History Pgs.102-141
10/9/06
5:42 PM
Page 102
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.
102
