U.S. MARINE CORPS HIS\uDBFF\uDC00TORY: The Leathernecks

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 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 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.

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.

Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

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 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.

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 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.

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.

Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

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.

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 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.

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.