ARMED FORCES: Man Who Gave

It is the destiny of the professional soldier to wait in obscurity most of his life for a crisis that may never come. It is his function to know how to solve it if it does come. It is his code to give all that he has.

In 1944 Frank Dow Merrill, then an obscure, 40-year-old U.S. infantry officer, found his crisis in Burma. Under command of General Joseph Stilwell, the Allies were set to drive across northern Burma to Myitkyina, key Japanese defense base and main air base from which fighters menaced the allied air route over “the Hump” to China. With a newly built road eastward from Ledo in northern India, they would intersect the Burma Road, reopen the land route to China.

Nameless Mission. West Pointer Merrill got command of an esoteric collection of U.S. infantrymen. They formed the 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional), whose parenthetical appendage proved symbolic. Culled from jungle-trained troops throughout the Pacific Theater, including a full battalion of Guadalcanal veterans (already thoroughly infected with malaria), the 3,000 men volunteered for a nameless “dangerous and hazardous mission.”

“Merrill’s Marauders” made American infantry history in the semi-guerrilla tradition begun by Rogers’ Rangers and Morgan’s Raiders: small groups of troops with heavy firepower, designed for mobile, long-range harassment behind enemy lines. The Marauders’ job: surprise encirclement and roadblocks behind the Japanese front as Stilwell’s mainly Chinese forces drove slowly toward Myitkyina.

No man looked less a leader for the daring end-run tactics than studious, shy Frank Merrill, a pudgy, peaceful staff officer with bad eyes and a weak heart, who had had little experience commanding troops. But Merrill was a professional of high intelligence and remarkable tenacity.

Decisive Moment. “We will walk back into Burma,” said Merrill firmly, as his men left India in February 1944. For the next four months, supplied by airdrops and using only mules and their own feet for transport, they slogged 500 miles across the most nightmarish terrain on earth, fought five major engagements and 30 minor ones against the crack Japanese 18th Division, whose commanders were convinced that the regimental-strength Marauders totaled two full divisions.

Flitting and stabbing day and night, sometimes fighting as long as 36 hours without food or water, crawling on hands and knees up sheer mountains, the end-running Marauders met the Japanese in obscure clearings with names like Walawbum, Shaduzup, Inkangahtawng, Miangkwan. This was the primitive Burma where tribesmen had often never seen a white mana harshly foreboding land of thunderous rivers and almost impassable jungles, where leeches clung to a man and drained his blood while stinking rot filled his soggy boots, where it rained 160 inches a year and nearly every Marauder shook with malarial fever.

Merrill walked always with his men, outworking and overworking them, seldom more than 100 yards from his fighting perimeter. Everything he had ever learned came together in the decisive moment of his life. If a precious radio broke down, he could repair it himself, then outwit Japanese jamming by telling his enemies a fairy tale in their own language, dumbfounding them into silence long enough to rasp out his message in English.

Undimmed Splendor. But Merrill’s spirit, like that of his men, was greater than his body could stand. Struck down with a coronary thrombosis, for three days he refused to be evacuated, was finally ordered out. As he recuperated in India, the Marauders’ 2nd Battalion was trapped at Nhpum Ga for eleven days, and cut in half. Trying to relieve their comrades, the 3rd Battalion was also stunned and exhausted before Stilwell’s main Chinese offensive forced back the Japanese.

With only two weeks’ rest, the Marauders were next flung into a drive on the Myitkyina airstrip itself. Against the odds, they captured it in mid-May 1944, just as Merrill returned to lead them—only to suffer a second heart attack soon after. When Japanese reinforcements arrived, a major battle developed in which the disease-ridden Marauders (now only 1,310 strong) were ordered to participate with far larger conventional forces of Chinese and British Empire troops. In the desperate Allied effort to hold on, a call for every able-bodied man forced many incapacitated Marauders back to the front line from hospitals in India.

This order, which Stilwell later was appalled to discover had been far too harshly carried out by overzealous subordinates, provoked a sitdown strike among the Marauders. As a mobile, one-shot force, they had succeeded brilliantly in harassing action, losing only 424 men in combat while inflicting tremendous casualties on the Japanese. But the static Nhpum Ga siege had broken their spirits—while amoebic dysentery, malaria, scrub typhus and psychoneurosis had put 1,970 men out of action. The Marauders were neither prepared nor equipped for the Myitkyina battle. They were withdrawn in June, disbanded in August.

Their end seemed inglorious, yet the splendor and pride of their campaign clung to Merrill and his Marauders. His own brilliant Army career cut short when a third heart attack in Manila forced his retirement as a major general in 1948, Merrill was always acutely conscious of what his men had undergone. He attended their annual Labor Day reunions religiously, wrote them letters all year round, kept them out of trouble, lent them money.

Appointed New Hampshire highway commissioner by Governor Sherman Adams in 1949, Merrill, an Army engineer in prewar days, went to work with characteristic gusto, forced through an unprecedented 15-year construction program. In New Orleans last week, his new fellow professionals elected him president of the American Association of Highway Officials.

On the way home, stopping at a Florida motel near Jacksonville, Frank Dow Merrill, 52, suffered his fourth and final heart attack.