History Pgs. 32-65
10/9/06
5:26 PM
Page 52
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)
