History Pgs. 32-65
10/9/06
5:21 PM
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THE MARINES
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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