to influence the final boundary.

One of the bloodiest of these occurred against the Marines at terrain features along the MLR known as Boulder City and Hill 119. These were not mere outposts.

Loss of these key positions would make the Eighth Army forfeit a huge chunk of territory and part of the Imjin River to the Communists.

No Marine wanted to be the last man to die as the peace negotiators waited for the ink to dry on the armistice agreement that hot July, but the Chinese were attacking in enormous waves and the fighting was abruptly as desperate as ever.

The PLA forces suffered 72,000 casualties in carving out substantial pieces along the MLR, but they failed to budge the 1st Marine Division from Boulder City or Hill 119. The successful defense of the positions cost the Marines 1,611 men killed, wounded, or captured.

The Korean War lasted three years, one month, two days. During that time fully 60 percent of the Marine Corps saw action, either with the division, the air wing, the offshore islands, or the ships of Task Force 77. Marines losses were substantial – 4,267 killed, 23,744 wounded – more than double the losses of the Marine Brigade in World War I. Forty-two Marines received the Medal of Honor; twenty-six posthumously. The Marines lost 436 aircraft in action.

Their performance prompted President Truman to sign Public Law 416 in 1952, a landmark statute that defined the Corps as a separate service within the Department of the Navy, sized at a minimum three divisions and three air wings, and awarded primacy in amphibious warfare. The Marines, fully into jet aircraft, transport helicopters, and body armor, now had the legislative legitimacy they had lacked the first 177 years. It was a great Marine victory that does not appear on their battle flag.

Cold War Crusades (1953-1967) Sooner or later the U.S. Marines seemed

the sacrifices of its troops. Never was the abiding philosophy of Semper Fidelis more severely tested.

Marines first deployed to Vietnam as organized units in 1962. A special radio detachment went to Pleiku, and Colonel Archie Clapp’s medium helicopter squadron began “Shu-fly” operations in support of ARVN forces at Soc Trang. Here immediately was the face of the war-tobe: massive use of electronic intelligence combined with tactical mobility provided by transport helicopters.

The Shu-fly outfit soon moved north from Soc Trang to Da Nang. When things became hairier up there, the Marines flew an infantry platoon down from Okinawa to stiffen the ARVN defenders of the strategic airfield. And as conditions continued to degenerate, the Marines deployed a Hawk Missile battalion from Okinawa to 2,000-foot Monkey Mountain, overlooking the airfield and port. Escalation had arrived. Soon it became time to put up or shut up.

By now Congress, with its contrived “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,” had given President [Lyndon B.] Johnson a virtual carte blanche to have his way in opposing the Communist campaign to overrun South Vietnam.

On March 8, 1965, Brigadier General Frederick Karch led ashore two battalions of his 9th Marine

destined to fight a protracted land war on the Indochinese Peninsula.

The first U.S. Marines arrived in Vietnam less than six months after the fall of Dien Bien Phu. Lieutenant Colonel Victor Croizat’s main responsibility was to train and inspire the nucleus of a Vietnamese Marine regiment, which would grow in proficiency and lethality into a very good infantry division.

Now the principal focus for the Marines became Southeast Asia – especially Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, each threatened by Soviet-supported insurgencies.

Counterinsurgency became in vogue as a political-military art form. Marines studied the recent counterguerrilla campaigns in Malaya and the Philippines, read Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy, conducted war games involving the landing of expeditionary forces at a place halfway down the Indochinese coast called Tourane (later: Da Nang), and vied for the coveted thirty-day “OJT” (On the Job Training) assignments as observers to the hard-pressed ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam).

Marines in Vietnam would fight with highest valor and innovation, but the nation’s longest and most political war would yield few tangible benefits in exchange for

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Expeditionary Brigade at Da Nang, one by air, one by sea.

The Marines had landed – at last! – and true to form, they were the first ground combat forces to deploy to South Vietnam. The infantry battalions immediately deployed among the high ridges surrounding the Da Nang airfield, from which two squadrons of Marine helicopters were already operating around the clock.

The Leathernecks exchanged scattered gunfire with the Viet Cong. The first Marine casualties made headlines.

No one – no one – could have predicted that these few casualties were only the vanguard of over 100,000 Marines to be killed or wounded in action in the filthy war that ensued.

The Marine buildup went into high gear. The first Marine fixed-wing squadron, VMFA-531, flew its F4B Phantom II jets into Da Nang in April 1965.

Later that month the 3d Battalion, 4th Marines, debarked into landing craft and proceeded eleven miles up the Perfume River to the ancient capital of Hue, loaded for bear – but relieved and delighted to find the riverbanks lined with cheering natives.

On May 6, 1965, Brigadier General Marion Carl, one of the Cactus Air Force aces from Guadalcanal days, led his 6,000-man 3d Amphibious Brigade ashore to establish a Leatherneck enclave fifty-seven miles below Da Nang. The place was called Chu Lai, but no one could find it on their maps. Turns out Lieutenant General Victor “Brute” Krulak, now commanding the Fleet Marine Force Pacific, had picked the spot by his own reconnaissance, then named it using the Mandarin Chinese characters for his name.

Chu Lai was initially just a wide stretch in the sandy scrub, dangerously surrounded by high ground. Twenty-five

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Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

Marines deploy from a “Huey” in Vietnam in Howard A. Terpning’s Touchdown, 1968, acrylic on illustration board.

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THE MARINES

BELL UH-1E HUEY During the Korean War it became apparent that helicopters would play a vital role in the future of search-and-rescue, medical evacuation, troop insertion and extraction, equipment movement, and supply.

The UH-1, originally developed by the Army, was the next generation of the Marine Corps’ vertical-lift aircraft, and took on the additional duties of quick troop insertions and extractions. Originally designed as a utility helicopter, without armament, the guerrilla warfare tactics used by the North Vietnamese forced helicopter crews to add armament to the aircraft.

On Aug. 19, 1967, Capt. Stephen W. Pless flew the UH-1E helicopter hanging above Legacy Walk to the rescue of a downed Army helicopter crew that was being overrun by Viet Cong. After making several passes over the crash site, driving 40 to 50 Viet Cong back to the tree line, Pless landed and his crew consisting of Capt. Rupert Fairfield (co-pilot), Gunnery Sgt. Leroy Poulson (gunner), and Lance Corp. John Phelps (crewchief) rescued three of the four crewmen. The fully-armed UH-1E was severely overloaded with Pless, his three crewmen, and three Army crewmen aboard. Pless jettisoned the empty rocket pods and ordered his crew to toss out all unnecessary excess equipment in order to lighten the aircraft. Once this was accomplished, he managed, with great difficulty, to coax the aircraft into the air and fly the wounded men to the hospital in Chu Lai. For their actions in this rescue mission Fairfield, Poulson, and Phelps all received the Navy Cross. On Jan. 16, 1969, now-Maj. Pless was presented the Medal of Honor by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Tragically, Major Pless died six months later in a motorcycle accident.

UH-1E TECHNICAL DATA Manufacturer: Bell Helicopter Company Type: Utility and transport helicopter Accommodations: Pilot plus up to 14 passengers; external load capacity, 4,000 lb Power plant: One 1,100 shp Lycoming T-53-L-11 engine Dimensions: Length, 57 ft; Height, 14 ft, 4 in; Rotor Diameter, 48 ft, 2 in Weights: Empty, 6,000 lbs; Max take-off weight, 10,000 lbs Performance: Max Speed, 127 mph; Service Ceiling, 17,300 ft; Range, 286 miles Armament: None. However, aircraft could be fitted with an M60 machine gun in each of the side doors, and have a TK-2 system mounted on each side.

days later the Marines had completed an 8,000-foot expeditionary airfield at Chu Lai, complete with carrier-like catapults and arresting cables, and graceful Marine A-4 Skyhawks were roaring aloft to provide close air support to Marine ground operations.

With 16,500 Marines now ashore in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland assigned them the primary responsibility for what he called I Corps Tactical Zone (quickly shortened to “Eye Corps”), the country’s five northernmost provinces, stretching from the increasingly contested demilitarized zone (“DMZ”) along the 17th Parallel down the narrow waist some 265 miles. The Laotian border marked the west, the South China Sea the east.

Eye Corps was home to 2.6 million Vietnamese, many clustered in the major cities of Quang Tri, Hue, and Da Nang. The government controlled the major population centers, the Viet Cong the countryside, especially at night.

Within weeks Marines were engaging in hot firefights with shadowy men in black pajamas who fired their AK47 assault rifles and RPG-7 rocket launchers with authority. The Leathernecks invariably prevailed, but always at a cost. At the ninety-day mark after the first landings, the Marines had sustained 209 casualties, including 29 dead.

Then came Operation Starlite, and the war turned another corner.

Starlite began when Marine combat intelligence identified the presence of the 1st VC Regiment assembled in the Van Tuong Peninsula preparing to attack Chu Lai, nine miles north. Colonel Oscar Peatross led his reinforced 7th Marines in a surprise, multipronged assault on August 18.

This time the Viet Cong stayed and fought. The Van Tuong Peninsula constituted their regimental command post, their “home.” Caves and spider holes laced the countryside. Many of the small villages were heavily fortified.

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THE MARINES

Peatross endeavored to land west of the enemy positions and drive the enemy into the sea. This worked well in one sector, when a hundred VC poured out of the tree line onto the beach and attempted to escape by sampans. The destroyer Orleck opened up her five-inch guns with relish.

In other sectors the fighting broke down into localized brawls between small units, the VC maximizing their dug-in positions, the Marines grimly scratching them out by fire and maneuver as at Iwo Jima or Okinawa. Viet Cong recoilless rifles knocked out several Marine tanks and riddled the LVTs, but most damage came from mortars and machine guns.

The Marines fought back, calling in artillery, naval gunfire, and close air support in very tight quarters.

Marine Phantoms and Skyhawks from Chu Lai flew direct assault missions so close to the end of their takeoff pattern the battle resembled Peleliu.

The battle raged six days. General Walt gave Peatross all the support and reinforcements he could handle. In the end the Marines counted 641 dead VC, a huge bag, at the cost of 203 wounded and 45 killed of their own. Two Marines received the Medal of Honor during Operation Starlite: Corporal Robert O’Malley, a squad leader, and Lance Corporal Joe Paul (posthumously), a fire-team leader.

At the time Starlite seemed a significant tactical victory. The Marines had surprised and soundly whipped a main force Viet Cong regiment, inflicting disproportionate fatalities at the rate of fourteen-toone. The media loved it. The United States, it seemed, could prevail over these Communist guerrillas where the Japanese and French had so badly failed. Dream on.

Never again would a Viet Cong force offer pitched battle against Marine regiments.

The VC would revert to their shadow war, stinging the Marines in a thousand small attacks and ambushes, leaving the bigger engagements for their better-armed brethren, the People’s Army of North Vietnam (dubbed by the Americans the “NVA”).

By now the entire 1st Marine Division had transplaced from Camp Pendleton to Vietnam, the Old Breed beginning their third Asian War in twenty years.

On their heels arose the 5th Marine Division, reactivated for the first time since V-J Day, and Marines everywhere were stretched thin.

The dirty war was getting a lot dirtier. The Marines had already learned that running the VC to ground would require a massive effort – plus it was all doomed in advance unless they could first gain the trust, and provide for the security, of the people.

Marine pilots flew hair-raising attack missions over North Vietnam from carriers operating in “Yankee Station” in the South China Sea. Marine artillerists fired millions of rounds of heavy ordnance, sometimes at on-call targets, others merely “harassing and interdiction fire” at night against enemy assembly areas and access routes. Marines patrolled everywhere, day and night, by foot, helo, LVT, or jeeps.

By the end of 1965, the Marines had suffered 454 killed and 2,093 wounded. A year later, with 67,000 Leathernecks deployed in South Vietnam, the casualty totals had quadrupled.

Gradually the focus of combat swung north, toward the DMZ. Increasingly, the enemy was the North Vietnamese Army, crossing the 17th Parallel in division strength, well trained, well armed, and easily supplied via the Ho Chi Minh Trail and its many tributaries.

Fighting along “the Z” took on the scale and nature of combat in the Korean War. Operation Hastings mushroomed from a modest probe into a full-scale slugfest involving eleven battalions and direct support from Guam-based B-52 bombers.

Hastings gave way to a series of subsequent battles called Prairie, each with a higher Roman numeral and a higher body count on both sides.

Farther west along the DMZ there was heavy fighting around the godforsaken outpost at Khe Sanh. Nearby Hills 561 and 881 were bitterly contested, finally seized – then lightly outposted as the war shifted elsewhere. No one would deny the NVA were good fighters. By the end of 1967 Marine casualties totaled 5,479 dead and 37,784 wounded. A hell of a war. Only World War II had been costlier – and this one still had plenty of nasty surprises to come.

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salutes the united states marine corps. thank you for your dedication to protecting the freedoms of our great country.

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THE MARINES

Col. Peter Michael Gish’s grim, stark still life Helmets at Que Sanh II, painted in 1976, tells the story of the sacrifices made by Marines stationed at the combat base in vivid terms.

Khe Sanh, Tet, Hue City (1968) Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

Few Marines ever held an exposed outpost

Colonel David Lownds commanded more than 6,000 troops in his reinforced regiment and defended a hardsurface runway suitable for the largest multiengine supply planes. Khe Sanh was also well within range of the U.S. Army’s big 175mm guns at Camp Carroll and the Rock Pile. Hundreds of U.S. and Allied attack aircraft and helicopters remained on call in direct support.

Westmoreland identified two compelling reasons to defend Khe Sanh: Provide a killing ground for NVA troops and prevent an NVA flank attack against Dong Ha and Quang Tri City.

Yet unmistakable evidence of a North Vietnamese buildup near Khe Sanh in January 1968 proved worrisome. The NVA had little difficulty infiltrating down the Ho Chi Minh Trail along the Laotian-Vietnam border, then crossing laterally into the hills above Khe Sanh along what the Marines would call the Santa Fe Trail. NVA

longer, under more relentless pounding, than India Company of the 3rd Battalion, 26th Marines, on Hill 881-South.

The wooded terrain feature, the most tactically critical of the hills overlooking the Marine Corps combat base at Khe Sanh, absorbed persistent North Vietnamese shelling and probing attacks throughout the grueling seventy-seven day battle for the western DMZ. Captain William Dabney’s Marines would lose half their number defending 881-S but never their pride or willful humor.

For several stomach-churning months the reinforced 26th Marines at Khe Sanh occupied the center ring in what became an international circus of politics and propaganda – an epic siege in the late winter-early spring of 1968 following the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive.

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THE MARINES

Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

Using the materials at hand, in this case totally appropriate to the subject, CWO Wendell A. Parks, USMC, created Tank in Hue in 1968 by burning his rendition of the scene into a wooden fuze box. long-range artillery – heavy stuff, 130mm and 152mm in caliber – began plastering Khe Sanh from safe havens inside Laos.

When the NVA moved two very good divisions into the high ground above Khe Sanh, then cut the only overland supply road, Westmoreland became convinced that his counterpart in Hanoi, the now-legendary General Vo Nguyen Giap, intended to repeat his 1954 success against the French at Dien Bien Phu against the 26th Marines.

On the other hand, in a shadowy war in which the enemy rarely stood and fought, the defense of Khe Sanh at least provided a “target-rich environment” for Marine gunners and their friends in other services. The bombscarred hills and valleys around the combat base became the ultimate “free fire zone” of the war. Marines would take maximum joy in its good use.

The key features of the Khe Sanh battlefield were these. The combat base encircled the airstrip and overlooked the valley of the Rao Quan River to the north.

Downhill from the base on the southern side ran Route 9 – east (now closed by the NVA) to Ca Lu and Dong Ha, west to the village of Khe Sanh, the Special Forces Camp of Lang Vei, and the Laotian border.

Four miles northwest of the combat base sat two hills whose peculiar topography dominated the battlefield, 861 on the right, 881-South on the left. The NVA now occupied 881-North in force.

This was the situation in late January 1968 as the Allied forces drifted toward the annual Tet holiday and the usual cease-fire announcement by the Viet Cong: The 26th Marines, now 6,600 men strong, with plenty of shooters and a superabundance of supporting arms within reach,

waited expectantly for the main attack to develop. Both Westmoreland and President Johnson were convinced that Khe Sanh would be Vo Nguyen Giap’s main effort.

The NVA/Viet Cong Tet Offensive struck simultaneously in the dead of night and nowhere with such terrifying suddenness as downtown Saigon. Thousands of enemy troops seemed to pop out of thin air.

Hundreds of towns and villages across South Vietnam – in thirty-six of the nation’s forty-eight provinces – reported large-scale enemy attacks. Hue seemed to have fallen to particularly heavy attack. The country was in an uproar.

Soon combined ground forces of Americans, South Vietnamese, South Koreans, and Australians overcame their shock and methodically threw the Communist troops out of the cities, villages, and hamlets.

Only at Hue did the situation remain in doubt.

Hue was the ancient imperial capital, the cultural center of South Vietnam, seat of a great university, and site of the Citadel, whose immense brick walls and moats had been built in 1802 by the Emperor Gia Long.

Now 3,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops occupied the city, fortified behind those same brick walls.

An enormous Viet Cong flag fluttered from the King’s Knight, the Citadel’s highest parapet.

The Communists seemed to hold the entire city except for two enclaves, the MACV [U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam] compound south of the Perfume River, and the 1st ARVN Division’s command post in the city itself. No one knew how many NVA or VC held the city.

The battle for Hue would run twenty-five bloody days.

A pair of infantry companies from the 1st and 5th Marines, accompanied by a platoon of tanks, tried bravely to retake control on the second day. The small force fought

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Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

History Pgs.102-141

Vietnam was also a battle of artillery and supporting arms, especially near the demilitarized zone and at places like Hill 881-S and Khe Sanh. Sgt. Richard L. Yaco, USMC, depicts this side of the war in Music with Guns, 1969, acrylic on masonite. their way to the American compound, re-formed, then battled their way across the main bridge. The Marines were too few, too light to reach the Citadel, and fell back to the MACV compound to await reinforcements.

Once their force grew to two battalions, the Marines began a street-by-street, house-by-house sweep along the south side of the Perfume River.

This was brutal, savage, heartbreaking fighting at point-blank range. Clearing the south bank and destroying two disciplined NVA battalions took a full week and proved costly.

NVA resistance was so fierce it still took ten days to close on the Citadel.

On February 22, the southeast wall of the Citadel fell to the Marines. The Leathernecks then stepped aside to let ARVN troops make the final assault on the sacred Imperial Palace.

At dawn on February 24, the flag of South Vietnam flew over the scorched and shattered Citadel. A week of mopping up followed before the Battle of Hue was declared over. The protracted fighting had cost the Marines 1,000 casualties; 142 died. The war in the north had gone far past “counterinsurgency.”

Tet stunned America.

Despite optimism so recently expressed by the Johnson administration and top military commanders, the public now realized that the promised end of the Vietnam War was nowhere in sight. It mattered little that

the NVA regulars and VC guerrillas had been soundly beaten everywhere during the Tet uprising.

Within a month the administration began to crumble.

Tet had unhorsed the whole caboodle …

Ironically, the only major American site not attacked during the Tet uprising was the Khe Sanh combat base.

For most of the 26th Marines hunkered down at Khe Sanh, the chief hazard was not the sudden sapper attack, scary as that might be, but the nigh-round-the-clock shelling of the compound by NVA gunners. The base was hit night and day by nine-foot-long rockets fired from Hill 881-North, heavy artillery shells fired from Laos, and medium mortar rounds fired from the ubiquitous 82mm tubes that closely surrounded the base.

Despite the protection of bunkers, helmets, and flak jackets, the clouds of whizzing shrapnel too often found human flesh. By the end of the first week of February, one Marine in ten at Khe Sanh had been hit.

Evacuating the critically wounded at Khe Sanh was never easy.

Each day Colonel Lownds had to orchestrate the evacuation of dozens of badly wounded or shell-shocked or acutely ill Marines, as well as the safe delivery of replacements and combat cargo – a staggering 185 tons per day.

It was a logistical nightmare, exacerbated by two complex factors, enemy fire and bad weather.

Never in any previous campaign had Marine infantrymen been so lavishly supported by aviators of every stripe

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SOLID. STRONG. GRATEFUL. Prudential is proud to support the dedication of the National Museum of the Marine Corpsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and grateful to the USMC for its 231 years of service.

IFS-A124128 Ed. 9/2006

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THE MARINES

National Archives photo by U.S. Navy

M50 ONTOS In order to preserve what was possible of Hue City in the fighting following the NVA Tet Offensive, the Marines were for the most part limited to using direct fire weapons. Among the most useful, according to Col. Stanley Hughes, commander of the 5th Marines, was the M50 Ontos.

Adopted by the Marine Corps in 1958, the odd-looking Ontos was a personnel carrier adapted to carry six 106mm M40A1C recoilless rifles, and emphasized pure firepower over armor protection. It could fire its weapons individually, in pairs, or all at once. It weighed only 9 tons and could reach 30 mph, with a range of 150 miles on roads and 50 miles when moving cross-country. The recoilless rifles were complemented by four .50-caliber spotting rifles and a .30-caliber coaxial machine gun.

Ontos were organized into anti-tank battalions, comprised of a headquarters and service company and three anti-tank companies until December 1967. Each company consisted of three platoons with five Ontos each, for a total of 45 Ontos per battalion, with one battalion of Ontos attached to each infantry regiment.

At Hue, however, Ontos were attached directly to tank battalions to provide desperately-needed firepower to the Marines fighting to retake the city.

Ontos on Chu Lai beach search for a defensive position shortly after descending from the landing craft aboard USS Thomaston in June 1965. Although very lightly armored, the Ontos were used heavily in the later fighting in Hue City. The museum’s Ontos is depicted in this setting.

M50 ONTOS TECHNICAL DATA Combat Weight: 19,050 lbs Length: 150 in Width: 102 in Height: 84 in Primary Armament: six 106mm M40A1C recoilless rifles Elevation: -10 degrees to + 20 degrees (manual) Range: 7,700 yards Rate of Fire: 2 rds per minute Crew: 3 Fuel: gasoline

The siege of Khe Sanh would run its bloody course for several more weeks. Enemy gunners would continue shelling the compound; Marines would die; helicopters would fall spinning from the sky; jets would cartwheel in flames into hillsides; but there would be no more largescale ground attacks.

On Easter Sunday, April 14, the seventy-seven-day siege of Khe Sanh ended exactly where it began – in the contested saddle between the two critical peaks [Hills 881-North and 881-South].

The 3d Battalion, 26th Marines, swarmed up the steep slope under a stunning concentration of indirect and direct supporting fire. The NVA troops had been burrowing into this mountain for months; abruptly many were sealed up in their caves and bunkers for eternity. Those who struggled clear had no time to mount a coherent defense. Wild-eyed Marines were on them with thrusting bayonets. Cold steel wrapped up the fighting.

A Marine shinnied up a shell-shorn tree and tied on a huge American flag. Marines watching intently from every hill and bunker in the highlands cheered.

Subsequent news that the Khe Sanh combat base would be abandoned shocked the nation but surprised few Marines.

Defending Khe Sanh so resolutely cost the Marines 205 dead and 1,668 wounded. Losses among the ARVN, other Allies, and the air crews spiked the figures somewhat higher. But NVA deaths in this meat grinder easily totaled 10,000. They may have suffered 15,000 dead.

The disproportionate figures beg the question, “Who was besieging whom?”

In a year of excruciating national despair, in the redbrown mud of this remote outpost, one small flame of duty, honor, and country flickered bravely in the spring rain.

and service. On any given day, the skies above Khe Sanh resembled a towering thunderhead of jet aircraft, often 35,000 feet high, the pilots patiently flying holding patterns, cycling ever lower in the queue, as Phantoms, Intruders, Sky Hawks, Crusaders, Thunderchiefs, and Super Sabres sequentially delivered their bombs and rockets.

To their credit, the NVA fighters took all the Allies could dish out and still maintained the pressure on Khe Sanh. Rockets and artillery plastered the combat base relentlessly. On February 23 the base endured the worst shelling of the campaign – 1,307 rounds in eight hours.

And now the NVA siege trenches were getting closer, advancing inexorably 200 to 300 meters each night, reaching like deadly fingers toward the prize airstrip.

Marines started listening for the unmistakable sounds of tunnels being dug underneath their lines, expecting anything, expecting the worst.

The heaviest NVA thrust against the compound itself occurred on February 29. Believing this to be the long-awaited main attack, Lownds released every weapon in the DMZ. The riflemen complained of not having any targets left to shoot after the big guns got through blasting the attackers. There was an abiding sense of having faced and crushed a major challenge.

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THE MARINES

Above: Weary and wary Marines ride atop an Amtrac. The danger of mines, booby traps, and ambushes was always immediate and real. Trac-Security, by Sgt. Henry Casselli, USMC, 1969, acrylic on illustration board. Opposite page: As always, the jungle could be as much of an enemy as the humans who fought each other within it. Green Hell, by Sgt. Richard L. Yaco, USMC, 1969, mixed media on illustration board.

(1969-1990)

The Marines wound up fighting two wars in Vietnam.

One was the virtually unrestricted slugging match against heavily-armed NVA divisions in the north along the DMZ. The other remained principally a counterinsurgency operation against Viet Cong and other NVA forces in the villages and rice paddies of Southern I Corps, an area best described as “the Rocket Belt of Da Nang.”

The DMZ war featured heavy pounding by NVA artillery, rocket, and mortar crews against the 3d Marine Division. Around Da Nang, the 1st Marine Division experienced less shelling, but a much higher dosage of mines, booby traps, and ambushes. Throughout the war,

half of all Marine combat casualties south of Da Nang came from these “silent” weapons and tactics.

The Marines hungered for combat action against real, flesh-and-blood enemies. The finely honed battle ax needed something to hew and hack. Pacification, the CAP [Combined Action Platoon] program, “Golden Fleece” rice-harvest protection duties, “County Fair” cordon-andsearch operations – all essential counterinsurgency stuff – lacked the viscerally rewarding, old-fashioned firefight.

For those 1st Marine Division troops hankering for more conventional warfare, there was always Arizona Territory, the rolling wasteland below Charlie Ridge and

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The heat, the weight of a heavy flak vest, and the length of a tour in-country all show on the face of this Marine. Tired, by Col. Houston Stiff, USMC (Ret.), 1968, oil on masonite. west of An Hoa. “The Arizona” became a boxing ring for Marine infantry battalions and NVA regiments in the latter years of the war.

In between these pitched battles, Recon Marines kept the pressure on NVA forces in Arizona Territory and the adjacent Que Son Mountains using “Sting Ray” operations. Six-man teams, inserted stealthily, established observation points along suspected NVA approach

routes, ready to direct interdiction missions by Marine air, artillery, or heliborne reaction forces.

The 3d Division’s war along the DMZ did not end with the razing of Khe Sanh. Major General Raymond Davis, veteran of Peleliu and Chosin Reservoir, now commanded the division, and he untethered his units from their static combat bases for a series of high-mobility strikes into the western mountains.

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Colonel Robert Barrow led his 9th Marines into the Da Krong Valley of western Quang Tri Province on January 22, 1969 to launch [Operation] Dewey Canyon.

Barrow first seized two remote, dominant hilltops with heliborne light security forces and plenty of strongarmed troops with axes and chain saws. In short order, trees felled, brush cleared, the choppers returned with 105mm and 155mm howitzer batteries. Almost overnight, two heavily armed fire support bases (“Razor” and “Cunningham”) bloomed deep in enemy-held territory, extending Marine artillery range fans all the way to the border.

Then came the three infantry battalions of the 9th Marines, and Barrow dispatched them west and south, advancing across sheer cliffs and through triple-canopied jungles, the roughest terrain the Leathernecks had yet endured in Vietnam.

The Leathernecks scaled and captured towering Tiger Mountain, uncovering a massive NVA headquarters and service facility carved out of solid rock. The Marines also captured several Russian-made 122mm artillery pieces, weapons whose fourteen-mile range and powerful punch had hammered the advancing troops all week.

There were other pleasant discoveries. As Gunnery Sergeant Russell Latona walked warily along a mountain trail, he kicked something unnatural: “Sticking out of a bomb crater I saw the footpad of a mortar bipod.” Latona dug it out and found a bonanza, a subterranean NVA armory that yielded a thousand weapons, including recoilless rifles and AA machine guns.

The 9th Marines now moved up to the forbidden border and observed heavy NVA military traffic along Route 922 inside Laos.

Barrow asked permission to extend his combat operations into Laos to cut Route 922. In closing, he added one sentence which seemed to capture the essence of this limited war: “My forces should not be here if ground interdiction of Route 922 not authorized.”

Captain David Winecoff then had the pleasure of leading Hotel Company across the border, establishing a night ambush along Route 922, and blowing away an NVA military convoy with Claymore mines and wellaimed rifle fire. Then they boogied back into Vietnam. A tiny blow, perhaps, in this protracted war of fits and starts, but my God it felt good!

Barrow fought his way into the high border country, then fought his way out. Operation Dewey Canyon, seven weeks long, dealt heavy casualties to both sides: 130 Marines killed, 920 wounded; 1,617 NVA killed. The Marines captured enough weapons and equipment to outfit an entire NVA division.

But just when the Marines were getting good at highmobility operations, the war began to unwind. The 9th Marines would in fact be the first to leave; before the end of 1969 the entire 3d Marine Division was gone.

The buzzword became Vietnamization – letting the ARVN fight its own battles. With peace talks underway in Paris, troop withdrawals occurring steadily, and the

Marines check out farmers near Marble Mountain outside Da Nang, making sure they are not actually Viet Cong. Marble Mountain Patrol, John A. Groth, 1968, watercolor on paper.

American public seemingly willing to forget the whole affair, the spark was gone.

In the spring of 1971 the last combat elements of the 1st Marine Division and the 1st Wing departed Vietnam, closing the long chapter. Only 500 Marines remained, advisers to the South Vietnamese Marine Division. Fittingly, some of these men participated in the last good fight.

The North Vietnamese chose Easter of 1972 for their long-expected offensive to overwhelm the south. No guerrilla war here. No U.S. Marine combat unit in front of them.

The NVA swarmed across the borders with tanks and heavy artillery, driving a wedge of terrified refugees before them.

But the Vietnamese Marines and their Leatherneck advisers hung tough. At Dong Ha, Captain John Ripley single-handedly throttled the advance of 30,000 NVA troops and 200 tanks by blowing the bridge over the Cua Viet River at extreme personal risk. No Marine’s Navy Cross was ever more dearly won.

Stumped by this unexpected setback, and hammered

by U.S. ships and aircraft, the NVA offensive petered out.

In Hanoi, the Politburo fired the great General Giap for this fiasco.

But in the end Ripley’s heroism and the steadfastness of the RVN Marines served only to buy time for warweary, polarized South Vietnam. Three years later the

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Wounded Marines had never had a better chance at survival as they did in Vietnam with the standard of rapid evacuation and medical care available to them. Forward Field Hospital, An Hoa I, by Col. Peter Michael Gish, USMCR (Ret.), 1967, oil on canvas.

NVA came back in even greater force, and this time there were no U.S. Marines left at all – no advisers, gunships, attack planes.

Cambodia fell first, then Vietnam. In both Phnom Penh and Saigon, Marines executed complicated mass evacuations of thousands of Americans and endangered nationals by helicopters from amphibious ships of the Seventh Fleet.

In Saigon, Master Sergeant Juan Valdez, senior NCO in charge of the Embassy Marines, was the last man to board the final helicopter that chaotic morning, April 30, 1975. In a plain brown bag he grimly carried the American flag. The antithesis of Iwo. But it was over.

Vietnam was the longest war in U.S. history. In overall terms, it was also the costliest for the U.S. Marines. A total of 13,067 Marines were killed in action or died of wounds; 88,633 Marines were wounded.

Although the number of dead was less, the combined Leatherneck casualties exceeded those of World War II. Thirty-eight Marines were captured and eventually released; eight died in captivity. Forty-nine Marines are still missing in action.

The Marines lost 252 helicopters and 173 fixed-wing aircraft in combat.

In 1968, at the peak of the fighting in Vietnam, III MAF counted 85,755 Marines on its rolls, a greater number than those who fought at Iwo Jima or Okinawa. Nearly 800,000 Marines served in the Corps during 1965-1972.

Historian Robert Moskin contributed a fitting epitaph: “Although Marines made up only one-tenth of all U.S. forces that served in Vietnam, one in every four

names carved in the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. is that of a United States Marine.”

“We are pulling our heads out of the jungle and getting back into the amphibious business,” announced new Commandant General Robert Cushman in 1972.

Getting away from the “second land army” focus and returning to their naval roots was how the Marines had reinvented themselves following World War I. The Marines set out to reestablish themselves as the world’s premier amphibious and expeditionary force.

First came the need to purify their ranks, to reassert the high standards of discipline and accountability that had distinguished Marines since the days of Archibald Henderson.

Two tough-nosed Commandants would bridge this gap during 1975-1983 – combat veterans Louis Wilson and Robert Barrow. Both men emphasized quality over quantity in recruiting and retention standards.

Developing and acquiring enhanced firepower and mobility for Marine combat units would take a priority effort over the next dozen years.

The advent of the Marine AV-8 Harrier V/STOL jump jet, the high-speed air-cushioned landing craft, the family of light armored vehicles, and a whole array of antitank and antiaircraft missile systems injected mobility, firepower, and confidence into a Corps now committed around the globe.

Problems of strategic lift were nicely solved by investing in a fleet of maritime prepositioning ships, stuffed with essential heavy equipment, afloat near the most remote and threatened regions.

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The aftermath of the suicide bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, where 241 died. Tragic Monument-Beirut, Lebanon, 1983, by Maj. John T. Dyer, USMCR, 1984, pen and brown ink with watercolor wash on paper.

The Marines also launched a low-profile retraining program in special operations to enable their expeditionary units to more smartly execute missions involving hostage rescue, embassy evacuations, and forcible seizure of ships or oil wells.

Yet the Cold War began to place onerous and increasingly dangerous political restrictions on the ability of forward-deployed Marines to defend themselves.

The Marines enjoyed one brief success in 1982.

Colonel James Mead’s 32d Marine Amphibious Unit (MAU) landed in Beirut, formed a well-armed, no-nonsense cordon, and promptly, peaceably evacuated 6,000 Palestinians and Syrians from an explosive situation. In and out, nicely done.

But then the Lebanese civil war worsened, and President Ronald Reagan ordered the Marines back to Beirut. Fatefully, they would stay ashore 533 days. Static, shackled, increasingly vulnerable, attractive targets.

The Marines in Beirut thus became a lightning rod for U.S. Mideast policy, a small band of amphibians, terribly exposed at an international airport, sniped at by day and shelled at night from the Shouf Mountains.

On October 23, 1983, a suicidal terrorist drove a Mercedes dump-truck directly into the lobby of the four-story building housing the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines – and blew himself up. The truck, loaded with six tons of TNT enhanced by pressurized propane gas and primer cord, had the explosive force of eleven Silkworm antiship missiles, roughly the yield of a small tactical nuclear bomb.

The building quartered about 300 Marines and a few sailors and soldiers. The blast killed 241 of them. In that terrible instant, more Marines died than those who had

fallen defending Khe Sanh, or recapturing Hue City, or assaulting Eniwetok.

Four months later, after more Marines had fought and died protecting other peacekeepers and the Embassy, the Reagan administration removed the last of the amphibious troops from Beirut – 533 days …

Two other less-than-satisfying military operations, in Grenada and Panama, involved the Marines before the decade of the 1980s finally closed. Both continued to reflect high politics, skimpy intelligence, hasty planning, and the holy grail of fully joint operations.

In Grenada, two days after the Beirut bombing, Colonel James Faulkner’s 22d MAU joined the joint task force assaulting several hundred Cubans and restoring a democratic government.

The Marines made multiple amphibious landings, fought with commendable professionalism and restraint, and didn’t hang around very long after the shooting stopped. Three Marine helicopter pilots died in the fighting; fifteen other Marines suffered gunshot wounds.

American medical students were safely rescued.

In December 1989, the other joint forces intervention occurred in Panama.

Heliborne Marines landed to secure the Bridge of the Americas and the westward approaches. One Marine died; three more were wounded. In relative terms, the nineteenth-century landings had been costlier.

Then a funny thing finally happened to the Marines and the protracted Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. We won! On the day after Christmas, 1991, the Soviet Union officially dissolved.

The enormous Soviet war machine came apart at the seams.

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An AV-8B Harrier II being loaded for bear during Operation Desert Storm. Marine Harriers were always immediately on call once the ground war began. AV-8B, Ready for a Sortie, by Lt. Col. Keith A. McConnell, USMCR, 1991, acrylic on illustration board.

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Brave New World Desert Storm If anything as miserable as war can be said to be the realization of a dream, the Gulf War was it for the United States Marine Corps. A beautifully rebuilt, expensively crafted fighting machine at the peak of its readiness and ferocity was injected into a sudden war with an outrageously evil enemy. The terrain was tailored to the Corps’ slashing mobility. Deployment was near flawless, battle planning and performance even more so. Teamwork was beautiful within and without the Corps. Against a huge, veteran, capable military machine they achieved swift, crushing victory in a key sector. And, most gloriously, casualties were astonishingly low. They returned home to the smashing acclaim that had been withheld after Vietnam. If the battle history of the Marine Corps were to end, this would be an ideal place. Of course that would mean the end of war, or rumors of war. Good luck.

Realization that a maverick dictator suddenly sat securely on 20 percent of the world’s oil supplies and threatened to double that hegemony prompted President George Bush to declare, “This will not stand.”

The Marines were instantly on the move. While one Marine expeditionary brigade deployed from the East Coast loaded for the traditional amphibious missions, two others marched aboard strategic airlifters to fly directly to Saudi Arabia to marry-up with their maritime prepositioning (MPS) ships.

Desert Storm would be the largest single combat operation in Marine Corps history. Nearly 93,000 Leathernecks took part – men and women, aviators and grunts, amphibians and desert rats, staff pukes and snakeeaters. Lieutenant General Walter Boomer commanded more Marines in combat than did Harry Schmidt at Iwo Jima or Roy Geiger at Okinawa.

The 7th Marine Expeditionary Brigade flew from California to Al Jubail on August 14.

The next day their five MPS ships arrived from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Within five days the 7th MEB moved north, ready to fight, 15,248-men strong, fielding 123 tanks, 425 artillery pieces and 124 tactical aircraft, both helos and fixed-wing.

Saddam [Hussein] missed a golden opportunity to make an early grab for Saudi Arabia’s economic center of gravity along the east (Gulf ) coast. The 7th MEB and the Army Airborne forces on hand were no match for the hundreds of thousands of first-echelon Iraqi troops stacked up along the Kuwaiti-Saudi border.

As time passed and Saddam failed to respond to diplomatic and economic pressures, President Bush realized that Kuwait would have to be liberated by force from her occupying legions.

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An M-60A1 main battle tank equipped with reactive armor and mine-clearing rollers and plows stands by at the head of a column of AAVP-7A1 amphibious assault vehicles as the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force prepares to enter Kuwait at the start of the ground phase of Operation Desert Storm. The Marines’ M-60s may not have been considered as capable as the Army’s Abrams main battle tanks, but they were capable enough to knock out a large number of Iraqi tanks.

Again, the old warhorse, the 2d Marine Division, got the call to combat, its first as a division since Okinawa in 1945.

President Bush also called up 23,000 Marine Reservists.

By late January, Boomer commanded what was called the I Marine Expeditionary Force (in reality, a Marine expeditionary corps), which included the 1st and 2d Marine Divisions and an enormous 3d Marine Aircraft Wing. More than 17,000 of Boomer’s Marines were embarked and combat-loaded on board thirty-one amphibious ships in the Persian Gulf, a larger force than those MacArthur had assembled to seize Inchon forty years earlier.

General [Norman] Schwarzkopf had things he wanted to plant in Saddam Hussein’s mind. He wanted Saddam to believe that these Marines would swoop ashore at any minute in the northern Gulf. Saddam bought the stratagem.

The grand assault plan took shape.

First, the “air supremacy” advocates would be given the opportunity to prove their claim that a smart air campaign would win the war without the need for a single infantryman to seize any contested ground.

Failing that, the half-million Allied troops would retake Kuwait and punch out the Iraqi military the oldfashioned way.

With the amphibious force posing a major distraction in the Gulf, General Boomer would launch his two Marine divisions through the Iraqi barricades into Kuwait, a “fixing attack” in Army lingo, to further divert Saddam’s attention from Schwarzkopf ’s main effort, the celebrated “Left Hook” around enemy forces on the left flank by two heavily armored Army corps.

The air war began at 3 A.M. Baghdad time with a spectacular series of strikes by USAF F-117 Stealth bombers and Navy Tomahawk cruise missiles. Marines flying F/A-18 Hornets out of Bahrain joined, taking out radar sites, power plants, and railroad marshaling yards.

Consistent with Air Force policy in Korea and Vietnam, a Joint Forces Air Component Commander in a light blue uniform called all the shots in the air – at first.

Then, according to Major General Royal Moore, commanding the 3d Marine Aircraft Wing, “We started weaning our own assets, and pretty soon, with General Schwarzkopf ’s acknowledgement, about fifteen days prior to the ground campaign, we were into battlefield preparation. At that time, if a target didn’t do something for the I MEF and battlefield preparation, we weren’t going.”

Iraqi AAA [anti-aircraft artillery] dominated the lower altitudes where the Marines needed to operate for battlefield preps and close air support. Moore authorized

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fifty-plane “Gorilla Strikes” in the effort to take out AAA positions in Kuwait.

The abandoned Saudi frontier town of Khafji seemed an unlikely place for the first major ground encounter of the 1991 Gulf War. During the night of January 29, 1991, the 5th Iraqi Mechanized Division swept across the border and seized the town in a surprise, spoiling attack, abruptly disputing claims by Air Force strategists that the Air War had immobilized Saddam Hussein’s ground forces.

Arab screening forces retreated south before this sudden onslaught. A handful of Marines stayed. Two recon teams from the 3d Marines hid on the roof of a four-story building. The senior NCO, Corporal Charles Ingraham, calmly reported the invasion by radio to his regiment, offering to direct air and artillery strikes against the Iraqis swarming through the streets.

He deployed his troops in firing positions, rigged Claymore mines in the stairwell, and unrolled a large orange panel to alert Allied aircraft that there were “friendlies” on the rooftop. Peeking into the building’s courtyard, Ingraham could see the helmeted heads of Iraqi troops searching the floors below. The Marines hunkered down, sweating out a nerve-racking twenty-four hours.

As keenly as the Marines wanted to move in and rescue their stranded recon teams, they could only offer assistance and wait for Saudi and Qatari mechanized forces to counterattack.

The Arab task force met stiff resistance from Iraqis as they tried to recapture Khafji. Corporal Ingraham made the difference. From his rooftop perch Ingraham called in air and artillery strikes with masterful precision, some rounds impacting so close that one of this men went down with a shrapnel wound.

Then, as the Arabs forged into town and the fighting became localized, Ingraham took advantage of the confusion and led his teams through back streets toward the Allied lines, rifle in one hand, radio in the other, orange air panel in his teeth, furling out behind. Made it.

Marine pilots had a turkey shoot against the armored columns of the Iraqi 5th Mechanized Division trying to reinforce their toehold in Khafji.

[General Bill] Keys asked Boomer to change his plans at the last minute to enable a simultaneous two-divisionsabreast breaching farther west. The Marines should approach this breaching just like an amphibious assault, argued Keys. Land on multiple fronts, keep units in assembly areas until cleared to cross the line of departure, avoid stacking up 40,000 Marines at a single landing point. Substitute “breachhead” for “beachhead.”

Quietly, … Keys and [Division Commander Major General Michael] Myatt began their final preparations for the Marine ground war. Between them they made several dozen cuts in The Berm, the fifteen-foot wall of sand that paralleled the Kuwaiti border, built years earlier by Japanese contractors for the Saudis.

Through these cuts during the dark of night went Marine combat patrols of considerable strength, clearing

the most immediate obstacles, reconnoitering Iraqi positions, calling in more artillery and air strikes.

Finally President Bush approved G-Day for February 24. General Boomer sent a message to his huge force poised along The Berm: “May the spirit of your Marine forefathers ride with you. … ” General Bill Keys’s double-barreled assault strategy would catapult the spearheads of both divisions well clear of the obstacle belts before the demoralized Iraqis could mount serious armored counterattacks.

The 1st Marine Division initiated the Allies’ ground war at 0400, surging across The Berm, the ear-splitting noise of artillery and MLRS rockets masking the telltale sound of tank plows, armored bulldozers, and linecharge-firing AAVs grinding through the minefields.

Myatt met each outburst of fire with immediate counterbattery fire by his 11th Marines or with “Quick-Fire” calls to Marine Harriers stacked up overhead.

Here was Marine close air support as first envisioned sixty years earlier: on station, responsive, loaded for bear.

“This is the time we start earning our flight pay,” Royal Moore told his pilots. “Now we have Marines in combat.”

The Ground War occurred during the four worst flying days of the entire war.

The weather was bad; the oil well fires made things worse. Four low-flying Harrier jets would fall to Iraqi shoulder-fired infrared missiles. On several occasions, Marine Cobras resorted to air-taxiing down highways, searching for their targets at almost eyeball level.

Darkness notwithstanding, the 3d Wing flew 671 support missions on G-Day, hitting six different Iraqi divisions.

If it was dark and ghostly for the Marines, it was doubly terrifying for the Iraqis.

They were being plastered by everything in the books.

Their tanks were getting nailed from impossible ranges, even in the smog. Marine infantry appeared out of nowhere, always on the flanks. Even the winds had turned against them, reversing the normal direction, blowing the smoke north into their faces, a bad omen. Iraqi soldiers began to quit. The 1st Marine Division would capture them by the thousands.

General Keys’s 2d Marine Division launched its attack ninety minutes later. The PsyOps people had rigged their loudspeakers along The Berm for the occasion. “The Marines’ Hymn” burst forth at mega-decibel level.

The 6th Marines led the way through the cleared lanes. Keys kept them moving. “Contrary to some reports, the Iraqis were still there, waiting for us,” he said. “They fired about 300 rounds of artillery as we worked to breach the minefields, but they had no forward observers to coax the fire on target, so we could discount the prospect of heavy casualties from their shots in the dark.”

Since one of Keys’s three infantry regiments (the 2d Marines) had been assigned to the amphibious role for the duration, General Schwarzkopf had assigned him the Army’s Tiger Brigade of the 2d Armored Division.

The Tiger Brigade brought 118 brand-new M1A1 Abrams tanks and a commendable proficiency to the fight. Keys called them “a first-class outfit.” (The Army

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tankers now wear the 2d Marine Division patch on their sleeves to reflect combat service with the Marines.

The Tiger Brigade streamed through the gaps in trace behind the 6th Marines, then angled north. The superb M1A1s began knocking out dug-in Iraqi T-55 tanks from two miles away.

By dark on G-Day, each division had substantial forces beyond both obstacle belts, with forward-deployed artillery battalions readily in range. The cost had been ridiculously low: three killed, seventeen wounded in action. They had taken 16,000 prisoners.

General Schwarzkopf would exult, “I can’t say enough about the two Marine divisions. If I used words like brilliant, it would really be an under-description of the absolutely superb job that they did in breaching the socalled impenetrable barrier. It was a classic, absolutely classic, military breaching of a very, very tough minefield, barbed wire, fire trenches-type barrier. They went through the first barrier like it was water. … A textbook operation, and I think it will be studied for many, many years to come.”

The second day of the ground war brought more bad weather and scattered, intense fighting in central Kuwait.

Both divisions encountered large-scale counterattacks, defeated them in wild slugging matches, and consolidated all elements well north of the obstacle belts.

Eastward, the roving task forces of the 1st Marine Division collided in the smoke and fog with Iraqi armored units boiling out of the Burquan Oil Field.

This became a real donnybrook, the largest tank battle in Marine Corps history. A hasty radio message from the division reported “Enemy tanks and troops flushed from Burquan area. Much confusion.”

Marine attack aircraft circled above the smoke, searching fruitlessly for holes in the soup, clear targets to nail. But the forces were too intermixed. Only the AH-1W Sea Cobras could help, although with the ceiling rarely higher than fifty feet the gunships were as vulnerable as ground combat vehicles.

Shortly after dark, Lieutenant Colonel James Fulks led his Task Force Grizzly across the valuable Al Jaber Airfield despite a dozen casualties to Iraqi rocket salvos.

The 2d Marine Division advanced rapidly through Kuwait, the 6th Marines capturing Iraqi defenses in “The Ice Tray,” the 8th Marines taking “The Ice Cube,” both built-up areas laid out in grids that resembled their names.

The third day finished crushing the Iraqis in Kuwait.

The 1st Marine Division engaged in another enormous and lopsided tank battle at Kuwait International Airport, knocking out an incredible 320 tanks, including 70 of the previously feared Soviet-made T-72s. The 2d Division swung farther north, seizing Mutla Ridge, effectively cutting off the escape of Iraqis from Kuwait City.

Many Iraqis had not bothered to wait for this development; the highway north to Basra was clogged with Iraqi vehicles, military and civilian, laden with booty, trying to escape the hell-bent-for-leather Marines. Here was a rich target for Marine attack aircraft.

Hundreds of Iraqi soldiers met a quick end.

Thousands more fled across the sands, leaving their loot behind. The Western media quickly dubbed the carnage “The Highway to Hell.”

The Marines deferred the honor of recapturing Kuwait City to their Kuwaiti and Arab allies, but a Marine recon team flew into the U.S. Embassy early and found the American flag still flying bravely. They replaced it with a large flag that had last flown in Vietnam. Honor restored.

No Marine would ever forget the cheers of welcome and gratitude from the Kuwaitis.

Meanwhile, the Allied main effort unfolded to the west; the Republican Guard divisions either fought and died, or fled north across the Euphrates River. President Bush, quickly accused by the media of “piling on,” ordered a cease-fire at the 100-hour mark.

The Allies had succeeded gloriously, and the Marines had garnered new accolades for their tactical prowess. In their uneven fight in Kuwait, the Marines knocked out 1,040 Iraqi tanks, 608 APCs, 432 artillery pieces, 5 FROG missile sites. They killed about 1,500 enemy troops and took well over 20,000 prisoners.

All this came at the cost of five Marines killed, fortyeight wounded in action. Five Marine aviators were shot down, captured, abused, and released. There were no Marine MIAs left from this war.

Marines en route to the Gulf in 1990 had been diverted to execute Operation Sharp Edge, the emergency evacuation of several thousand U.S. citizens and other threatened nationals from strife-torn Liberia.

Other Marines turned immediately from fighting Saddam’s hapless minions to helping people in extreme need: They conducted Operation Sea Angel in cycloneravaged Bangladesh. And then Operation Provide Comfort, an international relief effort on behalf of 750,000 starving Kurds in northern Iraq. The Marines labored in Kurdistan three months, 500 miles removed from their sea base. “Food Soldiers,” the Kurdish kids called them. …

But death is never far from a Marine, even in the dubious duties of peacekeeping, as they learned in Somalia.

The first Marines landed tactically in Mogadishu on December 9, 1992, and secured the port complex, airport, and the abandoned U.S. Embassy. They were the vanguard of more than 17,000 Leathernecks of the I Marine Expeditionary Force under Major General Charles Wilhelm. A dozen other nations pitched in to help.

The Marines set out to break the gridlock on food distribution by establishing “Humanitarian Relief Sectors” in central and southern Somalia. In each case, the Marines traveled in combined-arms convoys, seized urban centers in harness with Belgian paratroopers or French Foreign Legionnaires. Firefights with bandit gangs and heavily armed “Technicals” – careening light trucks mounting automatic weapons – were frequent.

A United Nations headquarters took command.

Unlike Lebanon, most Marines had departed by the time

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DoD photo by Tech Sgt. David McLeod

U.S. Marines roll into Kuwait International Airport in a light armored vehicle after the retreat of Iraqi forces from Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm. Note the fake hand grasping the whip antenna of the LAV.

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threatened the Marines defending the last beach on the last night ashore.

The Marines backed aboard their waiting amphibian tractors, weapons leveled, gunships overhead. They “disengaged” without losing a man – blessed are the peacekeepers.

Meanwhile, Marines had returned to Haiti after a sixty-year absence, this time to intervene against military strongman General Raoul Cédras.

A Marine Expeditionary Unit landed at Cap Haitien on Haiti’s northern coast after months of on-again-offagain threats of U.S. intervention. Army troops swarmed into Port-au-Prince.

But, then again, “operations short of war” were not particularly new to the Leathernecks.

A half-century earlier, Red Mike Edson, the combat giant of the Coco River patrols, Edson’s Ridge, and Tarawa, produced for the Corps his most significant contribution, the marvelously foresightful Small Wars Manual.

The Marines have rushed it back into print.

General Tony Zinni, already a veteran of such nontraditional missions in Kurdistan, Somalia, Bangladesh, Ecuador, and Rwanda, acknowledged the complexities ahead: “This is the direction the new world disorder is going, and there isn’t anybody else to call upon for help.

And these are the kinds of operations we will have to do better.”

That’s one thing Marines have always been able to understand. Learning by doing. Adapting. Doing it better.

the mission “crept” from humanitarian assistance to “nation building,” with the obvious implications of taking sides in the civil strife. Disaster was expectable. The ambush and killing of eighteen U.S. soldiers in Mogadishu in October 1993 led to the eventual withdrawal of American ground forces.

By 1995 the United Nations Command despaired of being able to turn Somalia around and called for American assistance in disengaging forces literally under siege in Mogadishu.

The amphibious Marines and Navy got the “911 call.”

Marine Lieutenant General Anthony Zinni took command of the combined task force for Operation United Shield.

Ever so carefully Zinni’s Marines relieved the Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Italian forces, phasing them back to the ships. In the process the Marines sustained twenty-seven firefights, “everything from snipers to rocket-propelled grenades.” A large armed mob of Somalis

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Above: Under threat and under fire from Somali warlords’ private armies, Marines were forced to defend themselves while trying to feed starving Somalis.

Preventative Medicine-Somalia, by Col. Peter Michael Gish, USMCR (Ret.), 1993, oil on canvas. Left: The collapse of a city and a society are evoked in Welcome to Mogadishu, Somalia, by Capt. Charles G. Grow, USMC, 1993, watercolor on paper.

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FOR ART’S SAKE

The Marine Corps Combat Art Collection by Craig Collins

THE COMBAT ART PROGRAM Of the thousands of works in the Marine Corps Combat Art Collection, some were composed by non-Marines, and some are very old – the oldest piece in the exhibit will be an 1825 portrait of a Marine lieutenant by Marine Lt. Charles R. Floyd. But the large majority is the work of Marines who drew, painted, or sculpted under the formal sponsorship of the Marine Corps Combat Art Program, officially launched in 1942 under the guidance of Brig. Gen. Robert Denig.

The job of Marine Corps artists isn’t easy; they don’t just go to the rear echelon and doodle. They are, first and foremost, Marines. Casselli himself, who saw action as a corporal in the massive Tet Offensive shortly after he arrived in Vietnam, says in the biography that appears on his Web site: “Within three days of arrival, I was knee-deep in war. I had to be a Marine just to survive.”

The vast scope of style and subject matter is bound to surprise many visitors to the exhibit – as soon as some have recovered from the initial surprise of learning there is such a thing as a Marine Corps Combat Art Program. The program’s agenda, says Grow, has always been simple. “Since its inception in 1942,” says Grow, “the guidance to the Marine combat artist has been: ‘Go. Experience. And do art.’ What they experience, and

Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

I

n early August 2006, in a cavernous, climate-controlled warehouse in Quantico, Va., Charles Grow and Joan Thomas, art curators for the National Museum of the Marine Corps, are leading a tour through the pieces of the Marine Corps Combat Art Collection that have been selected – from more than 8,000 works – for exhibition at the Museum when it opens in November. Fewer than 100 works will make the cut for this temporary exhibit, and many of the chosen are now leaning, some covered in clear plastic, against the wooden crates that stand row upon row throughout the warehouse.

The 30,000 items in the Marine Corps’ historical collection of artifacts are divided into four broad categories, and the Combat Art Collection, with its remarkable size and significance, comprises one of these, along with ordnance, uniforms and heraldry, and aircraft. From such a large art collection, how could you possibly choose which works to show?

Grow, a Marine Corps artist himself who served in Operation Desert Storm, has one overriding criterion: variety. One of the paintings, titled simply Combat Artist, by the late World War II Marine Sergeant Tom Lovell, stops the visitors in their tracks – an oil portrait of a Marine artist, perched on a stool before a spray of cherry blossoms, a paint rag stuck in the rear pocket of his khaki trousers. The artist is sighting down his thumb, squinting, his expression unmistakably playful. “In the layout of the exhibit,” Grow says, “that's going to be the second piece of work. We don't want anybody to think we take ourselves too seriously.”

Another work selected for the exhibit, The Seawall at Tarawa, by Colonel Charles Waterhouse (USMC-Ret.), has been widely praised by veterans for its realism. It is a large canvas, starkly depicting the Tarawa landing: Marines pouring onto a beach, many of them already fallen under withering defensive fire, as they fight their way into a landscape obscured by roiling, scarlet-tinted smoke.

To further illustrate the range of styles in the exhibit, Grow pauses next to an early painting by Henry Casselli – now a renowned painter of watercolors whose subjects range from ballet dancers to slaughterhouse workers. This painting, done shortly after Casselli joined the Marine Corps, shows several Marines atop an Amtrac on patrol, the hills of Vietnam in the background. It’s a fairly abstract work, with paint applied in a mosaic of geometric shapes, as if to mimic hundreds of tiny broken tiles.

“One of the reasons we chose this,” Grow says, “was because when people think of Casselli, they think of a very fluid watercolor painting. And this is something different. It's a side of Casselli that most people don't get to see. If an art historian or a critic shows up, they'll get to see the work of a young man in development.”

how they interpret it, is entirely up to them. One of the things I find fascinating about being here is that multiple gallery owners, curators, and academics come in, often with a preconceived notion that they’re going to see a bunch of John Wayne ooh-rah propaganda. And what they really see is a complex tapestry of how your average American views people, Marines.”

A recent example of the common misconception about combat artists, Grow says, occurred in February of 2005, when one of the three current Marine Corps artists, Warrant Officer Michael Fay, displayed some of his drawings and paintings at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, and was greeted by a small group of protesters. “The protesters were invited in,” says Grow. “And all but two of them kind of changed their drumbeat, because what they saw were psychological portraits of their sons and daughters, brothers and husbands, wives and sisters. Combat art doesn’t glorify war. It records it.”

When Denig launched the official Combat Art Program in 1942, his purpose was to keep the public informed about what Marines were doing in World War II. The fact that the program has endured for so long, with such an open-ended directive to its artists, may strike some people as a curiosity, given the inherently undemocratic culture of the military. But to Michael Fay, the program is an indication of the remarkable degree to which America’s military remains connected to its civilian roots. “In a free and open democratic culture, we have art for its own sake,” he says, “as opposed to, let’s say, propaganda art, you know, something like the Soviet Union, where their military art program, which I’m sure they had, all served the state, the ideology. What people find surprising about the Marine Corps is that there’s art that’s really for art’s sake. It’s combat art, just like you might have still-life art or you might have figurepainting art, or landscape art. It just happens to be about combat. The artists themselves aren’t ever really told what to do at all – just go, have the experience, do art for art’s sake, which Charlie takes great pride in. We all do.”

The future of the Marine Corps Combat Art Collection is bright: Plans for later phases of construction at the National Museum of the Marine Corps include a separate art gallery in which pieces from the collection can be put on rotating display. There may also be spaces available to showcase the curatorial work, says Grow: “I don’t think it’s set in stone, but there’s talk of making some spaces available to the public so visitors can see what we do here: maintain the art, arrange exhibits, stuff like that.

It’s exciting. Joan and I are looking forward to it.”

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“WE CARRY ON THE CARE”

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FIGHTING FOR THE FUTURE

By J.R. Wilson

“Every Marine is a rifleman and a warrior; this represents our link to the past and our key to the future.” – Gen. Michael W. Hagee, Commandant of the Marine Corps

T

he 21st century and a new millennium officially began on Jan. 1, 2001, but the future of the U.S. military really began eight months and 11 days later, when a new kind of enemy launched the most deadly attack on American soil since the Civil War. As for all Americans, September 11 set the stage for the future of the U.S. Marine Corps. In many ways, a future it eventually would have reached, but one now significantly accelerated. The Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) brought the largest Marine deployment since Vietnam, and one of the Corps’ longest land attacks – the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF) sweep from Kuwait to Baghdad. It also has seen the rapid introduction of new technologies and equipment.

But the Marines who went into Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan only weeks after September 11 or a little more than a year later into Operation Iraqi Freedom, had much in common with those who stormed the shores of Tripoli in 1805, entered the Halls of Montezuma almost a half century later, or reclaimed the Pacific from Japan during World War II. Those and many more Marine combat engagements along the way pushed humans and technology to their limits: All involved challenges in culture, language, geography, some even insurgents and terrorists.

“That will be the challenge, at least in the first half of the 21st century – maintaining a Marine Corps ready, relevant, and capable, as we have been throughout our history, but now across a broader and more complex spectrum of operations on a very technologically sophisticated battlefield. It remains maintaining the ethos of warriors, but being equally capable of feeding the hungry and doing counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism operations. It is extremely demanding to maintain a reasonable level of readiness across all those areas.”

Those lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan are being applied to the Marine role in the broader GWOT, which also extends to relatively unknown places like Djibouti, a small African nation on the Red Sea between Somalia and Ethiopia. Several hundred Marines – until recently sharing command of a joint task force with the U.S. Navy – are supporting and helping train Djibouti security forces to prevent the spread of al-Qaida and other terrorist groups in Northeast Africa. Those groups have targeted the region’s large Islamic population for recruiting, training, and places to hide. They also have attacked there, bombing U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaamin, Tanzania, in 1998.

What sets the GWOT apart is its role as a forcing factor in changes to the single most important area: the Corps’ approach to training and educating the 21st century Marine – still a rifleman, but a lot more, as well.

“We are not just the pointy end of the spear,” says Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Bob Magnus. “While it is absolutely true that warfighting excellence is a fundamental of Marines, along with expeditionary capabilities and ‘soldiers from the sea’ and ‘first to fight,’ ‘most ready when the nation is least ready,’ now it also is anything, any time, across the full spectrum of what used to be called conventional operations and, with MARSOC [Marine Special Operations Command, stood up in February 2006], extending into the area of Special Ops forces.

For the new Marine, forged in the mountain caves of Afghanistan and on the streets of Fallujah, winning in combat shares importance with being able to work with and understand cultures whose language, religion, lifestyle, and history are alien to most Americans, to make a smooth transition from combat to stabilization and rebuilding. Both officers and enlisted are now required to study languages and cultural awareness; for officers, that includes a regional career focus.

As a result, a young lieutenant deploying to lead a rifle company in the Mideast will know some Arabic and something about the culture. By the time he – or, in traditionally non-combat posts, she – becomes a major, those skills will have progressed to street talk, reading, writing, and a much broader and deeper understanding of the culture.

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“We have to ensure we are adaptive – not transformational, but able to adapt before change confronts us with a crisis.” – Gen. Bob Magnus, Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps

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A Marine with the 2nd Assault Amphibian Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, lies prone on the coastline of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., as he and other comrades simulate seizing an enemy beachhead. The Marine Corps is adapting to new threats, but always retaining its core capabilities.

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Above: Marines from Charlie Co., Battalion Landing Team 1st Bn., 6th Marines, look toward the sounds of new firing during a firefight with anti-coalition militia in central Afghanistan during Operation Asbury Park. Left: San Fernando, Calif., native Sgt. Robert E. Canales, chief scout with 2nd Platoon, returns fire on a target during an hour-long firefight in Husaybah, Iraq. Canales and his squad were providing security for combat engineers attempting to destroy a massive IED when a sentry saw armed men moving in houses across from them. Fighting the war in Afghanistan and Iraq has taught new lessons, but it has also reinforced old ones.

The United States Marine Corps has always maintained a strong sense of history and tradition, keeping the foundation concepts reflected in the Corps motto, “Semper Fidelis” (“Always Faithful”), the Revolutionary War call for “a few good men,” and the precept “every Marine a rifleman.” While the dedication of the National Museum of the Marine Corps provides a new opportunity to revisit and reexamine a proud heritage, Magnus believes it has an even more important role in securing the present and looking to the future.

“The focus of those visiting the museum, immersing themselves in Marine history and heritage, also must be on the people who make up the U.S. Marine Corps,” he says.

“And that’s not just looking at history, but into the future.

Which is why we will be expanding and keeping the museum current for anyone who wants to come back. It will be a living history, for people to think about how selfless sacrifice, talent, and the achievements of the men and women who were Marines before set examples, not only for Marines today and in the future, but for people who are not warriors, to develop themselves to their fullest.

“You also have to understand it was not mindless sacrifice – these warriors were educated and trained and physically and emotionally motivated for service. So when youngsters walk through the door, we want them

“That is something you have to develop, not just for this war, but for the entire 21st century. We need a broad breadth of officers in air and ground combat and combat service support who are specialized in a number of regions, including East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and even more traditional languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, or French, which are spoken a lot differently in-country than what you learn in college,” Magnus notes.

“The focus for the 21st century is to continue to recruit the highest quality Americans to become U.S. Marines; more than 98 percent of our recruits come in with a high school diploma, which is higher than the DoD [Department of Defense] standard. Before they get the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor, they learn not only to work to their potential but to work as teams, to make decisions as recruits, to achieve positions of leadership. The human element in war remains dominant, but the quality of those individuals – in training and education – is much more sophisticated today than it was 20 years ago.”

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Above: Marines from Charlie Co., Battalion Landing Team 1st Bn., 6th Marines, look toward the sounds of new firing during a firefight with anti-coalition militia in central Afghanistan during Operation Asbury Park. Left: San Fernando, Calif., native Sgt. Robert E. Canales, chief scout with 2nd Platoon, returns fire on a target during an hour-long firefight in Husaybah, Iraq. Canales and his squad were providing security for combat engineers attempting to destroy a massive IED when a sentry saw armed men moving in houses across from them. Fighting the war in Afghanistan and Iraq has taught new lessons, but it has also reinforced old ones.

The United States Marine Corps has always maintained a strong sense of history and tradition, keeping the foundation concepts reflected in the Corps motto, “Semper Fidelis” (“Always Faithful”), the Revolutionary War call for “a few good men,” and the precept “every Marine a rifleman.” While the dedication of the National Museum of the Marine Corps provides a new opportunity to revisit and reexamine a proud heritage, Magnus believes it has an even more important role in securing the present and looking to the future.

“The focus of those visiting the museum, immersing themselves in Marine history and heritage, also must be on the people who make up the U.S. Marine Corps,” he says.

“And that’s not just looking at history, but into the future.

Which is why we will be expanding and keeping the museum current for anyone who wants to come back. It will be a living history, for people to think about how selfless sacrifice, talent, and the achievements of the men and women who were Marines before set examples, not only for Marines today and in the future, but for people who are not warriors, to develop themselves to their fullest.

“You also have to understand it was not mindless sacrifice – these warriors were educated and trained and physically and emotionally motivated for service. So when youngsters walk through the door, we want them

“That is something you have to develop, not just for this war, but for the entire 21st century. We need a broad breadth of officers in air and ground combat and combat service support who are specialized in a number of regions, including East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and even more traditional languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, or French, which are spoken a lot differently in-country than what you learn in college,” Magnus notes.

“The focus for the 21st century is to continue to recruit the highest quality Americans to become U.S. Marines; more than 98 percent of our recruits come in with a high school diploma, which is higher than the DoD [Department of Defense] standard. Before they get the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor, they learn not only to work to their potential but to work as teams, to make decisions as recruits, to achieve positions of leadership. The human element in war remains dominant, but the quality of those individuals – in training and education – is much more sophisticated today than it was 20 years ago.”

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USMC photo by Gunnery Sgt. Keith A. Milks

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Photo by Cpl. Ruben D. Maestre

USMC future

Lance Cpl. Scott J. Dempsey of Amherst, N.Y., a civil affairs support staff member assigned with 5th Civil Affairs Group, 2nd Marine Division, holds a young Iraqi boy during a goodwill mission in Fallujah, Iraq. Marines, soldiers, and sailors attached to 5th CAG officially kicked off a major community service project for the month of July by promoting goodwill to the local populace. Their immediate goal is to build rapport with the local townspeople and their children by giving out clothes, school supplies, and other items.

Civil affairs operations are vital in the GWOT. equipment are planned and implemented, the leadership is looking at today’s asymmetrical battle as one part of a far larger requirement. It is a future in which individual Marines and every component to which they belong must be ready for both the irregular and the conventional, in all terrains and environments, against all levels of technology. It will be a joint/coalition, combined arms, networkcentric, increasingly modular, fast-moving battlespace in which junior officers, NCOs, and enlisted will be called

to think about their own obligations of citizenship – knowledge of their society and issues, about war and taxes and all else – and what the young men and women to whom this museum is dedicated put on the line for their country.”

The future of the Marine Corps is very much rooted in its past, but also in carrying forward – through technology, training, and the personal development of individual Marines – the same adaptability it has always

“We are shifting to grow in areas such as civil affairs; we would be foolish if we did not.”

– Brig. Gen. Thomas L. Conant, Director, Capabilities Development Directorate demonstrated to unexpected developments on the battlefield. That has been especially true in the ongoing GWOT. “We focus on warfighting excellence in all aspects of Marine Corps training, from boot camp to high-tempo joint and combined exercises,” Gen. Michael Hagee, commandant of the Marine Corps, says in his forward to the 2006 edition of Concepts and Programs. “A guiding principle of the Marine Corps is that we fight as combined-arms teams, seamlessly integrating our ground, aviation, and logistics forces. We exploit the speed, flexibility, and agility inherent in our combined-arms approach to defeat traditional, terrorist, and emerging threats to our nation’s security.”

Counter-terrorism and anti-insurgent operations are not entirely new to the Corps, but as future training and

upon to make decisions, under fire, at the small-unit level, decisions that once were the purview of higher echelon.

“The first and most critical step continues to be how we recruit and train the right people, to be able to absorb and then process and then put into action whatever is going to be needed in battle. That emphasis on the basics – from recruits to officers – continues to be what gives the Marine Corps the opportunity to succeed,” Lt. Gen. Jan Huly, deputy commandant-Plans, Policies & Operations, maintains.

“Fourteen years ago we couldn’t predict what we are doing today, and no one really can predict what we will be doing in 2020. So the best way is to continue to recruit and train young men and women who are adaptable, flexible, cunning, and able to deal with the unknown challenges they are going to face.”

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Keeping those basics fundamental to the training of all Marines also sets the stage for a future sea change in how Marine units operate on the battlefield, a change already being seen to some degree in Southwest Asia.

“If you lay that foundation early, you can build on the other enablers that allow you to adapt to the changing world, including cultural training, languages, adding new authority down to the NCO level,” adds Maj. Gen. George J. Flynn, commanding general of the Training and Education Command (TECOM). “Once the basics are built, units can do things traditionally done by higher headquarters – company doing battalion, platoons doing company. Part of that is because of technology, but also because of quality people we train to a standard that allows them to execute.

If you have brilliance in the basics, you can add on all these other things.”

Recognizing what unique talents and skills Marines bring to the fight, what complements the contributions of other services and allies, also is vital to both the current and future fight. That begins with the oldest Marine niche – a truly expeditionary force coming from the sea.

“And doing it as a combined arms team, internally as well as externally. It’s not the only thing we do, but that’s what we bring that is unique,” Huly says.

Access to future battlefields from neighboring friendly land or air bases will be increasingly problematic in the 21st century, so projecting ground and air forces from the sea will be even more essential to U.S. military tactics and success.

“In the future, we must be able to conduct an Operation Iraqi Freedom without having access to a Kuwait,” Hagee says. “Can we do that today? No, but we believe that we must be able to do it in the future.

“To use the sea as maneuver space, we have to have certain enabling capabilities – [and] every service must be able to plug into any and all aspects of Seabasing, whether it is the command and control system, the sustainment, the strike, or the defensive set of capabilities.”

Magnus says a new generation of littoral ships will greatly enhance that capability.

“We see increasing leverage and value in amphibious and MPFFuture [Maritime Prepositioning Force-Future] ships, which we believe will be the ideal large platforms from which to base littoral operations,” he says. “They will become fundamental to joint Seabasing. If you have a 70,000-ton MPF-Future ship that can land tiltrotors and helicopters and large deck amphibs that can carry Harriers and attack helicopters and stay off the coast for 90 days, that is a huge national asset.”

Lt. Gen. Jim Amos, Commanding General of the Combat Development Command (CDC), says the importance of seabasing also will grow as fear of terrorist strikes leads some to deny U.S. and coalition forces access to other air and land routes.

“If you map out where the greatest conflicts have been in the last 15 years, 85 percent are within littoral regions; 70 percent of the Earth is covered by water and 80 percent of the world’s greatest cities are in the littorals. So Seabasing is the premier cornerstone for how the Marine Corps and Navy will continue to be relevant in the face of anti-access.

Being in the littorals, persistently, is a prescription for success in how we fight and influence the world in the next 10 to 20 years,” he says.

“The best way to fight in the battlefield under such circumstances is in a distributed manner, which takes maneuver warfare to the next level, deploying forces through the air and over land and dispersing small groups of Marines in the enemy’s rear and throughout the battlefield. Seabasing enables distributed ops, the ability to maneuver around the enemy’s rear.”

The war in Southwest Asia has been a proving ground for both new technologies, such as air and ground robotics, as well as new joint command structures and responsibilities. It also has reinforced an old truth: When the shooting is over, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have won the war. In today’s joint world,

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Marines from the 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion speed across the Iraqi desert in a light armored vehicle. LAV crews face the dangers of landmines and improvised explosive devices on a daily basis, sometimes encountering one every other day. The Marines with 1st LAR provide security from Iraq’s northwestern border with Syria.

The Marine Corps has placed two more LAV companies on line to add maneuverability to the force.

Marines are not just the “pointy end of the spear” in combat, but also an integral part of the follow-on stabilization and rebuilding mission – a mission already significantly remolding the Corps.

“We’re working hard to understand the lessons learned from Afghanistan and Iraq as they relate to culture and language,” Amos says. “In 2004, the force structure review group took 15,000 Marine billets and realigned them to what we thought was more important, based on the war in Iraq, and just replowed that ground with the capabilities assessment group, looking at what we really need to fight irregular warfare for the next 10 years. We have put two more LAV [light armored vehicle] companies on line, giving us a more maneuverable force; we have moved some MOS [Military Occupational Specialty] billets to military police and civil affairs and psyops.

“The Marine Corps is well past the idea of a Marine who can only pull the trigger; we are into tough-thinking Marines who understand the culture and language and have an educated appreciation, based on tactics and the history of small wars, of building schools, roads, houses, and hospitals.

Winning the GWOT involves helping nations bring peace and stability to their region. There are about a dozen

Marines today working in the middle of Fallujah with the local authorities to help rebuild that city, which is a far cry from kinetic ops. And that is the kind of thing we need to be doing to win this war.”

That applies not only to Southwest Asia, but has become a permanent part of the evolving Marine ethos, in which college degrees will become more common in the enlisted ranks, masters and doctorates among officers, and multicultural studies and foreign languages a requirement for both.

“The landscape will change in the next decade, but today we are rewriting our curriculum and training, requiring all our officers to study the region of the world to which they are assigned and to take foreign languages. We will soon begin doing the same for select MOSs on the enlisted side, where they will be required to specialize in regions of the world. And that will become a permanent part of how we do business in the foreseeable future,” Amos says.

“We will end up with Marines that are a bit like [Army] Green Berets, who are experts on specific cultures and languages. We are trying to build a force of Marines that have a piece of that, so when they are out there and there are six of them

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Marines from Company F, 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment line a trench as they fire at an enemy mortar position during the initial stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). The battalion took up positions on bridges across the Euphrates River after enemy forces attempted to destroy them. OIF seemed to begin as a conventional war, but soon took on the characteristics of an insurgency. maneuvering behind enemy lines, they have a sense for how to survive and how to deal with the people. Or when we are in an environment such as today in Iraq, where we are a stationary peace force – living, eating, fighting, and protecting people in an entirely different culture.”

Ensuring that the fielding of all Marine warfighting capabilities are integrated across the spectrum of doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, education, personnel, and facilities is the responsibility of the CDC’s Capabilities Development Directorate (CDD), commanded by Brig. Gen. Thomas L. Conant.

“The CDD takes the concept and looks at what we can and can’t do now and in the future; what we can’t do we call gaps, and finding those is what CDD is all about. If we need on-the-move, over-the-horizon communications for distributed units, how do we do that and how far can we go to accomplish that solution? We try to find the challenges and concepts of the future – and solutions to them,” he explains.

“What we’d never done before was take an integrated look. It is no longer feasible to develop something in the aviation or ground combat ‘stovepipe,’ push that to the top, and try to fund it.

What we now do is take those battlefield functions, find the challenges

and solutions, and work them into the MAGTF [Marine Air Ground Task Force] of the future. That integration is the critical point of what we are doing since the reorganization two years ago.”

The MAGTF is the Marine approach to modularity, scalable from a special purpose force of several hundred Marines and sailors all the way up to an expeditionary force of 100,000, depending on the mission and limiting factors provided to the MAGTF commander.

Whether it is a MAGTF or a patrol, however, the future of the Marine Corps lies in a seamless integration of new and better technology, weapons, and tactics with more capable, versatile Marines.

“The future is empowering the small unit leader to make decisions as a proactive leader in the battlespace of the future. You need to give him the training, tools, and education to excel in that arena. And that is how we will be judged in the future,” Conant predicts. “That is an irregular and counter-insurgency focus, but what we have discovered is, if you give these young leaders the power, training, tools, and skill sets, they will do outstanding things in this fight of the future. And that includes cultural knowledge and being a stabilizing force in an unstable world.

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The MV-22 Osprey is a common sight in the skies of Eastern North Carolina; however, tens of thousands of people recently had an opportunity to observe the aircraft for the first time when two Ospreys made the “self-deployment” from MCAS New River to the continent of Europe. The flight covered more than 4,000 miles, much over it over the North Atlantic Ocean, in challenging weather conditions. The Osprey will replace the aging CH-46, bringing higher speed, payload, and range to the vertical lift equation.

“We’re still required to be the most ready when the nation is least ready, and cannot afford not to be able to fight the big fight and win at the MEF level in terms of access denial and fighting through sheer devastating combat power. But we also have to fight in the irregular combat arena, where you need to focus on enabling the lieutenant and captain leading small units in very challenging environments to excel and succeed. So we stood up the Center for Advanced Cultural Learning to train and educate a culturally astute force in the Marine Corps, for both the small unit leader and the big force.”

The MAGTF is the central focus in the Marine effort to deliver relevant, integrated capabilities to the current and future battlespace, from the individual rifleman to unit leaders at all levels, incorporating the right mix of ground vehicles, aviation platforms, assault support, and other capabilities. Another focus is making certain it all fits seamlessly into the evolving joint, network-centric environment.

“This is the No. 1 problem we are looking at in CDD – when you have the ability to collect, process, and share data and combine that with the art of command and control, you have a powerful tool for success in the future battlespace,” Conant says. “We are going to approach this from a Marine Corps enterprise that ties it all together from the small unit to the operations unit

back to the home base. It isn’t wanting to do it, but having to do it.

“And we have to tie into the network, not only jointly but with our coalition partners. It is mandatory for every service’s future role in combat – taking advantage of technology and the power of moving a lot of information quickly and putting that into knowledge that can be used to make decisions.”

Decisions are being made on a daily basis that affect training, acquisition, TTPs (Tactics, Techniques and Procedures) unit structure – the shape and function of the Marine Corps, both near- and far-term. These decisions are heavily influenced by what has been called a “three block war” – fighting in one block, handing out humanitarian supplies in the second, trying to bring security and stability in the third, all at the same time and often with the same Marines shifting among them, trying to survive and succeed from day to day. But those same Marines also must be able to fight a traditional enemy in a more conventional environment.

“Our future – and possibly our institutional survival – depends on us being able to fight and win in this demanding new environment against a very lethal, vicious, adaptive enemy,” Conant says of the GWOT. “We are looking at that through the force structure process: what we buy, how we communicate forward and backwards, how we train reserves to the same core competencies as the regular force.

“What you see in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the world is training and being ready for the three-block war. And

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Above: USS San Antonio, the first of its class of LPD 17 amphibious assault ships, represents a new family of vessels that will comprise the Seabase fleet. Right: The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle will replace the old amphibious assault vehicle in the future. The vehicle is being created to address the weakness found in the current amphibious assault vehicle, and will have more speed, power, and range.

it is a moving target – what we fought and learned last week is not what we will face next week. And if you can’t adapt to fighting this very asymmetric enemy, we won’t win in the future. But neither can we lose our original focus as a fighting force, being the most ready when everyone else is least ready.”

The enemy also is learning – on the streets of Iraq, in the mountains of Afghanistan, and in war rooms around the world. Operation Iraqi Freedom was not Desert Storm; insurgents with car bombs and IEDs are far removed from OIF; what worked last week in Iraq may not work this week in Afghanistan – or Iraq – much less in some future conflict in some other part of the world.

“We have to adjust TTPs and curricula and instructions in our schoolhouses to adapt to this new environment and have the ability to do that rapidly. We can’t take two years to change a program of instruction; the new requirement is to rapidly change what you are training for, what kind of adversary are you training against. We take that very seriously,” Conant says.

“We will try to understand what is demanded of us in the future to remain relevant. You can’t live on your laurels. History is great and we will never back away from our ethos, who we are as a Marine Corps, but relevancy to the nation is making sure you have an adaptable, flexible force – not only operationally, but also institutionally.”

While the Corps’ top leaders focus their individual and combined efforts on the individual Marine as the key to future success, the technologies and equipment they will employ are undergoing often sweeping change, as well.

One of the most prominent of those is Marine aviation, which will experience a nearly complete turnover of assets in the next two decades and conversion to an almost all-STOVL (short takeoff and vertical landing) fleet, including the tilt-rotor V-22 Osprey troop carrier and a variant of the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter.

Combining longer range, greater speed, and more austere airfield requirements, including the ability to operate from smaller – and far more numerous – ships than aircraft carriers, a STOVL fleet will add greatly to Marine agile maneuverability and self-sufficiency.

“Tilt-rotor aviation is a revolutionary leap forward in warfare, because the helicopter can only go so fast,” Flynn says. “What is enabled by technology is the concept of distributed operations; tilt-rotor is transformational because

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The centerpiece of future Marine aviation is the F-35 Lightning II, which will allow flexible basing and bring a host of new capabilities to Marine Corps aviation.

it changes the battlefield in terms of space and time – go deeper, go faster. How you leverage that is how good your force can adapt to the battlefield you fight on today – and the one you fight on tomorrow.”

Given the increasing focus on the MAGTF, starting at the basic schools for both enlisted and officers, air/ground operations are and will continue to be second nature to Marines. As a result, he says, the new STOVL platforms will not necessarily change the role of Marine aviation in supporting ground forces in a joint environment, but enhance it.

Lt. Gen. John G. Castellaw, deputy commandant for Aviation, says the centerpiece of future Marine aviation will be the F-35B Lightning II, which essentially will consolidate three legacy airframes into one, greatly reducing maintenance and logistics concerns. It also will provide linkage to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), tactical aircraft, and ground platforms, giving ground commanders a common operational picture.

“The STOVL version will give us flexible basing options, therefore not restricting us to airfields a conventional aircraft requires. We can also operate from amphibious shipping as well as fleet carriers,” he says.

“But the F-35B isn’t just a ‘bomb truck.’ It has an ISR capability, an electronic attack capability, and, with its communications capability, can act as a control node for both ground and air commanders to increase shared situational awareness of the operating environment.

“Our rotary wing force will have greatly expanded capabilities. The MV-22B Osprey has six times the range, twice the speed, one-sixth the IR signature, and seven times the ballistic survivability of the aircraft it will replace, the CH-46 Sea Knight. The CH-53K, operating 110 nm out to sea, will enable Ship-To-Objective Maneuver (STOM) as well as flexible Seabasing. Our H-1 program, the UH-1Y and the AH-1Z, will represent quantum leaps in light attack and utility capabilities.”

Robots – UAVs, unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), and even unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) for littoral and riverine applications – already have become a valued part of Marine operations in Southwest Asia and are seen as playing an increasingly important role as a complement to flesh-and-blood Marines in the future.

“UAVs will open up the ability to see the battlefield and conduct precision operations, not limited only to the higher elements but also having an impact on how a fire team conducts operations,” Flynn says. “The more mature the technology becomes, the more it is available to lower echelons of operations, which is really where the future will be. You will have small units that are very much technology-enabled, and UAVs and robotics will play a big part in doing that.”

Other equipment areas also are under development, including sharing concepts and requirements with the Army, which is undergoing a massive transformation that will, in some ways, make it more like the Marines in terms of equipment weight, speed, and tactics. The Army already has fielded the first of its interim Stryker platforms in Southwest Asia as it continues development on the far more expansive and complex 19-platform Future Combat System (FCS). The Marines are observing both efforts and others, such as the Army’s Land Warrior and Future Force Warrior combat ensemble research and development.

“The question becomes how much or how little. We are looking at the Marine as a system, and how to outfit the infantryman, for example, to have the capabilities to be powerful in the future battlespace. So we are picking the best of the breed the Army is looking at,” Conant says. “Where can we have commonality and synergy in acquiring these things, whether individual systems or weapon systems? We want to have the same weapons and shoot the same ammunition. And if there are service-unique systems, maybe they come under an overarching system.

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“As we look at the mobility piece, we’re looking at whether the Stryker can do what we want to do, with no preconceived notion of whether we want it or not at this point. FCS is spinning off a lot of things in the IT and capabilities worlds and, if it makes sense for us, we want to be part of it. We’re working to see how close we can shape each other’s requirements so we can do some things together to get commonality in purchase, supply chain, operating in the battlespace together.”

One possibility would be an adaptation of the Stryker instead of developing another derivative of the LAV to meet the Marines’ growing future need for more personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles, Amos says.

“The Army has about 1,200 of those (Strykers), so it is an established program and, if it meets our needs, with programmatic savings, we would be foolish not to do that instead of starting a new program. The old days of unilateral programs are gone,” he says. “For example, we are looking with the Army at the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, which will replace the Humvee and be mine resistant.

“We’re also mapping the architectural pieces of MAGTF command and control to the FCS right now.

There are technologies both services are discovering as they get into FCS development that may well apply to other areas, from force protection to communications. So we are looking at what we can leverage or buy in a joint program with the Army.”

Even as the Marine Corps looks to adapt and adopt new technologies, increase the training of every Marine in other cultures and languages, and applies itself increasingly to the evolving joint/coalition, network-centric battlespace, Magnus firmly rejects any implication that current or future changes reflect badly on the past.

“There has been a lot of discussion in the last generation about the changing nature of war and the need to transform not only the battlefield but the military. I don’t think that’s wrong, but an undue focus on that would lead you to believe there was something so fundamentally wrong with the military and the Marine Corps in recent years that we have to radically change the systems and networks and culture and the people who are the warriors. That is flat wrong,” he says. “The Marine Corps has been evolving for 231 years – and every time the U.S. has found itself in a crisis, the Marines have been ready, relevant, and capable to that crisis.

“And that is what we must give to those Marines who come after us. We Marines need to continue to challenge ourselves to understand the changing nature of technology, of societies and cultures on this planet. We also need to adapt to what our government, our commander in chief, wants us to do – and to the fact that American culture also is changing. If we don’t do that, we won’t be able to attract the best young men and women to selfless dedication to the nation.”

Despite cutbacks in manpower and weapon systems and platforms during the 1990s, the U.S. military that went to war after September 11 did so with what it then had, and perhaps even surprised itself by how much it had learned since Desert Storm and how well it employed its combat forces in joint and coalition warfare, he adds.

Marines with 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing practice their marksmanship skills during Exercise Desert Talon at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Ariz. Various models of the M-16, including the M16A2 and M16A4 used by Marines, have served in the hands of servicemembers, making it the longest-serving rifle in U.S. history. “Every Marine a rifleman” remains a watchword even in the 21st century.

“But we also need to remain very careful about never underestimating the enemy, because if the human element in war is dominant, then it also is dominant for our enemies. And if they do not have the technology we have, that does not mean they automatically will lose,” Magnus warns.

“You have to be very careful that technology itself does not become a weakness, to be ready for technology to surprise us as the enemy fields something you don’t expect or defeats your technology, reducing you to the very basic level of human against human on the battlefield. So we work very hard to make sure U.S. Marines, individually and as combined arms teams, are and will remain dominant on the battlefield.”

Huly, too, warns against the siren song of technology as the answer to every battlefield problem.

“Even as technologically advanced as we are today, I believe decades from now the battle ultimately still will be won by a young man or woman on the ground with a rifle and bayonet who can say ‘this is my piece of turf, I control it.’ Everything else will help, but it will be that welltrained, educated, adaptable man or woman who will win the day for us. And it will be the responsibility of the leadership in that time to make sure we maintain those basic qualities of a United States Marine.”

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THE MARINE CORPS HERITAGE FOUNDATION

By Craig Collins

W

hile it supports the inauguration of the National Museum of the Marine Corps, the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation’s other historical programs are flourishing.

In 1981, in an article entitled “Why a Marine Corps Historical Foundation?” published in the Marine Corps Gazette by Maj. Gen. Donald M. Weller (USMC-Ret.) bluntly addressed a question that was apparently on the minds of some in the Corps. “A Marine Corps Historical Foundation was established in early 1979,” Weller began, “and some Marines are probably wondering why such an organization is necessary.” The Marine Corps, after all, had its own History and Museums Division, charged with pursuing the historical interests of the Corps.

At the time, Weller explained, the historians of the History and Museums Division’s Historical Branch were

laboring to record the Corps’ experience in the Vietnam War – and there simply weren’t enough people to handle the workload. The branch consisted of a chief historian and six others, three of whom were Marine officers serving regular duty at Marine Corps Headquarters. As a government entity, the History and Museums Division could not solicit funds to support Marine Corps-related research by non-official historians. It could accept non-solicited funds to a research grant fund, but in the five years before the Historical Foundation was established, this fund brought in less than $2,000 a year. “It’s clear,” Weller wrote, “that the Historical Branch can use all the help it can get.”

When the Marine Corps Historical Foundation, under the leadership of the former commandant, Gen. Wallace Greene, stepped in to augment the efforts of the Historical Branch, its aims were modest. It established a

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Photos courtesy of Marine corps Heritage Foundation

Opposite, left to right: Bud Baker, co-chairman of the Marine Corps Heritage fund-raising campaign, Gen. Michael Hagee, commandant of the Marine Corps, retired Lt. Gen. Ron Christmas, president of the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, and retired Brig. Gen. Jerry McKay, chief operating officer of the Marine Corps Historical Foundation, attend the coin ceremony for the National Museum of the Marine Corps and Heritage Center construction site. Above: Virginia Gov. Mark Warner presents a check for $640,000 to Lt. Gen. Christmas, president of the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, and Lin Ezell, director of the museum, representing a state appropriation he secured for the building of the National Museum of the Marine Corps. $10,000 annual research grant fund, and also initiated an annual award to support creative historical writing on Marine Corps-related subjects. The award, named in honor of Marine historian Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr., initially consisted of a bronze plaque and $250 in cash, and went to the author of the best magazine article pertaining to Marine Corps history that had been published in the preceding year.

For most of its early years, the foundation, with a limited budget and a small but dedicated staff, strove to meet its potential as a private, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization able to actively seek funds from individuals, institutions, and corporations. It’s unlikely that early members of the Historical Foundation would have conceived of the crowning achievement that has stemmed from these first efforts to stimulate historical research: the opening of the National Museum of the Marine Corps. Of those who know anything about the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation today – and there are many more now, certainly, than when Weller wrote his 1981 defense – it’s easy to see why it exists.

Museum near the Marine Corps Base at Quantico, Va.; and several other installations around the country. Looking ahead, Weller in 1981 wrote that the foundation hoped simply to expand the Aviation Museum – housed in a cluster of nearby aircraft hangars and other corrugated-metal buildings – into “an Air-Ground Museum by incorporating the display of small arms, artillery, amphibian tractors, tanks, and vehicles.” While this objective was ultimately met to a degree, there was no denying that the museum facilities of the Marine Corps were, for the most part, substandard, overstuffed, and relatively inaccessible to the public.

This was, to say the least, a regrettable state of affairs for the Marine Corps, an organization fiercely devoted to its origins and cultural heritage. The enduring adage “Every Marine a historian” – meaning every Marine, regardless of rank or mission, is steeped in the traditions and tales of the Corps’ collective and individual defining moments – seemed a painful reminder that the Corps was the only branch of the military that did not yet have a significant national museum to share its story with the nation.

In the late 1980s, when the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) committees began their work, the Marine Corps and the foundation received some help.

Congress, fearing that historical documents and artifacts might fall through the cracks if they weren’t directed to a central headquarters for preservation, authorized each service branch to develop a “national facility” at a site sufficient to maintain service records and interpret that service’s history to the American public.

Toward a National Museum In fact, the early Historical Foundation did not envision a new museum for the Marine Corps, despite the fact that the History and Museums Division’s remarkable archive of 60,000 artifacts was dispersed among the Marine Corps Museum at the Washington Navy Yard; the Aviation

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Above left: Henrietta Holsman Fore, center, then-director of the United States Mint, presents two proof mints of the commemorative United States Marine Corps dollar to retired Lt. Gen. Ron Christmas, left, president of the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, and Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Michael W. Hagee in July 2005. Congress authorized the U.S. Mint to create the coin to commemorate the Marine Corps’ 230th birthday and to honor past, present, and future Marines who have made sacrifices to defend the nation. The Marine Corps is the first service to have a coin minted. Above right: Susan Hodges of the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation and Mr. Wayne S. Spilove, chairman of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, unveil the historical marker sign near the original site of Tun Tavern, the traditionally recognized birthplace of the United States Marine Corps, in Philadelphia. The dedication of the marker is the first official recognition of the site of the tavern, where the Continental Marines were recruited by Capt. Samuel Nicholas, the first Marine officer. The erection of the sign was a joint project between the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and was funded publicly and privately by active and reserve Marines and friends of Marines.

On the heels of this legislation, some members of the foundation began to realize that their organization needed a grander vision. In 1995, it began exploring interest in a complex large enough to meet curatorial needs and attract the general public. These early investigations involved some of the nation’s finest historians, educators, museum professionals, and Marines. “The idea began to germinate,” explains Lt. Gen. Ronald Christmas, who retired from the Corps and joined the foundation pro bono as its president in 1997, “of having a Marine Corps Heritage Center, which would feature the National Museum of the Marine Corps – but would also be a place where Marines could gather, and artifacts could be stored and preserved.”

Under Christmas’ leadership, the foundation took a hard look at studies it had either conducted or commissioned. “And the recognition

was ... that we had to first of all change our name to the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, to really encompass the growth and the vision of where we needed to go with our programs.” Another thing the studies indicated, says Christmas, was “that we, in fact, could be successful in building a national museum.”

Two factors, enabled by Congressional legislation, further contributed to this optimism. First, a public-private partnership between the foundation and the Marine Corps allowed for the foundation to serve as a fundraising arm for the Heritage Center, and to continue supporting it through its lifetime.

Under this partnership, the Marine Corps took on the responsibility for developing the museum exhibits, and will assume the operational and administrative functions of the museum after its November 2006 opening. The Heritage Foundation

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The interior of the Mess Hall cafeteria on the second deck of the National Museum of the Marine Corps, complete with appropriate historical photos selected by members of the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation. contracted the physical construction, and will donate the buildings to the Corps.

A second breakthrough was the donation of 135 pristine wooded acres adjacent to Interstate 95 and the Marine Corps Base at Quantico. The land, donated by Prince William County, Va., provided a site sufficient for the multipurpose campus of the Heritage Center. Near Washington, D.C., and an abundance of hotels, this stretch of Interstate 95 is one of the busiest tourism corridors in the United States. A feasibility study on the project found that, given its location, the National Museum of the Marine Corps could expect to receive as many as 500,000 visitors a year.

These new developments encouraged the foundation, in early 1999, to formally authorize a campaign in support of the Marine Corps Heritage Center. “The first thing we did,” explains Christmas, “was we reached out to find, as our founders for the Heritage Center project, those former Marines who ... felt very strongly about their ties to the Marine Corps, and had gone out and been very successful in life.” Led by this volunteer group of prominent Marine Corps veterans – the Founders’ Group, which now numbers 97 – the foundation launched a direct-mail outreach to all Marines.

Seven years later, as the National Museum of the Marine Corps finally began to take shape among the

wooded hills outside Quantico, the foundation’s campaign had resulted in 70,000 contributors, who, as of August 2006, had donated $58 million toward the museum’s construction and operation.

Supporting History For an organization that began 27 years ago with a modest research grant fund and a $250 annual magazine award, it’s been quite a journey. But the Heritage Foundation has not forgotten its roots – far from it, in fact. As it has made its own history with the National Museum project, it has capitalized on the attention, resulting in unprecedented support for work that preserves and promotes the Marine Corps’ history and traditions. The foundation, supported by a small paid staff at the administrative offices in downtown Quantico, has expanded this support beyond scholarly written research.

The awards program that began as the $250 Heinl Award has grown to include 10 awards, for work in film, literature, journalism, museum exhibits, art, and other more specialized fields, including a lifetime achievement award and recognition of an individual or team that has done the most to highlight the contributions of women Marines.

The foundation also supports education from the middle school to post-graduate levels. It helps to develop

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bank, quite frankly that’s all fenced, and yet we still do our operations and our programs.”

Its commitment to both the museum and to work that promotes interest in Marine Corps history is not a short-term balancing act for the Heritage Foundation.

Its dual role is now a permanent fact of life. For all the excitement surrounding the November 2006 opening of the first phase of the National Museum, it’s important to remember that this event, however momentous, is only the first in what Christmas describes as “probably a two- to three-decade endeavor.” The remaining exhibits will be phased in over time – it is estimated that it will take a year for each era gallery to be installed, and a separate gallery is planned for the 7,500-piece art collection, as well as classrooms and office spaces. And the museum itself, while considered to be the centerpiece of the Heritage Center, is just one facility in a multi-use campus that will eventually include Semper Fidelis Memorial Park, a parade ground, an interactive armory, artifact storage and restoration facilities, an on-site hotel and conference center, an elegant glass chapel, a water feature, and paved and unpaved walking trails.

And of course, even if the Heritage Center were to be completed tomorrow, it would still require continued support. The National Museum of the Marine Corps, a government museum, does not charge an admission fee, and the Heritage Foundation, since long before ground was broken at the site, has been devoted to finding ways for it to be as self-sufficient as possible.

Under the leadership of Brig. Gen. Gerald McKay (USMC-Ret.), who joined the foundation as chief operations officer in 2001, the foundation has launched a new fundraising campaign through which anyone, Marine or non-Marine, can purchase a brick engraved with an honorary or memorial message of their choice. “The brick campaign,” says McKay, “is a way to offer another group of donors the opportunity to be a part of the museum. The bricks can honor either their own contribution or the service of a loved one in the Marine Corps.” The bricks, which can be purchased for $300 each, will line the paved walkways that wind through Semper Fidelis Memorial Park. As of August 2006, more than 8,000 bricks had been sold.

The unique public-private partnership between the Heritage Foundation and the Marine Corps will allow the Heritage Center – and especially the museum – to be supported in part by revenue-generating concessions as well as the gift shop. The second deck of the museum will house two eateries – the Mess Hall, a cafeteria meant to be an easygoing interpretation of the everyday dining experience of Marines, and Tun Tavern, a full-service restaurant. Tun Tavern, which will be operated under the sponsorship of Anheuser-Busch, will itself be a kind of

Marine Corps Heritage Foundation President Lt. Gen. Ron Christmas (USMC-Ret.) is presented with a Ka-Bar knife by Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Michael Hagee. The presentation was part of a June 2006 Evening Parade hosted by Hagee in honor of Christmas. lesson plans for middle school and high school teachers about important events in Marine Corps history, such as John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, the Boxer Rebellion, and the Battle for Iwo Jima. It offers graduate and advanced-level fellowships that range from $2,500 to $10,000, as well as one-time grants of $400 to $3,000, in order to encourage Marine Corps-specific study and dissertations. The foundation also, in partnership with cooperating institutions, arranges internship opportunities for promising college or university students in historical, research, or museum activities.

In addition to the museum, the foundation has also continued to take on a number of special projects, though on a much smaller scale. When battle honors need to be added to the base of the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va., for example, those additions are funded by the foundation. It accepts donations and disburses funds for the rehabilitation and maintenance of the Commandant’s House, and offers special support to the oldest professional music organization in the nation: “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band.

Recently, the foundation also funded the installation of a memorial plaque at the site where Tun Tavern – the legendary birthplace of the Marine Corps – once stood on the Philadelphia waterfront.

Occasionally, when rare artifacts, works of art, documents, or memorabilia related to the Marine Corps come onto the market, the Heritage Foundation engages in their direct acquisition. It has purchased rare scrapbooks owned by composer and conductor John Philip Sousa; one of only six Civil War brevet commissions granted to Marine Corps officers for gallantry during the attack on Fort Sumter in 1863; and a desk that once belonged to the 18th commandant of the Marine Corps, Alexander Vandegrift.

Most remarkably, the Heritage Foundation funds nearly all of these activities through its direct-mail program, Christmas says. “We’re able to use it to pay all the operational expense, so that any large donor – corporation, foundation, or individual – that money immediately goes into a fenced account, the building fund. So that’s been part of our success. All of that ... that’s raised in pledges or moneys to the

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Tun Tavern, on the second deck of the museum, is built to resemble the original interior of what is traditionally celebrated as the Marine Corps’ birthplace. museum piece, built to resemble the 18th-century interior of the Marine Corps’ birthplace.

The Heritage Foundation will also operate two simulators within the museum itself, which visitors can try out for a fee. One, an M-16 rifle range within the “Making Marines” exhibit, is an actual laser-designated marksmanship training system designed by MPRI of Columbia, Md., a company that designs such systems for U.S. military and law enforcement organizations. At the beginning of the Museum’s Legacy Walk, there will be a flight simulator designed by a museum and amusements contractor, OTB International. This simulator, McKay explains, will be tailored to the enjoyment of the general public. “It is not meant to replicate an actual flight simulator that a Marine Corps pilot would use in learning to fly aircraft,” he says. “This is more a simulator to give the visitor some sort of sensation of what it might be [like] to fly an air-to-air mission or an airto-ground mission.”

The foundation has also spearheaded the effort to recruit and train volunteers to staff the museum as docents. “Some of the docents will work at the front desk as greeters,” says McKay. “Some will be in prescribed stations or out on the floor, where they will assist the visitor and talk to the visitor about the exhibitry. And then we’ll have docents who will actually lead organized tours throughout the museum. There will also be volunteer

opportunities to work within the Museum Store.” McKay estimates that the museum will need about 200-300 such volunteers, who will need to be serious about their commitment: They will undergo 13 weeks of instruction before they begin work. The first group of docents, who began their training in July of 2006, range in age from 16 to over 80.

When he looks back on the last several years, Christmas is overwhelmed by what the foundation and the Marine Corps have been able to accomplish. “The support we’ve received,” says Christmas, “has been unbelievable. We were a very small foundation. I’d guess our budget was less than $100,000 a year.” The men who first formed the foundation in 1979 probably would not have imagined that within a span of seven years, 70,000 charter sponsors, Marines past and present, would generate such an outpouring of support.

But they wouldn’t be too surprised. The Heritage Foundation’s members were forged in the crucible of an organization that is a living embodiment of sacrifice and service, and they view the new museum as another opportunity to give something to the country they’ve sworn to protect. “The National Museum of the Marine Corps is truly going to be a national treasure,” says Christmas.

“And quite frankly, it’s not just our gift to those who have worn the Marine uniform. This is our gift to the American people.”

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Above: Present-day Marines stand amidst the history of their Corps on the second deck of the National Museum of the Marine Corps. Behind them is an F4U Corsair, an aircraft famous for its exploits in the Pacific and Korea. Opposite: The Eagle, Globe and Anchor is etched into the glass of the entranceway to the museum.

CONVEYING SEMPER

FIDELIS TO AMERICA The Marine Corps Heritage Center

by Tom Linn

History in Need of a Home

Within the Marine Corps there is a rich lore. Every Marine knows of double Medal of Honor winner Dan Daly, who before charging German defenses in World War I, called to his Marines, “Come on you sons-ofbitches! Do you want to live forever?” There is reverence for the uncommon valor on Iwo Jima, where 27 Medals of Honor were earned. And the courage and leadership of wounded Capt. Bill Barber, who commanded the defenses of Korea’s Toktong Pass from a stretcher, made him an example for all Marines.

Such heroic service not only earned the Marine Corps a place in American history, it affected every Marine. As Pulitzer-prize winner Hanson W. Baldin wrote “… they live tradition; the United States Marine bears upon his shoulders the nation’s past and the nation’s hope for the future.”

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n The U.S. Marine Corps Story, J. Robert Moskin wrote that the Marine Corps had “won an unerasable place in America’s history and heritage.” But Moskin also stated that Marines were seen as “a mysterious fraternity born of smoke and the danger of death.” Such mystery largely results from their valiant and loyal service going untold on a broad scale.

Much of the mystery is now revealed by the Marine Corps Heritage Center. For the first time, it provides the American people with insights into what makes Marines different, their monumental contributions to the nation, their ethos and esprit de corps. Moreover, it provides an opportunity to see the history of this great nation through the eyes of Marines. And just as it tells the story of the Marine Corps, the making of the Heritage Center is a story in itself, driven by a desire to share what it means to be a Marine.

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What remains of such legendary figures are the physical items they carried, used, and captured – some 30,000 relics and artifacts. Together with recorded accounts, these artifacts tell the story of the Marine Corps’ march into history.

The need to preserve these treasures and tell the Marine Corps’ story was recognized within the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation in the mid-1990s. Established under former Commandant Gen. Wallace Greene in 1979, the foundation was a small, private, nonprofit organization that assisted the Marine Corps’ historical program. Two foundation members, Colonels Jerry Turley and the late Jerry Thomas, raised concern that these artifacts were in danger of deteriorating in substandard facilities. And while the Marine Corps’ few, small museums could display some artifacts, they could not adequately convey the Corps’ story.

From Col. Jerry Thomas came the vision. He saw a place that would be more than the standard collection of weapons and equipment. Rather, it would be a center where Marines could celebrate their service and honor fallen comrades, but also where the American people could learn about the Marine Corps’ unique culture and contributions. It was a vision driven by a desire to share what it means to be a Marine.

The vision was further developed by educators, museum professionals, and Marines, brought together by the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation. In 1997, the concept was proposed to then-Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Charles C. Krulak, and enthusiastically received. In a letter of support, he stated that the center should be “a multiple-use complex of buildings and outdoor facilities … devoted to the presentation of Marine Corps history, professional military educational opportunities, and unique military events … the showcase of our Marine heritage.”

The Marine Corps Heritage Center took life. An executive steering committee was established, chaired by the assistant commandant. In 1999, Reserve Col. Joe Long was called to active duty to serve as the Marine Corps’ project manager. He himself had been a part of the Corps’ history, with service in Vietnam, the first Gulf War, and Somalia. For the next seven years, Long helped guide and coordinate the center’s development. Referring to Long’s contribution, one Marine later said, “We could not have done it without him.”

Subsequent commandants also saw the center as a way to share what it means to be a Marine. Upon becoming commandant in 2000, Gen. James L. Jones, Jr. embraced the center, saying that “The American people can come view the history of our nation through the eyes of Marines … a place where the Corps’ organizations and associations can meet ... the glorious history of the Marine Corps can be researched and recorded.”

Later, Commandant Gen. Michael W. Hagee said what all Marines feel: “Creation of the new Marine Corps Heritage Center, with the inspiring National Museum of the Marine Corps as its centerpiece, turns the dreams of

thousands of Marine veterans and patriotic Americans into reality. This magnificent place represents our heritage and timeless esprit de corps, and finally allows us to tell our story as we would have it told."

Building Partnerships to Build Capital Raising the money for the center meant thinking anew. In the late 1980s, Congress authorized the military services to allocate a portion of their budgets for construction of service museums. But a notoriously lean Marine Corps was hard-pressed to find the funds within its meager budget. As retired Col. Ray Hord, vice president of Development and Marketing for the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, put it, “The Marine Corps wanted to take advantage of that, but receives, on average, the smallest percentage of the defense budget each year.

Therefore, we had to be innovative.”

An innovative approach was thus presented to Congress. In 2000, it authorized a public and private partnership between the Marine Corps and the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, allowing it to conduct a capital campaign for the $80 million dollar Heritage

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Above and right: Bricks lining the winding pathways to the rally points in Semper Fidelis Memorial Park have been purchased by donors who want to commemorate their service or the service of friends or family members in the Marine Corps. Semper Fidelis Memorial Park overlooks the museum.

Center, with the first phase of development being the National Museum of the Marine Corps.

Within this partnership a division of responsibility occurred. On the public side, the Marine Corps assumed the cost of the museum's design, internal fitting, artifact restoration, exhibit placement, and its operations and maintenance when completed. On the private side, the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation assumed responsibility of raising funds for vertical construction.

“The support we’ve received has been unbelievable,” said retired Lt. Gen. Ron Christmas, president of the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation.

The foundation reached out. Strong support came from successful former Marines, such as FedEx corporate head Fred Smith, and other prominent business leaders who now comprise the Founders Group, a volunteer committee guiding development.

Also, the foundation’s direct-mail

campaign initially garnered 2,000 supporters, growing to 65,000 sponsors in 2006. Corporations also contributed generously.

Support came locally as well as nationally. Previously, Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va., had given land to Prince William County when Interstate 95 was being built. In 2000, the county ceded 135 acres back to the Marine Corps, providing a location for the center. It was ideal. According to a feasibility study, the center in this location could be expected to

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Above: The sign at Taylor Overlook at the entrance to Semper Fidelis Memorial Park says it all. Left: A statue of Marine Corps Maj. Gen. John Lejeune, 13th Commandant of the Marine Corps, stands in Semper Fidelis Memorial Park.

Lejeune, who served over 40 years in the Corps, is often referred to as “the greatest of all Leathernecks.” the revitalization of the area.” The Marine Corps Heritage Center had a home.

Photos by Larry S. Glenn

From Yellow Footprints to Mount Suribachi: The Greening of the Design Team In the early morning hours at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego, 55-year old Christopher Chadbourne, head of internationally renowned exhibit design firm Christopher Chadbourne & Associates, stood on yellow footprints, receiving the customary greeting from Marine drill instructors. He didn’t go far enough on the row of footprints, resulting in extra attention from a drill instructor. It was just one of many experiences that center designers willingly underwent to learn about the Marine Corps.

Several months prior, in November 2000, a national competition had been launched to select a Heritage Center architect. In the competition’s first stage, 30 architectural firms submitted qualifications for review by a jury comprised of Marine Corps Heritage Foundation members, the director of the Marine Corps History and Museums Division, and naval facilities staff. Four firms were selected and each given $50,000 to develop a preliminary design.

In June 2001, a design team from Colorado-based Fentress Bradburn Architects headed to Washington with a

receive 500,000 visitors annually. As the chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors put it, such a facility in this location would be “a catalyst for

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model of the proposed center about the size of a ping-pong table. It was comprised of ordinary materials – cardboard, plastic, and wood – but its form and detail were inspirational.

Rising from the model’s terrain was a proposed National Museum of the Marine Corps, with a conical glass atrium projecting into the air. Inside, aircraft hung from the ceiling, with combat vehicles on the main floor. Iconic Marine quotes like “Retreat, hell! We just got here,” appeared around the top of a circular wall, below the glass atrium. Pictures of the Corps’ giants were spaced along the wall.

Atop the glass atrium was an angled spire.

Commenting on the image conveyed, noted Marine historian Col. Joe Alexander said, “I saw immediately the relationship between the angle of the large spike … as being similar to the angle of the flag at Iwo Jima being raised on Mount Suribachi.” Lt. Gen. Ron Christmas would similarly comment, “Fentress Bradburn has captured this evocative imagery in a design concept.” In July 2001, Commandant of the Marine Corps James L. Jones, Jr. announced that Fentress Bradburn Architects would design the Heritage Center.

In that same year, a competition was under way for a museum exhibit designer, with Christopher Chadbourne & Associates eventually being selected. Both the architectural and the exhibit-design firms would work closely in creating the center and the National Museum of the Marine Corps. Both would also work closely with the Marine Corps to understand its ethos and heritage.

The design team had no prior Marine experience; thus the Marine Corps sought to “make these guys green.”

This understanding of the Marine Corps also was seen as critical by the designers. “The architectural challenge …,” said Curt Fentress, head of Fentress Bradburn Architects, “was first comprehending and then translating into physical form what it means to be a Marine. Asking ourselves that question was part of a daily ritual which started in the competition and continued throughout design.”

Designers saw first hand the monumental challenges of being a Marine. Their journey began on a bus loaded with new recruits bound for Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego and the unforgettable reception by drill instructors.

The designers witnessed recruit training, from swim qualification to the grueling “Crucible” test and graduation.

They then observed duty in the Fleet Marine Forces, where Marines serve with the Navy. Designers flew in a CH-53 helicopter to the amphibious ship USS Nassau, off the Norfolk coast, where they lived in troop-berthing spaces and saw Marines prepare for landings.

The designers learned how history shaped the Marines ethos as well. They read about and then journeyed to the sites of its hallmark battles – Belleau Wood in France, Guam, Saipan, Tinian, and Iwo Jima – accompanied by Long and former Director of the History and Museums Division Col. John W. Ripley, a Navy Cross winner in Vietnam.

It was atop Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi, where the historic flag-raising occurred on Feb. 23, 1945, that designers saw the reverence and pride that Marines hold for their

The central structure within Semper Fidelis Memorial Park will be the chapel, a striking building designed to be reminiscent of field chapels erected by Marines on battlefields all over the world. heritage. In a quiet moment, Ripley placed Marine Corps medallions on the geodetic marker indicating the site of the flag-raising, with the intent of giving them to fellow Marines at home. Exhibit designer Bill Ruggieri of Christopher Chadbourne and Associates later remarked, it was as if these medallions were “dipped in the waters at Lourdes.” One of the unparalleled rewards of being a Marine is being a part of an institution that made such history.

A Design that Pays Homage to the Corps Referring to the now-built National Museum of the Marine Corps, architect Curt Fentress calls it “taking the hill.” Just as the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi commanded the attention of Marines on Iwo Jima and Navy ships at sea over 60 years ago, its architectural metaphor, the museum’s 210-foot central gallery and angled spire, rises from high ground and can readily be seen by northbound travelers on Interstate 95. The museum captures people’s attention and shifts that attention to its contents, beginning with an engraving at the entrance: “Enter and experience what it means to be a Marine.”

But the museum is only the first phase for an even larger experience that the Marine Corps Heritage Center promises.

Walking sites like Belleau Wood and Wake Island evokes remembrance and reflection. The planned Semper Fidelis Memorial Park will provide such an experience for visitors. It will help commemorate the sacrifices of Marines who served the nation and will be the most emotive aspect of the Marine Corps Heritage Center.

Located on approximately three wooded acres south of the museum, the park’s paths will connect visitors to the facts of Marine Corps history, to the ethos and esprit de corps that underpin this institution. Composed of paved and decomposed granite, these paths will lead past monuments erected to Marine Corps organizations and those who served in them. Portions of the paths will be lined with commemorative bricks engraved with the names of

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The museum’s 210-foot angled spire and central gallery structure echo the iconic Marine Corps image of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima, as well as other martial images of the Corps. those honored by families and friends. Commemorative benches along the way will offer opportunities for solitude and reflection.

The central structure within Semper Fidelis Memorial Park is the chapel, reminiscent of the field chapels that Marines often set up in mess tents when operating in combat areas. Composed primarily of wood and glass, the chapel’s design resembles a tent canopy with open sides.

However, its soaring roofline, stone base and nearby water feature also symbolize Marine Corps operations on air, land and sea. Inside, textured wooden planks will cross the ceiling. And, just as field chapels provided Marines with respite and moments of prayer, the park’s chapel will offer the same to visitors. Additionally, this denominational chapel will be available for weddings and funerals.

The park’s water feature is a symbolic connection to the Marine Corps’ amphibious tradition. It will originate at the chapel in the form of a stream, growing in size as it passes through a memorial wall rising above it, and flowing into a large pond on the low ground within the center.

The park’s paths will repeatedly bridge this water feature.

Throughout the park will be overlooks and rallying points focused on key features, such as the chapel and the memorial wall across the water feature. Two major overlooks will be located on high ground adjacent to the museum, offering a commanding view of the structure.

The best representatives of the Marine Corps are Marines themselves. The center will include a 2.3 acre

outdoor, lighted parade deck just north of the museum.

Here, visitors will be able to see the precision of Marines on parade, and attend Marine Corps band concerts and other events. The site will also serve as a demonstration area for Marine Corps capabilities and equipment.

Future additions to the center may include an office building that will serve as a home for the Marine Corps History and Museums Division. The master plan also calls for adjacent facilities dedicated to artifact restoration and preservation. Additionally, the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation anticipates the private construction of an onsite hotel and conference center.

A National Treasure “Ultimately, the once and future Marine Corps depends … on the labor and dedication of those obscure Americans who chose to serve in the Fleet Marine Forces,” wrote Alan R. Millett in Semper Fidelis. The same is true for the Marine Corps Heritage Center that tells their story. To date, that effort has been described by Brig.

Gen. Gerald McKay (USMC-Ret), chief operating officer for the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation: “For all of us who have had the honor and privilege to work on this project, it has truly been a labor of love.” Their result: a national treasure which conveys the meaning of “Semper Fidelis.”

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A NEW ICON

by Craig Collins

F

rom its modest materials to its spectacular central skylight, the National Museum of the Marine Corps is designed to evoke the uniqueness of the Corps.

On a bright summer afternoon, Brian Chaffee, principal and project architect of the National Museum of the Marine Corps, leads a pair of visitors to the middle deck of the observation tower that rises beneath the soaring glass ceiling of the museum’s dramatic centerpiece, the Leatherneck Gallery. He wants them to understand something: The view is different up here. Below and to the right, suspended in midair, is a Curtiss JN-4HG “Jenny” biplane, casting its shadow over the circular globe-patterned terrazzo floor, on which an abstract water-and-earth pattern is gridded by concentric latitudes. The sky is almost perfectly clear overhead, but even so, a few wispy cloud shadows drift lazily over the floor. “With the movement of the clouds, you really get the sense of these aircraft in flight,” says Chaffee.

“When you get to the top of the observation deck and you’re looking down on that aircraft, the Curtiss Jenny, you can imagine being a pilot in an aircraft just above it.”

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Modest materials are used to extraordinary effect in the design of the National Museum of the Marine Corps.

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Opposite: Suspended beneath the ceiling structure is a milestone of Marine Corps aviation; the Short Take-Off Vertical Landing (STOVL) AV-8B Harrier II that embodies Marine Corps innovation. Above: Simple materials like concrete, sandstone, and stainless steel, echoing the Marine Corps tradition of performing the extraordinary with the ordinary, form the setting in which Marine Corps history is presented.

To the left, at eye level, is the downward-angled nose of an AV-8B Harrier II jet; the viewer can’t help but trace its trajectory up along the nose, to the cast figure of a Marine aviator seated in the cockpit, bearing down intently. “Look at the Harrier,” Chaffee says, smiling. “It’s almost as if ... it could be the last thing you ever saw.”

Moments earlier, Chaffee and his visitors had stood on the floor of the gallery, gazing upward at the bellies of four suspended Marine Corps aircraft and beyond, through a ceiling composed of 35,000 square feet – that’s two-thirds of an acre – of glass into the open sky.

From the middle observation deck, they climb to the third and uppermost platform, a rugged slab of steel checkerplate that places the viewer on a level with the highest-hanging airplane in the Leatherneck Gallery, an FG-1 Corsair, cable-rigged some 70 feet in the air and tipped on its axis just enough to flash the upper surfaces of its signature inverted gull wings.

No doubt, the different vantage points on the tri-level tower in the Leatherneck Gallery are meant to surprise and delight the half-million or so people who it’s estimated will visit the National Museum of the Marine Corps each year. But for Chaffee and his colleagues at Fentress Bradburn, the Denver-based architectural firm that

designed the museum, they’re part of a thorough and painstaking design process that began six years ago, took some of them to distant corners of the globe, and now, in the summer of 2006, was beginning at last to blossom forth on a hill next to Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va.

The Patient Search For Fentress Bradburn – a firm already well-known for its distinctive, innovative designs of the Denver International Airport, the Denver Broncos’ stadium (now known as Invesco Field), South Korea’s Incheon International Airport, and many other museums and buildings around the world – the journey began on Nov. 30, 2000, the date when the Marine Corps Heritage Center National Design Competition was announced. The first phase of the competition attracted nearly 30 architects, a pool that was eventually thinned to four. Each finalist was invited, before making its final design submission, to tour the 135-acre site in Prince William County, Va., where the Heritage Center would be built.

The Fentress Bradburn team, led by Curt Fentress, the firm’s founding partner and principal-in-charge of design,

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The National Museum of the Marine Corps dominates the high ground above Interstate 95. had only six weeks to prepare its design. The team promptly embarked on what is known in the industry as a “patient search”: a process of inquiry aimed at discovering, in addition to the general questions about the purpose of the Heritage Center site, the key to capturing the distinctive aura of the Marine Corps in the material media of building construction. Before making its first sketch, the team immersed itself in Marine Corps culture, reading books, watching films and other videos, interviewing Marines both past and present. The walls at the Denver office of the firm were plastered with still photographs of Marines in every situation imaginable – in battle, at sea, in flight, and often simply gathered together in quiet moments. “What we were striving for,” says Fentress, “was a building that would be a new image, a new icon for the Marine Corps.”

In their sketches, Fentress says, the design team returned again and again to an image that has, to many Americans, become the iconic representation of the Marine Corps: Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of five Marines and a Navy corpsman raising the American flag atop Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, on Feb. 23, 1945.

Already memorialized in the Marine Corps War

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Above: Landmark Marine Corps quotations are carved in the sandstone walls of Leatherneck Gallery. Left: A workman lays down a bead of caulk sealing a pane of glass that covers Leatherneck Gallery. The structure of the fritted glass ceiling evokes the cargo nets that Marines once used to scramble down ships’ sides to their landing craft.

Memorial at Arlington, Va., the image of those men had stuck with Fentress for decades. “When I was a child,” he recalls, “I remember my father looking at that picture and telling me about what happened at Iwo Jima. My father was not an educated man, and he was never in the military, but he knew exactly how many of those guys survived the war, and what happened to them later ... and how many Marines died at Iwo Jima ... It was amazing that somebody would know this much about this group of people. Even then, I knew there was something very special about that photograph.”

One of the most distinctive qualities of Rosenthal’s image is the angle at which the flagpole is inclined as the servicemen struggle to raise it. As the design team studied the other images in front of them, this raised angle seemed to be a common feature among many of them.

They brought in a renowned Marine historian – retired Col. Joseph Alexander, who would later become an integral member of the museum’s exhibit design team – to explain the recurrence of this image. “We were looking at the howitzers in the photographs that were pointed up at the same angle, always,” says Fentress. “We didn’t know

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through,” Alexander says. “It’s also the angle of a Marine artillery piece, particularly a howitzer, that would be fired that steeply because the range would be so short.

You’re just lobbing it almost vertically, and that means that the enemy is very close. There’s an image of a number of our jet planes taking off at that extreme angle, trying to get to altitude as quickly as they could, because of an incoming air raid.”

Alexander also saw, in the team’s preliminary designs, some links to the Marine Corps that they seemed to have stumbled on almost intuitively. “For example, if you look at the glasswork in the atrium, you’ll see a pattern of panes or reinforcements. Whatever the structural reason for it is, it gives the impression of a net. And we don’t do this anymore, but for much of at least the first half of the 20th century, that’s how we went from ship to shore. It started by going off the steep side of a transport down a cargo net that was in a grid exactly like that, to get into the small boats, the landing craft alongside it. It was a hairy thing, but that was always the start of a ship-toshore movement, the Marines heavily laden with their rifles and packs going over the side four at a time, hands on the vertical, feet on the horizontal. If you get them backwards, you get stepped on, and then the leap for life as you get down on the bottom craft in the chop below.

If you mistime, you step off of the net and then you’re hanging by your feet.”

Fentress says that after Alexander arrived to discuss the design with them, they felt much better about the direction in which their design was moving. “The design that you see today kind of grew out of all of those things,” says Fentress. “And when we overlaid some Marine Corps images, overlaid the photographs onto this design, then it just sort of made sense. And the one that’s the most striking, obviously, is the flag-raising [at Iwo Jima]. When you see that superimposed on the design, it looks as if was born from that.” On July 9, 2001, several weeks after their final jury presentation, Fentress Bradburn’s team received word that they had been selected to design the 135-acre Marine Corps Heritage Center.

Suspended beneath the 210-foot-tall stainless steel mast in Leatherneck Gallery are milestone Marine Corps aircraft, and the abstract pattern of land and sea, divided by lines of latitude, can be seen in the terrazzo flooring here as the museum nears completion.

The Greening of the Architects The dominant design element of the National Museum of the Marine Corps, inspired by these early explorations of Corps imagery, is the 210-foot-tall stainless steel mast that tapers as it rises at a 60-degree angle through the conical skylight of the Leatherneck Gallery.

But it is by no means the sole feature of the museum – or of the Heritage Center campus – that has been designed to be evocative of the Marine Corps’ unique culture and traditions.

After Fentress Bradburn had won the design competition, many decisions remained to be made. Over the next several months, details emerged and were refined, some of them after Chaffee and Fentress, along with other members of the architectural and exhibit design teams, underwent a brief “greening” tour, ordered by

why. We looked at the way people stood ready with their rifles at about the same angle. We didn’t know why. We had a photograph of the wedding ceremony, with the sabers held at angles similar to this. We could see something there, but we didn’t exactly know why. And so Col. Alexander explained it to us.”

The angle Fentress, Chaffee, and other members of the team kept encountering, says Alexander, was coincidental to a number of circumstances unique to the Marines. It is similar to where Marine officers would, at the command to draw swords, extend a sword in front of them before snapping it back to their shoulders. “And if you’re getting married in a military wedding, by the way, that’s the angle of the arch that you and your bride come

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Commandant James L. Jones and conducted by Col. Joe Long (USMC-Ret.), who is now the museum’s deputy director. The object was to immerse the design team in some of the Corps’ history and traditions.

Chaffee attended boot camp at Camp Pendleton in San Diego, and spent three days aboard the USS Nassau, an amphibious assault ship, offshore from Camp Lejeune, N.C. Fentress visited the sites of some of the most

historic Marine Corps battles, such as Iwo Jima and Belleau Wood, the World War I battle site in the forests of northeastern France. At Belleau Wood – considered to be a pivotal battle in Corps history, in which it transformed itself from a shipbound organization of sharpshooters to a lethal force-in-readiness – Fentress was surprised to discover many material remnants of the battle.

“We walked across those fields that the Marines had to

198

Photo by Larry S. Glenn

Beyond the tableau of Marines storming the beach at Tarawa and the Curtiss Jenny stands the observation tower, calling to mind the superstructure of an attack transport or primary flying control aboard an amphibious assault ship.

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cross in the face of all those machine gun nests,” he says.

“We saw the trenches. There’s still stuff in the woods, you know, toothbrushes and canteens, and bullets, all sorts of stuff. It must have been an incredible scene of carnage there.”

Both Chaffee and Fentress say that once they made these visits, many of the up-in-the-air details of the museum and the Heritage Center began to settle in their minds.

One of the most obvious elements for Chaffee is the central observation tower, which bears a striking resemblance to the superstructure of a naval warship. “I can say that there was a very direct relationship between my visit aboard the USS Nassau and how the central stair and elevator observation tower evolved, and the development of that design,” Chaffee said. “It just took on a notably ship-like appearance, utilizing what I had observed on the ship as a very modular design esthetic, and portions could easily be fitted, be removed and replaced, and it really kind of adopted the utility of the Marine/Navy shipboard devices.” The final exterior color of the building – a naval shade of gray – was also partly inspired by the stay aboard the Nassau.

Some of the museum’s design elements are overtly metaphorical, such as the abstract terrazzo pattern on the circular floor of the Leatherneck Gallery, in which a wavy blue ribbon – symbolizing water – meanders through two brown-and-green segments of floor, which represent land.

While the central tower, with its ship-like features, is situated in the “water” portion of the floor, Chaffee explains, the land-based tableaus – an LVT amphibious landing craft storming the coconut-log wall at Tarawa and a Sikorsky helicopter offloading Marine assault troops in Korea – are situated in the land-colored portions. “And of course,” says Chaffee, “the aircraft are suspended in the space above that.

So that encapsulates land, sea, and air within that space.”

Other features are subtler and, while their link to Marine Corps history and principles is still resonant, have a more intuitive feel. The chapel that will be built, in a later construction phase, on the Heritage Center campus in Semper Fidelis Memorial Park, will be a single-room structure. Its roof, built simply of exposed wood planks and beams, will cap glass-paneled walls fitted to a stone foundation, in order to gracefully evoke the austerity of a Marine Corps field chapel. “Part of what we studied,” says Chaffee, “was what kind of chapels Marines have fashioned in the field, in the combat zone. And often they just used the mess tents, you know, stacked up panel boxes sideways to sit on, or vertically to make a lectern.”

At the rear of the chapel, the plan calls for a man-made stream to spring up from the ground and then trickle downhill, slowly gathering strength until it culminates in a large pool on the lower ground of the site. “The whole premise of the Semper Fidelis Memorial Park,” says Chaffee, “was a couple of ideas. One was to include a water feature that could help symbolize that Marines – most Marines – spend part of their career at service on the sea in conjunction with the Navy. And secondarily, to provide a more natural exterior experience and a place where units can memorialize their comrades, and unit designation can evolve over time in the infrastructure of this park.”

It’s About Storytelling Fentress Bradburn’s team looked well beyond the designed elements and forms that would be installed on the Heritage Center campus. The ethos and traditions of the Marine Corps informed virtually every choice they made, from where the National Museum of the Marine Corps would be sited to the very materials that would be used in construction. The museum’s glass skylight is located on the highest ground visible from Interstate 95, which is, of course, no accident. “We did recognize that there’s a strategic advantage to being on the high ground and what the Marines do in combat situations,” Chaffee says. “And that strategic advantage extends to architecture here. That’s where the building has an advantage on being on the high ground, being in its horizontal location, very visible and commanding a very strong presence.”

One of the immediate things a visitor will notice upon first glance is the stark simplicity of the museum’s exterior: Its walls, made of cast-in-place concrete, are relatively unadorned, and the skylight is made of stainless steel and glass. In selecting materials, the Fentress Bradburn team focused on a theme inescapable to any student of the Marine Corps: doing extraordinary things with modest equipment.

“I’m definitely proud of that,” Chaffee says, “finding the appropriate materials to represent the Marines. One of the things we learned from Col. Alexander, as we were awarded the competition and as we were then starting to develop the detail of the design, was the story of how the Marines worked with fairly modest means – and in some cases used material that had been discarded by other armed services in battle and sent to the Marine Corps for use. And he underlined the thought that the Marines are modest in means, but yet they’re expressive in power and force, and our material selections were based on those kinds of values – simple, economical, and utilitarian.”

The ability to use concrete, glass, and steel to narrate the history of an organization like the Marine Corps is one of the things that defines someone as an architect.

“It’s a lot about storytelling,” says Chaffee. “Architecture should be able to tell a story on its own. Of course, if you’re a museum you also have the benefit of artifacts and exhibits to tell the story. It’s one of the nice things about a history museum, or any museum where the exhibits are going to be a little more permanent. The architect can afford to tell a story in conjunction with the exhibits.”

Fentress also views architecture as a form of narrative – one so complex and large in scale that it reminds him of producing a feature film, in this case an epic history of the Marine Corps: “Because you have to have the writing, the idea, the story, and then you mock it up, and you storyboard it. And then you change it and continue to refine it. And then when you go out to actually make the movie, when you’re ready to produce it, it takes millions of dollars and it takes a lot of people. ...

It’s exciting stuff. And this building is truly an exciting, memorable building.”

201

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Photo courtesy of Marine Corps Heritage Foundation

THE MUSEUM

Photo courtesy of Fentress Bradburn Architects

The National Museum of the Marine Corps dominates the high ground above Interstate 95. had only six weeks to prepare its design. The team promptly embarked on what is known in the industry as a “patient search”: a process of inquiry aimed at discovering, in addition to the general questions about the purpose of the Heritage Center site, the key to capturing the distinctive aura of the Marine Corps in the material media of building construction. Before making its first sketch, the team immersed itself in Marine Corps culture, reading books, watching films and other videos, interviewing Marines both past and present. The walls at the Denver office of the firm were plastered with still photographs of Marines in every situation imaginable – in battle, at sea, in flight, and often simply gathered together in quiet moments. “What we were striving for,” says Fentress, “was a building that would be a new image, a new icon for the Marine Corps.”

In their sketches, Fentress says, the design team returned again and again to an image that has, to many Americans, become the iconic representation of the Marine Corps: Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of five Marines and a Navy corpsman raising the American flag atop Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, on Feb. 23, 1945.

Already memorialized in the Marine Corps War

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Photo courtesy of Fentress Bradburn Architects

10/9/06

Above: Landmark Marine Corps quotations are carved in the sandstone walls of Leatherneck Gallery. Left: A workman lays down a bead of caulk sealing a pane of glass that covers Leatherneck Gallery. The structure of the fritted glass ceiling evokes the cargo nets that Marines once used to scramble down ships’ sides to their landing craft.

Memorial at Arlington, Va., the image of those men had stuck with Fentress for decades. “When I was a child,” he recalls, “I remember my father looking at that picture and telling me about what happened at Iwo Jima. My father was not an educated man, and he was never in the military, but he knew exactly how many of those guys survived the war, and what happened to them later ... and how many Marines died at Iwo Jima ... It was amazing that somebody would know this much about this group of people. Even then, I knew there was something very special about that photograph.”

One of the most distinctive qualities of Rosenthal’s image is the angle at which the flagpole is inclined as the servicemen struggle to raise it. As the design team studied the other images in front of them, this raised angle seemed to be a common feature among many of them.

They brought in a renowned Marine historian – retired Col. Joseph Alexander, who would later become an integral member of the museum’s exhibit design team – to explain the recurrence of this image. “We were looking at the howitzers in the photographs that were pointed up at the same angle, always,” says Fentress. “We didn’t know

194

USMC photo by Lawrence Giberson

Architecture

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Photo courtesy of Fentress Bradburn Architects

through,” Alexander says. “It’s also the angle of a Marine artillery piece, particularly a howitzer, that would be fired that steeply because the range would be so short.

You’re just lobbing it almost vertically, and that means that the enemy is very close. There’s an image of a number of our jet planes taking off at that extreme angle, trying to get to altitude as quickly as they could, because of an incoming air raid.”

Alexander also saw, in the team’s preliminary designs, some links to the Marine Corps that they seemed to have stumbled on almost intuitively. “For example, if you look at the glasswork in the atrium, you’ll see a pattern of panes or reinforcements. Whatever the structural reason for it is, it gives the impression of a net. And we don’t do this anymore, but for much of at least the first half of the 20th century, that’s how we went from ship to shore. It started by going off the steep side of a transport down a cargo net that was in a grid exactly like that, to get into the small boats, the landing craft alongside it. It was a hairy thing, but that was always the start of a ship-toshore movement, the Marines heavily laden with their rifles and packs going over the side four at a time, hands on the vertical, feet on the horizontal. If you get them backwards, you get stepped on, and then the leap for life as you get down on the bottom craft in the chop below.

If you mistime, you step off of the net and then you’re hanging by your feet.”

Fentress says that after Alexander arrived to discuss the design with them, they felt much better about the direction in which their design was moving. “The design that you see today kind of grew out of all of those things,” says Fentress. “And when we overlaid some Marine Corps images, overlaid the photographs onto this design, then it just sort of made sense. And the one that’s the most striking, obviously, is the flag-raising [at Iwo Jima]. When you see that superimposed on the design, it looks as if was born from that.” On July 9, 2001, several weeks after their final jury presentation, Fentress Bradburn’s team received word that they had been selected to design the 135-acre Marine Corps Heritage Center.

Suspended beneath the 210-foot-tall stainless steel mast in Leatherneck Gallery are milestone Marine Corps aircraft, and the abstract pattern of land and sea, divided by lines of latitude, can be seen in the terrazzo flooring here as the museum nears completion.

The Greening of the Architects The dominant design element of the National Museum of the Marine Corps, inspired by these early explorations of Corps imagery, is the 210-foot-tall stainless steel mast that tapers as it rises at a 60-degree angle through the conical skylight of the Leatherneck Gallery.

But it is by no means the sole feature of the museum – or of the Heritage Center campus – that has been designed to be evocative of the Marine Corps’ unique culture and traditions.

After Fentress Bradburn had won the design competition, many decisions remained to be made. Over the next several months, details emerged and were refined, some of them after Chaffee and Fentress, along with other members of the architectural and exhibit design teams, underwent a brief “greening” tour, ordered by

why. We looked at the way people stood ready with their rifles at about the same angle. We didn’t know why. We had a photograph of the wedding ceremony, with the sabers held at angles similar to this. We could see something there, but we didn’t exactly know why. And so Col. Alexander explained it to us.”

The angle Fentress, Chaffee, and other members of the team kept encountering, says Alexander, was coincidental to a number of circumstances unique to the Marines. It is similar to where Marine officers would, at the command to draw swords, extend a sword in front of them before snapping it back to their shoulders. “And if you’re getting married in a military wedding, by the way, that’s the angle of the arch that you and your bride come

197

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THE MUSEUM

Commandant James L. Jones and conducted by Col. Joe Long (USMC-Ret.), who is now the museum’s deputy director. The object was to immerse the design team in some of the Corps’ history and traditions.

Chaffee attended boot camp at Camp Pendleton in San Diego, and spent three days aboard the USS Nassau, an amphibious assault ship, offshore from Camp Lejeune, N.C. Fentress visited the sites of some of the most

historic Marine Corps battles, such as Iwo Jima and Belleau Wood, the World War I battle site in the forests of northeastern France. At Belleau Wood – considered to be a pivotal battle in Corps history, in which it transformed itself from a shipbound organization of sharpshooters to a lethal force-in-readiness – Fentress was surprised to discover many material remnants of the battle.

“We walked across those fields that the Marines had to

198

Photo by Larry S. Glenn

Beyond the tableau of Marines storming the beach at Tarawa and the Curtiss Jenny stands the observation tower, calling to mind the superstructure of an attack transport or primary flying control aboard an amphibious assault ship.

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cross in the face of all those machine gun nests,” he says.

“We saw the trenches. There’s still stuff in the woods, you know, toothbrushes and canteens, and bullets, all sorts of stuff. It must have been an incredible scene of carnage there.”

Both Chaffee and Fentress say that once they made these visits, many of the up-in-the-air details of the museum and the Heritage Center began to settle in their minds.

One of the most obvious elements for Chaffee is the central observation tower, which bears a striking resemblance to the superstructure of a naval warship. “I can say that there was a very direct relationship between my visit aboard the USS Nassau and how the central stair and elevator observation tower evolved, and the development of that design,” Chaffee said. “It just took on a notably ship-like appearance, utilizing what I had observed on the ship as a very modular design esthetic, and portions could easily be fitted, be removed and replaced, and it really kind of adopted the utility of the Marine/Navy shipboard devices.” The final exterior color of the building – a naval shade of gray – was also partly inspired by the stay aboard the Nassau.

Some of the museum’s design elements are overtly metaphorical, such as the abstract terrazzo pattern on the circular floor of the Leatherneck Gallery, in which a wavy blue ribbon – symbolizing water – meanders through two brown-and-green segments of floor, which represent land.

While the central tower, with its ship-like features, is situated in the “water” portion of the floor, Chaffee explains, the land-based tableaus – an LVT amphibious landing craft storming the coconut-log wall at Tarawa and a Sikorsky helicopter offloading Marine assault troops in Korea – are situated in the land-colored portions. “And of course,” says Chaffee, “the aircraft are suspended in the space above that.

So that encapsulates land, sea, and air within that space.”

Other features are subtler and, while their link to Marine Corps history and principles is still resonant, have a more intuitive feel. The chapel that will be built, in a later construction phase, on the Heritage Center campus in Semper Fidelis Memorial Park, will be a single-room structure. Its roof, built simply of exposed wood planks and beams, will cap glass-paneled walls fitted to a stone foundation, in order to gracefully evoke the austerity of a Marine Corps field chapel. “Part of what we studied,” says Chaffee, “was what kind of chapels Marines have fashioned in the field, in the combat zone. And often they just used the mess tents, you know, stacked up panel boxes sideways to sit on, or vertically to make a lectern.”

At the rear of the chapel, the plan calls for a man-made stream to spring up from the ground and then trickle downhill, slowly gathering strength until it culminates in a large pool on the lower ground of the site. “The whole premise of the Semper Fidelis Memorial Park,” says Chaffee, “was a couple of ideas. One was to include a water feature that could help symbolize that Marines – most Marines – spend part of their career at service on the sea in conjunction with the Navy. And secondarily, to provide a more natural exterior experience and a place where units can memorialize their comrades, and unit designation can evolve over time in the infrastructure of this park.”

It’s About Storytelling Fentress Bradburn’s team looked well beyond the designed elements and forms that would be installed on the Heritage Center campus. The ethos and traditions of the Marine Corps informed virtually every choice they made, from where the National Museum of the Marine Corps would be sited to the very materials that would be used in construction. The museum’s glass skylight is located on the highest ground visible from Interstate 95, which is, of course, no accident. “We did recognize that there’s a strategic advantage to being on the high ground and what the Marines do in combat situations,” Chaffee says. “And that strategic advantage extends to architecture here. That’s where the building has an advantage on being on the high ground, being in its horizontal location, very visible and commanding a very strong presence.”

One of the immediate things a visitor will notice upon first glance is the stark simplicity of the museum’s exterior: Its walls, made of cast-in-place concrete, are relatively unadorned, and the skylight is made of stainless steel and glass. In selecting materials, the Fentress Bradburn team focused on a theme inescapable to any student of the Marine Corps: doing extraordinary things with modest equipment.

“I’m definitely proud of that,” Chaffee says, “finding the appropriate materials to represent the Marines. One of the things we learned from Col. Alexander, as we were awarded the competition and as we were then starting to develop the detail of the design, was the story of how the Marines worked with fairly modest means – and in some cases used material that had been discarded by other armed services in battle and sent to the Marine Corps for use. And he underlined the thought that the Marines are modest in means, but yet they’re expressive in power and force, and our material selections were based on those kinds of values – simple, economical, and utilitarian.”

The ability to use concrete, glass, and steel to narrate the history of an organization like the Marine Corps is one of the things that defines someone as an architect.

“It’s a lot about storytelling,” says Chaffee. “Architecture should be able to tell a story on its own. Of course, if you’re a museum you also have the benefit of artifacts and exhibits to tell the story. It’s one of the nice things about a history museum, or any museum where the exhibits are going to be a little more permanent. The architect can afford to tell a story in conjunction with the exhibits.”

Fentress also views architecture as a form of narrative – one so complex and large in scale that it reminds him of producing a feature film, in this case an epic history of the Marine Corps: “Because you have to have the writing, the idea, the story, and then you mock it up, and you storyboard it. And then you change it and continue to refine it. And then when you go out to actually make the movie, when you’re ready to produce it, it takes millions of dollars and it takes a lot of people. ...

It’s exciting stuff. And this building is truly an exciting, memorable building.”

201

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An exhibit depicting a 37mm anti-tank gun crew on Guadalcanal.

Canister rounds, which burst open and scattered shrapnel on leaving the muzzle, proved deadly against attacks by massed Japanese soldiers.

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THROUGH THE EYES OF MARINES

The National Museum of the Marine Corps’ design team, through carefully crafted exhibits, summons the spirit of the nation’s military elite. By Craig Collins

All photos Larry S. Glenn

L

ong before he had so much as sketched out the first exhibit for the National Museum of the Marine Corps, Bill Ruggieri found himself atop the rocky volcanic dome of Mount Suribachi on the island of Iwo Jima, 650 miles south of Japan. He had been invited by the National Museum’s deputy director, Col. Joe Long (USMC-Ret.) and two of the Marine Corps’ historians, Col. John Ripley and Col. Jon Hoffman (both retired Marines), to see the place where 6,140 Marines and Navy personnel, along with nearly 22,000 Japanese defenders, were killed during the 35day fight for the island.

Ruggieri, who was born after World War II, knew the fight for Iwo Jima’s air strips was one of the most important battles in history. He knew of the black-sand beaches, the volcanic landscape whose dominant feature was the dormant crater on the island’s southwestern tip. “But I had no idea,” he says, “that it was that small.”

Iwo Jima would be just one leg of the journey made by Ruggieri – the lead exhibit designer for the National Museum of the Marine Corps – and other members of the design team, long before ground had been broken at the site of the new museum. Together and separately, they visited the Pacific Islands of Tinian, Saipan, and Guam; they visited Belleau Wood, near Chateau-Thierry, France, where Marines fought the bloodiest and fiercest battle of World War I and earned the nickname “Devil Dogs” from their German opponents; they stayed for several days in a troop-berthing aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Nassau, offshore from Camp Lejeune, N.C.; and they visited several other military museums around the world.

According to Long, they also experienced a bit of what he went through at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego in 1966: boot camp. When Ruggieri’s company, the Boston-based Christopher Chadbourne and Associates, joined the Denver architectural firm of Fentress Bradburn as the main design contractors for the museum, Long says, “The Commandant [Gen. James L. Jones, now NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, Europe] said ‘Let’s see if we can make these guys green,’ and I thought that was a great idea. We wanted them to be as close to the Corps as they could get.”

In San Diego, design team members jumped off a bus with two dozen recruits and ran smack into a classic drillinstructor welcome, which Long recalls with unconcealed

fondness. “Chris Chadbourne – he’s 55, probably, and doesn’t need to do the kind of stuff he did, but he got on the bus. And boy, they got screamed off the bus. The drill instructor was screaming at them to line up on the yellow footprints, and my guys jumped off the bus along with all those 18-, 19-year-old recruits, and Chris Chadbourne didn’t go far enough down the line of yellow footprints – he was supposed to go down to the very end – and the drill instructor got right in his face and screamed him down to the end. Actually,” he laughs, “the guys were kind of quivering a little bit.”

Ruggieri – who would become perhaps the only museum exhibit designer ever to knock himself unconscious on a Marine boot camp obstacle course – remembers his experience with a mixture of emotions. His visit to Iwo Jima moved him profoundly.

Jon Hoffman, former deputy director of the Marine Corps’ History and Museums Division, explains that immersing the design team in Marine Corps culture was an important first step toward answering a rhetorical question posed by Lt. Gen. Victor Krulak nearly a halfcentury ago: “Why do we need a Marine Corps?” By implication, the question for the design team was: “Why do we need a Marine Corps Museum?”

“Because when you really get down to it, the Marine Corps is essentially like a second army,” Hoffman says.

“We’re guys who fight on the ground ... and so my view as to the museum was that this should explain to the American public what the Marine Corps contributes that nobody else has, and why we should keep the Marine Corps around.”

A Core Message When they first began seeking designers for the National Museum several years ago, the two key organizations in the planning of the museum – the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, the nonprofit organization that promotes historical scholarship about the Corps, and the Marine Corps’ own History and Museums Division – began by knowing exactly what they did not want the museum to be. Since World War II, the History and Museums Division’s remarkable archive – approximately 30,000 artifacts, including the finest small-arms collection in the world; authentic combat film footage; a collection of combat art; documents; and cherished items associated with the heroic acts of

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The cold, dark, Toktong Pass exhibit. With sound and light effects as well as a lowered temperature in the darkened room, visitors will get a strong impression of what Marines experienced during the Chosin Reservoir campaign. individual Marines – had been scattered among several installations nationwide, including the Marine Corps Museum at the Washington Navy Yard and the AirGround Museum on the Marine Corps Base at Quantico, Va. In 1999, when the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation formally launched its campaign in support of a Marine Corps Heritage Center that would be anchored by a National Museum, Hoffman says everyone involved wanted to avoid making the new museum into merely a larger warehouse stuffed full of Marine Corps treasures. Early debates over what the museum should be were conducted among members of the Heritage Foundation and historians such as Hoffman, Ripley, and Col. Joseph Alexander (USMC-Ret.), one of the Corps’ most esteemed living historians and author or co-author of nearly a dozen books, including A Fellowship of Valor: The Battle History of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Alexander gives much of the credit for the final vision of the museum to the late Col. Jerry Thomas (USMCRet.), a member of the Heritage Foundation. “To me he was the visionary,” says Alexander. “He, more than anybody, was responsible for leading us out of what we have now – just the standard collection of stuff – into capturing more of what we would hope to be the unique culture of the Marines.”

In Christopher Chadbourne and Associates, whose previous work has included dynamic three-dimensional

exhibits for such clients as the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Hershey Museum, and Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, Marine Corps visionaries such as Hoffman and Thomas found a group of designers who understood the rare opportunity presented by a National Museum of the Marine Corps. “A friend of mine once said museums are made up of factoids, just little paragraphs that tell you facts that you needed to know to pass a history exam,” says the firm’s founding partner, Christopher Chadbourne. “We felt that what had happened with museums is that they had forgotten the art of storytelling, and that like a good teacher, you have to weave the facts into a good story and do it entertainingly. And so our exhibits ... tend to be story-based.”

Before the first exhibit was designed, Chadbourne sat down with Alexander and Hoffman to figure out the most important lessons to be learned by the story of the United States Marine Corps. First, they focused on a “Core Message,” or the single point a visitor should grasp and retain. They settled on a succinct answer to Krulak’s long-ago question: “The Marines Corps provides a vital contribution to the nation and the preservation of freedom.” They then drafted a list of nine “Primary Messages” that would guide how exhibits were designed and organized.

One of the clearest examples of this message-driven exhibit today occupies the museum’s most striking space, the Leatherneck Gallery, in which several aircraft are suspended

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within the soaring glass vault of the central chamber. “We created the goal,” says Hoffman, “that everything in the central gallery would highlight a significant contribution of the Marine Corps, not in terms of fighting, but in terms of the more intellectual aspect, in terms of developing doctrine. So when you come in there, you won’t just see neat things. You would say, ‘Oh, the Marine Corps weren’t just tough guys who knew how to fight. They came up with new ways to fight, and showed other people how to do that.”

There are six large artifacts in the Leatherneck Gallery. Two of them anchor tableau exhibits on the floor: an LVT “Alligator” landing craft breaching a coconut-log wall at Tarawa in November 1943 while cast figures of Marines climb over by hand; and an HRS-1 Sikorsky helicopter unloading a Marine machine gun team atop Hill 880 in West Central Korea during Operation Summit, 1950. Four are aircraft that hang from the glass curtain of the gallery: two Corsairs, an AV-8B Harrier II jet, and a Curtiss JN-4HG “Jenny” biplane.

Each of these signature artifacts is a concrete illustration of one of the Primary Messages drafted by Chadbourne, Hoffman, and Alexander: “The Marines’ traditions of rapid deployment and assault from the sea demand constant innovation.” The Curtiss “Jenny” biplane was used by Marine aviators during World War I and the “Banana Wars” of the early 20th century to refine and perfect the tactic of “dive-bombing” to provide more precise air support of combat troops. The powerful bentwing Corsair – initially rejected by the U.S. Navy because it was deemed unsuitable for use on aircraft carriers – was adopted by Marine aviators and became a lethal ground attack fighter-bomber in World War II and Korea. The vertical takeoff and landing capabilities of the revolutionary Harrier “jump jet” were ideal for the Marine Corps’ needs. The floor tableau of Tarawa illustrates the Marine Corps’ first major test of its doctrine of amphibious assault from the sea against a heavily defended beach – using an innovatively redesigned logistic support vehicle – and the Sikorsky helicopter demonstrates the new dimension the Marines added in the mobility of assault troops and logistical resupply.

Ken Smith-Christmas, the former curator of material history at the Corps’ Air-Ground Museum in Quantico for more than 25 years before it closed in anticipation of the Heritage Center, was a key contributor to the design of the National Museum’s exhibits. The signature artifacts of the central gallery were one of the very first ideas to be discussed, he says. “This was a concept actually suggested by our former commandant, Gen. Mundy, in one of our planning sessions, that the visitor take away five major contributions of the Marine Corps to American military warfighting – amphibious warfare, use of helicopters, vertical takeoff and landing, close air support, and dive-bombing. These are the five biggies that we could represent using major artifacts in a huge atrium, where you just weren’t hanging up a bunch of airplanes because it’s the only place you have to hang airplanes.

Each one of these has its own story to tell. And if that’s

In this exhibit, an early World War II Marine machine gunner fires at enemy planes with his water-cooled .30-caliber machine gun, representing the desperate early months of the war when Japanese planes seemed to fill the skies above Marine island outposts. the only part of the museum you see, you come away with an understanding of why we have a Marine Corps, and what it’s done over the years.”

A Museum for Everyone The idea that someone would visit the National Museum of the Marine Corps and visit only the central Leatherneck Gallery, without viewing any of the museum’s other exhibits, is a curious suggestion to anyone with even a passing interest in the Marine Corps. But it’s not entirely farfetched. An early marketing study, performed by a local university professor, indicated that the very characteristics that make the site of the Marine Corps Heritage Center so attractive – its location on the Interstate 95 corridor, one of the busiest tourism corridors in the United States; its free admission; and its iconic architectural design – make it more likely to be visited by people who know very little, or perhaps nothing at all, about the Marine Corps. Of the half-million visitors who are expected to visit the museum each year, it’s likely that 70 percent will have no direct connection to the Corps. “And so if you start in a gallery by describing what the Marines did during the Barbary Wars,” says Chadbourne, “you’ve already lost the 70 percent of the people who don’t have a clue what the Barbary Wars were.”

As a Marine historian, Alexander’s post-military career has consisted of writing books and making

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Opposite and above: A Marine machine gun team deploys from a Sikorsky HRS-1 helicopter in the Korean War tableau located in Leatherneck Gallery. The Korean conflict marked the Marines’ pioneering use of helicopters on the battlefield.

appearances on television’s History Channel to relate the stories of the Corps to both military and civilian audiences of varying levels of knowledge and interest. But even he, in his role as author of virtually every exhibit panel that appears in the National Museum of the Marine Corps, was not prepared for the range of visitors that Chadbourne and Associates hoped to entertain and educate. “Chris divides any museum’s visitors into three categories,” says Alexander. “First, the Streakers, who come and go, who are in and out in a half hour, just skimming the surface. Then you’ve got the Strollers, who may come and stop and pause and read and ponder, but aren’t really that into it. And then the Students, who come and may stay forever – and may stay forever in one section of one gallery, because they want to know everything they can about it. It’s hard to appeal to all three, obviously.” He offers this example: “If I’m writing the exhibit panels for the Vietnam War, I can’t assume that the people coming in know what an NVA is or what a ChiCom grenade is, or what a Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle was, or what the Gulf of Tonkin was, what McNamara’s Wall or what Tet was, or even what the whole war was about. This is where Christopher Chadbourne has been particularly effective.”

It isn’t just the nature of the exhibits themselves, but also the physical layout of the museum that appeals to each of these three groups – and attempts to convert every visitor, at every turn, into a Student. The hub of the museum’s circular structure, the Leatherneck Gallery, while

built to appeal to all three groups, is a classic and flashy appeal to Streakers. It is ringed by a fast-track pathway known as the Legacy Walk, a timeline printed on the wall and illustrated by cased artifacts and other visuals that allow visitors to correlate Marine Corps activities and events with their context in American and world history – a feature, says Alexander, designed for Strollers. “Here you’re seeing that the United States, for example, in the late 19th century, became an imperial nation and was in pursuit of overseas markets and possessions along with the other European powers, and got us into a war with Spain over the perceived outrages in the Spanish colony of Cuba.

And so you’ll say, ‘Okay, here are the Marines going into Gitmo Bay.’ Now you know a little bit more of why this happened, how we ended up going to Guam, going to the Philippines. You get a sense of the Marines being the storm petrel, the fire brigade, priding themselves on their ‘First to Fight’ readiness, their quick deployability.”

At the appropriate point along the Legacy Walk, visitors may enter one of the three “era galleries” that exist today: Uncommon Valor, 1940-1945; Send in the Marines, 1946-1954; and Land, Air, and Sea, 1955-1974.

“World War II, Korea, and Vietnam,” says SmithChristmas, “we selected those because they represent the generations that are dying off now. The guys that served before then aren’t with us any more, and the guys – and ladies – who’ve served since then, we’re going to keep moving to cover their periods of Marine Corps history

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as well.” Ultimately, nine era galleries are planned for the museum.

The era galleries are the museum’s main organizing features, and their exhibits – a mix of immersive multimedia environments, tableaus, static written panels, and cased displays – are designed to appeal to all types of visitors and learning styles. They are also the rooms that will house the relics of Marine lore, some of which – like the large flag raised at Iwo Jima and famously captured on film by Joe Rosenthal – are likely to be familiar to non-Marines, and other iconic items which, while probably unknown to the casual visitor, have an almost spiritual significance for Marines: Capt. Stephen Pless’s Huey helicopter; John Lejeune’s map case; Smedley Butler’s swagger stick; John Quick’s sword; Dan Daly’s Medals of Honor. The era galleries will make it clear that the design team, while making Marine Corps history available to the broadest range of visitors possible, is not interested in “Marine Corps History for Dummies.” Its exhibits are meant to appeal equally to scholars such as Alexander.

“Our real goal,” says Smith-Christmas, “was to make everybody feel, when they come through the museum, that we designed it with them in mind. That’s everybody from the thoroughly disinterested spouse who would rather be – like my wife – going to a nice historical garden someplace and not surrounded by tanks and airplanes, to the nitpicking canteen cork collector. ... No matter how much time you spend in there, you come away with a complete story. It might not be as detailed as others, but at least it’s complete from A to Z – and every visitor will understand the debt that we all owe to the Marine Corps.”

An oil-stained gunner aims his Lewis gun from the rear cockpit of the National Museum of the Marine Corps’ JN-4HG Jenny.

From the Yellow Footprints to Hill 881 South

into some of the more personal side of it, and how we intended to use this to tell the story, not just of the generals and colonels, of which there were many in the room, but of the troops,” Alexander says. “It was really their story. And a man named Eugene Sledge had just died that year. He was a great PFC who had written the definitive account of World War II called With the Old Breed. It’s still in print. And a lot of people have compared it to All Quiet on the Western Front from World War I, also The Red Badge of Courage from the Civil War – an enlisted man’s account of two horrific battles at Peleliu and Okinawa. He was a survivor of both of them. And we proposed that the museum would be not just the big picture of the battles and the great generals and such, but to have people like this youngster who actually did more to win the battle, I think, than any of us ever did, and had the heart to come home and then try to expunge these ghosts from his past and also to tell the story of his buddies who didn’t come back – and did so terrifically.”

With members of the design team, Alexander set about making the voices of Marines such as Sledge available throughout the exhibits. The galleries feature several audio and video stations where visitors can plug in and hear firstperson accounts not only of battles, but of everyday life in

It should also be clear to visitors that the design team’s goal was to tell the story of the Marine Corps through the experiences and voices of individual Marines. Visitors who venture beyond the Leatherneck Gallery may enter the museum’s orientation theater, the Scuttlebutt Theater, for a brief introductory film about the Corps, narrated by more than a dozen Marines of varying ages and ranks. From this theater, visitors will encounter Making Marines, the first of several immersive exhibits that will allow them to experience, to the fullest extent possible, what it’s like to be a Marine.

They’ll visit a virtual “boot camp,” where they’ll step into a kiosk and place their feet in the yellow footprints familiar to every Marine, while a virtual drill instructor offers the new “recruits” a vociferous demonstration and some insight into how a group of diverse young Americans are transformed into disciplined and unified comrades-in-arms.

For Alexander, the desire to tell the Marine Corps’ story in the first person – as opposed to the detached monotone of the history professor – was an idea that struck the museum’s proponents in their earliest discussions, before the design team had been selected. “We got

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Above: A retired CH-46 Sea Knight was cut in two so that the rear half could be used as the entrance to the Vietnam-era Hill 881-S exhibit. The helicopter is painted in the colors of HMM-364 Purple Foxes. Left: A mural depicts the commanding view from Hill 881-S, and details such as the correct bootprints in the red clay soil, or the flattened tire of the howitzer, add to the experience. person as much as possible. ... To me that was the most interesting part of it, because it wasn’t just straight old history. It was told in the voice of the Marines.”

The design team’s desire for first-person perspectives at the National Museum was so powerful, in fact, that each of the era galleries is anchored by a multisensory immersive exhibit, such as the boot camp experience, that will allow visitors to feel as if they are part of a key event in Marine Corps history. Given two eventful centuries, a non-Marine might have difficulty deciding which events would receive this level of treatment. But there is a surprising – if not universal – consensus among most Marines, one that Alexander says is shared by Commandant Michael W. Hagee. “He has the view,” says Alexander, “that the three greatest battles – and this is a way to start a fight in any club in the Marine Corps – are what I’ve called, in a previous publication, the touchstones. “They are Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima, and the Chosin Reservoir [in Korea, where a small number of vastly outnumbered Marines fought their way

the Marine Corps. All of these audio and video presentations were produced by Batwin & Robin Productions of New York. Says Robin Silvestri, the company’s co-principal, “I think the thing that was most interesting for all of us – meaning all of us here at Batwin and Robin – is that everything was created from a first-person point of view. Even within the straight video-monitor, documentary kind of pieces that we produced, we did a lot of research with Col. Alexander and a researcher by the name of Beth Crumley [currently the assistant curator in the museum] on finding first-person accounts, whether they were written in books or whether they were audio recordings, and we used first-

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Alexander speaks of the immersive exhibits with great enthusiasm. “The classic example of the immersion gallery, I think, is in Korea,” he says. “When you walk into that exhibit, the temperature drops. And you feel the wind in your face. ... And you can make out the huddled figures of Marines in a very thin line defending a hilltop at Fox Pass. It was very much like Thermopylae: There are not enough of them, they’ve been hit night after night, they don’t know how long they can hold out, but they’ve got to because there are two whole regiments up at the other end of the road, 20 miles away, and the only way they can ever get out is along that road. And you step into that and environmentally sense the cold, the loneliness, the fear, the fortitude, and the dread, because it’s night and the Communists are coming. ... You hear the telltale signals that the Marines have learned, the bugles blaring and the cymbals crashing and the flares and the yells and the screams, and somewhere out there in the night, through the snow, are a thousand Chinese with their burp guns, running. ... You’ll walk out of that with a sense of, ‘My gosh, whoever they were, the men who fought in the Chosin Reservoir have seen their touch of a cold hell.’”

The immersive exhibits – including the Iwo Jima immersion, in which visitors step from an amphibious landing craft onto a black beach, wrapped by a 270degree projection of actual film footage of incoming enemy fire from the ramparts and caves of Iwo Jima – are meant to help visitors imagine. But nobody on the team believes, or desires, that visitors will feel what the Marines felt at Chosin or Iwo Jima. The only ones who can convey that, of course, are Marines themselves, and they do this movingly in the introductory film produced by Batwin & Robin for the Scuttlebutt Theater.

In the film, says Silvestri, “We interviewed everyone from (former Marine) Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) down to Sgt. Wright, who is a young Marine in his 30s who had both his arms blown off in Iraq. And they tell the story of what it means to be a Marine, and that is among the most moving pieces we’ve done. And I’m happy to say that Col. Alexander has shown it to a few of his old buddies and he said it’s brought tears to these old dogs’ eyes.”

Alexander himself – a prolific and gifted military historian – almost seems at a loss for words when pressed to describe what it means to be a Marine. “We’re not a maudlin type,” he says, preferring to point to a concrete example he often finds on cars in the parking lots of shopping malls, churches, and watering holes in his hometown of Asheville, N.C.: United States Marine Corps bumper stickers and rear-window emblems of every type.

“They’re everywhere,” he says, “which indicates of course the presence of a lot of Marines of some stripe, and also the fact that this persists, that most of these guys who put in their time, some of them 30 years – whatever it is, they gave their all, and they were proud of it, and are still proud of it.” If you’re not a Marine, the only way you might come close to understanding why is to visit the National Museum of the Marine Corps.

BOEING CH-46D SEA KNIGHT The Sea Knight is the result of the Marine Corps converting the civilian Vertol Model 107-II helicopter into a medium lift assault transport.

Originally designated the HRB-1, the aircraft was redesignated CH-46A and first flew in October 1962. HMM-265, stationed at New River Air Station, N.C., took delivery of the first three production CH-46As in 1964, and the Sea Knight made its combat debut in March 1966. Although the CH-46 initially had some teething troubles, by the end of its first year in combat it was gaining a good reputation and had flown more than 32,000 combined hours in Vietnam by May 1967.

Toward the end of 1967 the CH-46 fleet suffered multiple incidents in which the helicopters ripped in half in midair. The aft pylon housing the helicopter’s two engines was separating in flight. Although the exact cause of the structural failures was difficult for the Marine Corps and Boeing Vertol to determine, engineers began to suspect that the rear ramp modifications and the addition of a blade-folding mechanism to the original civilian design had weakened the aircraft's structure. Modifications made to the aircraft by the Marine Corps and Boeing Vertol strengthened the aft pylon and finally eliminated the problem.

The CH-46 became critical to the Marine Corps Vertical Envelopment doctrine, performing emergency medevac and troop resupply missions and inserting recon teams, and has served the Marine Corps and Navy with distinction for over 40 years. The Marine Corps still flies the CH-46E model Sea Knights that will remain in the Marine Corps until the Bell/Boeing V-22 Osprey becomes available.

The museum’s CH-46 is depicted landing at Hill 881-S as part of a “Super Gaggle,” a tactic invented by Maj. Gen. Norman Anderson, CO of the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing, in order to cut the heavy losses of his helicopters.

It teamed 12 A-4 Skyhawks with 12 Sea Knights. Skyhawks attacked enemy positions with bombs, napalm, tear gas, and smoke while the CH-46s flew in with their loads, at which point all the Marine ground troops on the hills would cut loose with everything they had. The Sea Knights would drop their loads, load wounded, and depart. The Marines lost only two helicopters during a Super Gaggle.

This portion of CH-46 used as a portal to Hill 881-S in Khe Sanh is the back half of aircraft BuNo: 154824, and was originally a Marine aircraft. It entered the Marine Corps inventory in May 1968, and flew with HMM-265 out of Phu Bai, Vietnam, in 1969-70. The front portion of this aircraft has been returned to service as a training device with the Presidential Helicopter Squadron HMX-1.

CH-46D TECHNICAL DATA Manufacturer: The Boeing Company, Vertol Division, Morton, Pennsylvania Type: Combat Assault Helicopter Accommodations: Crew of three and up to 17 assault troops or 15 stretchers with two attendants Power plant: Two 1,400 hp General Electric T58-GE-10 shaft turbine engines Dimensions: Rotor diameter 51 ft each; Fuselage length 44 ft, 10 in; Height, 16 ft, 8 in Weights: Empty, 13,065 lb; Gross, 23,000 lb Performance: Max speed 166 mph at sea level; cruising speed 154 mph; service ceiling 14,000 ft; range 230 statute miles. from the Chosin Reservoir south to Hungnam in subzero weather]. The Vietnam gallery will also feature an immersive exhibit emblematic of the Marine experience in Vietnam: a hot landing zone at Hill 881 South, near the combat base at Khe Sanh.

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Below: Two volunteer Marines pose for their hands to be cast for one hour while the mold dries. The final mold will be of a hand-to-hand fight during World War I between a German machine gunner and a Marine lieutenant. Bottom, right: Staff Sgt. Steven C. Sullivan poses next to his face’s statue after holding his facial expression for one hour. Sullivan is portraying a Marine lieutenant in a World War I scene.

SUPPORTING CASTS The cast figures populating the exhibits at the National Museum of the Marine Corps are 100 percent Marines

USMC photos by Lance Cpl. Christopher Roberts

by Craig Collins Don’t be surprised if, upon visiting the National Museum of the Marine Corps, you recognize the Marine dangling from the rigging about 15 to 20 feet above the floor in the Legacy Walk near the “Huey” helicopter. You might have already seen him, in human form, walking purposefully through the museum.

He is Sgt. David Peterson, USMC, one of the sergeants who staff the museum’s administrative and security section. If you know him really well, you might also have recognized him from the back, hunkered down in Korea’s frigid Toktong Pass, along with several other figures used to re-enact the now-legendary defense by Fox Company of the pass along the heavily fortified main supply route from Chosin Reservoir.

In fact, you might recognize any one of the cast figures that animate the museum’s exhibits: storming the coconut-log wall at Tarawa; grappling with a Chinese Boxer atop the Tartar Wall; or manning a machine gun atop Hill 881South near Khe Sanh, Vietnam. Most of the 73 men and women who modeled for the figures were active-duty Marines, and nearly all were from local Marine Corps Base Quantico. In addition, Navy personnel and civilians modeled the Navy corpsman, chaplain, and civilian cast figures.

The figures are the work of Studio EIS, a fabrication studio in Brooklyn, N.Y., that put out an audition call in 2005 to find authentic-looking models. From winter into summer, a few Marines at a time posed for a casting process that took several hours for each figure: “They started off measuring every inch of us,” Peterson recalls, “you know – fingertip to wrist, fingertip to elbow – then some of the people wore stockings, and we wore boxer briefs, and then they covered our entire body in Vaseline. Then ... they’d mold us from the waist down.” After those casts had set, upper bodies were posed and cast as well, and then it was time for the faces – which were cast in alginate, a faster-drying, putty-like

compound that would help capture finer facial features. Many of the models, Peterson says, had to act out the grimaces and dramatic expressions that might occur in battle situations. “It [alginate] hardens up pretty quick, so they’d put it on our face, and then coach us to get in the facial expression they wanted and tell us to hold it. And after about three or four minutes of holding that expression, the stuff hardens around your face, and it stays like that until they pry it off.”

The experience of having their heads cast rattled a few Marines’ nerves.

“To me it was nothing,” Peterson says. “It just sounds like you’re under water when people are talking. But they did explain that some people do get claustrophobic, because your entire head is encased, and there’s no movement or anything possible.”

Each cast figure has a strikingly lifelike appearance, especially in the facial details. You might wonder: Is it strange for Peterson to look up and see himself dangling from a rope? “Yes sir, it’s downright creepy,” he says. “When I saw him lying down on the ground on his back and I got beside it – I was a little bit heavier at that time than I am now; I had my winter fur on, I guess – but as soon as it was hanging up and I looked at it ... I thought, ‘Oh, that is me. That looks so much like me.’ My wife also thought it was creepy seeing it as well.”

Peterson thinks the creepiness will probably wear off in the years ahead, to which he looks forward with a hint of pride in his voice: “I get to go back for the next 40 or 50 years, and tell my son and daughter: ‘There’s your dad.’ Or if they have kids: ‘There’s your grandfather.’”

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PRESERVING A HERITAGE

By Craig Collins

From architects to curators to restorers, the National Museum of the Marine Corps wages war against a museum’s cruelest enemies: light, temperature, dust, moisture – and the passage of time

Abelsma compares the long-term effects of light – even controlled low-level light such as that found in the most hospitable museum environments – to the collective effect of thousands of footsteps on an old staircase.

“Everybody contributes something,” he says, “but nobody realizes it. In a way, it’s almost like we’re determining how many more generations are going to look at that flag.”

Of course, the best way to preserve artifacts as beloved as the Iwo Jima flag would be to seal them all away in a darkened, climate-controlled room, away from human contact. Abelsma is one of many at the museum who, realizing the absurdity of the alternative, has devoted his career to an intricate balancing act: struggling to preserve these artifacts while releasing them into an environment where they can be viewed and appreciated by the public.

First, Do No Harm The roughly 30,000 objects in the Marine Corps’ historical collection of artifacts are divided into four broad categories: Abelsma’s uniforms and heraldry; aviation (aircraft flown by Marine aviators, aviation ordnance, aeronautica); ordnance (firearms, edged weapons, wheeled and tracked vehicles, artillery, and associated equipment); and the Marine Corps Combat Art Collection, comprised of more than 8,000 works of art.

The job of documenting and caring for these objects is divided among the collections management, curatorial, and restorations staffs.

In a museum, standards are established for limiting certain factors known to cause damage: light, moisture, and even dust, which is, according to museum specialist Mike Starn, a bigger problem than most people realize. “When bugs chew on material,” he says, “it’s not that they’re literally chewing the material. They’re eating the dust. The material just happens to get in the way. And so dust is just as big an enemy as sunlight, actually any bright light.”

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M

emorial Day weekend 2004 was stressful for Neil Abelsma, uniform and heraldry curator for the National Museum of the Marine Corps. He had helped arrange the temporary loan of the “second” Iwo Jima flag, the bigger and more famous of the two raised on Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945, to the Smithsonian Institution for its four-day National World War II Reunion.

“They had their light levels adjusted,” says Abelsma.

“They had a little barrier set up. And they had signs everywhere: ‘No Photography.’ And there was even a guard.”

But for some reason, the urge to take flash photographs was irrepressible among the hundreds who viewed the flag that weekend. “I went in there, and this poor guard,” Abelsma remembers – “by the end of the day, he was hoarse.”

A widely held view among museum visitors is that the “no flash photography” rule is a way to force them to buy more postcards at the gift shop. But it’s a much more serious matter. Anyone who has ever peeked behind old window curtains will see the jaundiced look of fabric that has been exposed to the sun for too long. The flash of a camera, though brief, emits light that is many times brighter and hotter than direct sunlight. “And the light doesn’t just change the color,” says Abelsma. “It breaks down the fabric’s structure.”

Of the items in the museum’s collection, the ones Abelsma is charged with overseeing – including flags, uniforms, documents, and medals and their ribbons – are among the most fragile, because many are made, either wholly or partly, of natural fibers that contain cellulose.

When light strikes a cellulose molecule, it causes a chemical reaction in which the molecule literally ruptures – which not only results in physical damage but also releases, as a byproduct, a molecule of sulfuric acid. For just about anything you can imagine a museum might wish to collect, sulfuric acid is, to put it mildly, not a good thing.

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Photo by Larry S. Glenn

THE MUSEUM

Opposite: The first flag flown over Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima, one of the museumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s many iconic and precious exhibits that must be protected against light, moisture, dust, and other environmental factors. Above: The museumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Curtiss JN-4HG Jenny was originally covered in doped Irish linen that deteriorated long ago. It is now covered in the more robust Dacron, which can still be doped and painted as the original covering was in years past.

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Preservation

Because the art collection’s paintings are often the most delicate of the museum’s artifacts, and the most susceptible to damage, the art on display will be regularly rotated.

This is Staff Sgt. John F. Clymer’s Marines Stop Seal Poachers, 1891, painted in 1945. Oil on canvas.

One of the first lines of defense against such enemies is a carefully designed museum environment. Fentress Bradburn, the architectural firm that designed the museum’s physical structure, went to great lengths to limit the potential for damage. The ventilation system includes both humidity control and filtration devices to remove as much dust as possible from the air. The vast central Leatherneck Gallery, in which several large artifacts are displayed beneath a soaring glass vault, was designed to protect objects from exposure. Ken Smith-Christmas, the former curator of material history for the Marine Corps’ History and Museums Division, served as an adviser during the design phase and says the skylight initially raised eyebrows.

“Fentress Bradburn was very responsive to all of our concerns about the artifacts,” he says. “A lot of people look at that (skylight) and say, ‘Oh my god, what are you doing … having all these things out there in the direct sunlight?’ Well, the fritted glass … has got an integral arrangement, in the way the glass is made, that breaks up the direct sunlight.”

The skylight’s construction, says Smith-Christmas, is also designed to reduce the amount of moisture in the Leatherneck Gallery, a space intended for the hosting of special events. “They [Fentress Bradburn] really did a lot of great studies. In one, we were figuring how many warming trays would be out if you were giving a banquet. Say they’re all going on the coldest night imaginable, and you’ve got condensation forming on the inside of the glass – they even put little channels in there, so that if condensation ever got on the inside of the glass, it would run down and out a scupper.”

Of course, even the most carefully controlled museum environment is subject to fluctuations in temperature and

humidity that are beyond anyone’s control, which is why collections management – which includes rotating objects into exhibits while returning others to rest and recuperate in a more strictly controlled storage location – is a key factor in preservation. It is estimated that only about 5 to 10 percent of the 30,000 items in the collection will be displayed at one time.

The Marine Corps Combat Art Collection, because of the high organic content of most of the materials used to compose its works – canvas, paper, wood frames and stretcher bars, and even the paints and inks – includes some of the most sensitive objects in the museum. Joan Thomas, the museum’s assistant curator of art, says that the act of creating a painting involves several different steps, each performed with a different material. “First … you’re stretching a canvas or linen, or whatever, over the stretcher bars. Then you’re probably putting a primer base on. And then you’re starting to put the paint layers on. And then you’re putting it in a frame,” she says. “All of those things are reacting differently to changes in climate, changes in light, changes in temperature. So you might have the wood moving one way, the paint moving another way, and the frame holding it all to where it can’t move.” The result, in many older paintings, can be a crackling effect, where paint and canvas are moving in different directions or at different rates, or a bubbling, where humidity has swelled paint above the surface of the canvas.

The museum environment, explains Thomas, is simply more variable than the place where paintings are stored. “The more people you get in a gallery, the more

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Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

Preservation

Photo by Larry S. Glenn

Above: The museum’s FG-1 Corsair rests on its landing gear in Leatherneck Gallery before being hoisted up toward the ceiling. The Goodyear-manufactured Corsair was repainted in an accurate World War II camouflage scheme by present-day Marine aviation maintenance personnel. Right: Detail of the HVAR air-to-ground rockets carried beneath the Corsair’s wings. that’s going to change the climate. And that’s going to cause minor stresses. … So you’re going to want to limit the time that they’re on display, and then keep them away for a few years. And then you might exhibit them again.”

That may sound harsh to those who are unacquainted with the richness and variety of the Marine Corps’ Combat Art Collection, but according to Charles Grow, its curator, good collections management will actually, over time, help to broaden and deepen the experience of visitors, rather than limit it. The permanent gallery space planned for later construction, says Grow, will provide a unique showcase for the collection: two gallery sections will be rotated on a six-month basis. “So every three months,” he says, “you’ll get to see a new art exhibit.”

exhibit space. For many of these iconic artifacts, more exacting measures may be taken to stabilize them or, in extreme cases, to treat active deterioration. These kinds of activities, such as cleaning, preserving, or remounting, are rarely necessary, but when they are, it becomes time for the museum to call on a private conservator.

The National Museum of the Marine Corps’ collection is so varied that it has proven uneconomical for it to maintain its own staff of conservators. Much conservation work – which is often highly technical and requires advanced training – is sent out to specialized contractors.

According to the museum’s chief of curatorial services, Lt. Col. Robert J. Sullivan (USMC-Ret.), the field of conservation also evolves rapidly. “Conservation changes,” he says. “We’ve got objects that were conserved 20, 30, even 50 years ago that now have to be conserved differently.

And you have to undo what was done those years ago, because today there are different techniques and you have to review what you did and the paperwork. You keep

Taking Action There are two kinds of artifacts in the National Museum of the Marine Corps, however, which are impractical to rotate in and out of display space: first, the “macro” artifacts, or those so large and bulky – such as the nearly 45-ton M26 Pershing tank in the Korean War gallery – that moving them would prove nearly impossible. Second, some items are so iconic – such as the Iwo Jima flag, Dan Daly’s two Medals of Honor, or Smedley Butler’s swagger stick – that they are assigned their own

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Photos by Larry S. Glenn

THE MUSEUM

Left: In the case of the museum’s M26 Pershing tank, parts such as the tank’s fender skirts had to be remade from scratch. Above: The patina on the tank’s treads and other components, whether mud, sand, rust, or otherwise, is completely artificial, and can be removed without damaging the tank’s actual “good as new” condition beneath. copious notes. Years later, when you say, ‘Oh, we’ve got to reconserve the flag, what did we do last time?’ well, you pull out the images. You pull out the notes that the conservator had, and you find out exactly what chemicals and what process and what was done, so that you’re not going to damage it [while] thinking you’re improving the process.”

The Iwo Jima flag – along with its predecessor, the smaller boat flag flown earlier in the day – was reconserved in 1999, after the curatorial staff became concerned about the way the flags had been mounted. The larger flag, in particular, looked dirty and had begun to sag; an earlier treatment had involved some light stitching of the flag’s upper border onto a cloth background. At the Keedysville, Md., laboratory of textile conservator Fonda Thomsen, both flags were taken out of their old cases, lightly cleaned, and then remounted in the European style: on an acid-free cotton fabric, over a welded aluminum backing, and pressure-mounted beneath a sheet of acrylic glass specially treated with ultraviolet light filters. This technique ensured no further damage to the flags from stitching, and provided full support. Additionally, every frayed thread from the tattered, wind-whipped “second” flag was carefully laid out before the acrylic covering was fastened under the frame.

The cleaning performed on the flags is about as intrusive as most conservators want to get with an historical object; today’s conservators are much more reluctant to apply chemical cleaners or preservatives that might alter an artifact’s physical composition. Other times, especially with metal objects, a protective wax coating may be applied – sometimes to protect from the damage associated with

handling. “By simply picking up a rifle without a pair of gloves on,” explains Starn, “you could potentially leave your fingerprints behind on that piece for a long time, because the oils and moisture from your hand will leave a fingerprint behind, well, like it does on anything.”

In the art collection, a protective coating is sometimes used on paintings that experience extreme crackling or loss of paint, says Thomas. “You never do anything that can’t be reversed,” she says, “because you want to be able always to get back to the original intent of the artist and what they were doing. And so what will happen is, once [the paint] is stabilized, something will be put over it, like maybe a clear varnish. And then the pigments will then be reapplied with a water-based paint.

So then if we ever needed to get back to the original state of the painting, this all can be removed with no impact to the painting.”

For collection items that aren’t iconic – in other words, that are historical, but not particular to a specific person or event – authenticity is considered more important than hair-splitting devotion to every original stitch and eyebolt. The uniforms worn by the cast figures throughout the museum are representative of a time and place, and even, in some cases, of the individual who once wore them, but nearly all are replicas, rather than originals. The macro artifacts in the Leatherneck Gallery, also, are not preserved in their original state – three of them include parts covered in a fabric that deteriorated long ago. Rather than the original Irish linen that once covered the fuselage and wings of the gallery’s Curtiss JN-4D “Jenny” biplane, for example, the museum opted for longer-lived Dacron, which could be doped and painted just as linen was in years past.

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Preservation

For the museum’s Guadalcanal exhibit, a standard World War II-era Jeep was modified into a close air support Jeep in the same way, and with the same equipment, that it would have been done during the war. Parts, such as the insulated mounting assembly for the Jeep’s antennas, often are acquired through European sources because of the tons of spare parts left there after World War II. to take out certain things – the panels, newer equipment and communications that didn’t exist in 1967 or ’68.

You’ve got to change the pattern of paint. There are different seats. That’s all historical research … So consequently we can now say: ‘That’s not an aircraft that is similar to the one he flew. No. That’s Pless’s Huey.’ And there’s a history behind it as well as the man, and the action that ended in him receiving the Medal of Honor.”

The consistent demands of such macro artifacts make it useful for the museum to have its own small restorations staff, which often performs its work in nearby Larson’s Gym at Marine Corps Base Quantico. In the months prior to the museum’s opening, its own aircraft restorers, with the help of Marine mechanics from a reserve squadron, conducted the repainting of the FG-1 Corsair that hangs in the Leatherneck Gallery. “They stripped it all down. And then they found the right color blue, and the right color light blue, and then the decals,” says Sullivan, “and measured the sides from research. And they got the Marines who do it for a living anyway on modern aircraft – they loved doing a historical aircraft that’s the same type that Pappy Boyington flew.”

Many of the museum’s macro artifacts are used to illustrate a unique-to-the-Marine Corps contribution to warfighting. Restoration specialist Alan Berry, whose focus on ground vehicles has earned him the nickname “Tank Boy,” spent much of the months leading up to the museum’s November 2006 opening on the restoration of a Jeep featured in the World War II-era gallery.

“When it was first decided that they were going to have a Jeep in the World War II side, the curators decided that one of the things that they wanted to demonstrate

Restoring the Past Planes, tanks, and helicopters were built to be durable, and some of the objects in the museum were used by the Marine Corps for decades, over which they were modified, updated, damaged, and repaired numerous times.

When such an object is adopted as an exhibit by the museum, the key issue is no longer how to simply preserve it, but also how to restore it to a state that represents the event or circumstances the museum is trying to convey.

Restoration – procedures intended to return an object to a particular state, often through the addition of non-original materials – is an inherently invasive activity, and the ethics of its costs and benefits are the stuff of graduatelevel study in the field of museum science. But for the purpose of educating the public about an object’s service in a certain time and place, there is often no alternative.

Many of the restorations performed on museum artifacts have, like the museum’s conservation work, been done by outside contractors. Hovering just above the museum’s Legacy Walk is the UH-1E “Huey” helicopter piloted by Capt. Stephen W. Pless on Aug. 19, 1967, when he exhibited exceptional airmanship by attacking an enemy force of an estimated 30 to 50 Vietcong and rescuing four U.S. Army soldiers stranded on a beach near Quang Nai, Vietnam – an action for which he became the first and only Marine aviator to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor in Vietnam.

Pless’s Huey remained in service for more than a decade after he left Vietnam in 1967, explains Sullivan.

“We wanted it to be restored from a 1980s configuration back to its Vietnam configuration, which means you have

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Preservation

Above: The UH-1E gunship flown by Maj. Stephen W. Pless when he became the only Marine aviator of the Vietnam War to receive the Medal of Honor had up until recent years been on active duty, and was painstakingly restored back to its 1967 configuration. Right: The “Huey” still bears the stencil mark left by its crew chief, Lance Cpl. John G. Phelps, who received the Navy Cross during the same mission.

USMC photo by Cpl. Justin Lago

was close air support that the Marines were at the forefront of developing,” says Berry. “So what we’re doing is taking a standard [Jeep] and converting it over to what they call a CAS Jeep, close air support.” The differences between the two – battery voltages, the radio system, rear seat size, antennas, even the cabling – are significant, and Berry has been aided in his work by European warehouses. “At the end of the war, the U.S. did not want to transport all the stuff home, so they gave it to the armies of Europe: the Dutch, the French, the Belgians.

And so a lot of it was warehoused, almost never used.”

For many of these parts, such as the pristine insulated mounting assembly for the Jeep’s long radio antenna, it’s been a long journey – to the European front, into a Dutch warehouse, and years later, back to Quantico for display.

But Berry considers himself lucky; for some exhibits, he is forced to manufacture parts by hand. The Korean War M26 Pershing tank, for example, came to the museum in fine shape except for one glaring detail: It was missing the steel fender skirts mounted above the tank’s tracks. Berry, after traveling to another museum, made careful measurements, built his own templates, and fabricated the skirts from scratch at his shop in Quantico.

To most people, spending one’s days rebuilding the fender skirts of a Pershing tank may seem a peculiarly specific career choice, but for Berry – and for everyone on the museum staff – it’s a true labor of love.

“For these old veterans who used this gear,” he says,

“you’ve got to get it right. I got into restoring military vehicles – well, one, because I like playing with them.

But two, I got into it more when I would go to air shows and re-enactment events, and some of the older veterans, especially the World War II vets, came around. And you could look at the memories in their faces when they saw a particular vehicle. You could tell there were some very, very close-knit memories wrapped up in it. And what we’re doing by preserving them is saying: ‘Hey, we remember. What you did is not forgotten.’ And that’s kind of the driving force for why I do what I do.”

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“Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they made a difference.

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