ARMED FORCES: The Sunday Punch

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The cold Korean night rang with silence. But in all the dark and unseen hills for unseen miles around lay thousands of hidden armed men, breathing, staring, listening, waiting. Once in a great while, far away in some high ravine, a machine gun pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-popped, and then stopped to hear its own echo. Thirteen U.S. Marines listened to it with odd gratitude as they felt their way, single file, through a black no man’s land of paddy-fields. When the echoes died, they could hear nothing but the sound of their own breathing and the nerve-racking scuff of their own missteps.

They moved ahead cautiously in the gloom, and stopped, moved and stopped again. Ahead, a staff sergeant named Stanley Main crouched, groping gently for the trip wires of Chinese mines. He rose, went on, crouched again. Finally the paddies were behind. The ground rose. Trails thinned out. Brush materialized in the darkness. Then, ahead, dim against the glow of the sickly crescent moon, Sergeant Main made out the ridge he was seeking. Nine Marines fanned quietly out to establish a base of fire. Main, a second sergeant with a submachine-gun and two riflemen circled with infinite caution toward the top, sniffing like animals for the smell of garlic, the telltale odor of the Chinese soldier.

The Miserable War. A yard from the summit the two sergeants froze. Just ahead, almost within touching distance, a Chinese stood vaguely silhouetted against the dark sky. They tensed to tackle him; their mission was to bring back a prisoner. But in that split second, warned by smell or some faint sound, the Chinese touched the trigger of his burp gun. Main shot the prisoner-to-be instantly and regretfully with his .45, but the second sergeant rolled backward down the hill with an astounded gasp, slugs in his arm, leg and belly. After that the night was noisy with gunfire.

The Marines sprayed the summit with automatic-carbine fire. Chinese on the ridge replied with burp guns. Amid the brush of the slope, Marines tumbled the bulky, bleeding form of the wounded sergeant on to a poncho and labored off in the darkness, a man hauling at each corner of the improvised litter. Bright, raucous mortar bursts followed along behind them. The bursts were short and above the din they heard a cheering sound—two alarmed Chinese patrols back on the ridge were busily trying to kill each other. The Marines reached their own lines safely by dawn. But it was, they agreed to a man, a miserable type of war for U.S. Marines.

Appetite for Attack. To the hard-bitten professionals of the First Marine Division, night patrols such as Sergeant Main led last week were refreshing enough as diversion and exercise. “We can keep those goonies guessing instead of having to guess all the time ourselves.” said one red-faced, wearily scornful sergeant. But the whole idea of the static Korean front, the practice of patrolling and repatrolling the same ground, of feints with no big blow behind them, struck them all as most degrading work.

Many a Marine—from noncoms in the line to the Washington headquarters of General Lemuel Cornick Shepherd Jr., 20th Commandant of the Corps—had come to regard the Korean war not only as a frustrating mess, but as a downright dangerous and softening experience for new troops. “In World War II when you hit a rock,” said one indignant master sergeant, “you knew that the enemy was getting your big punch. Here we are holding back. Kids who come up as replacements, even if they are regulars, don’t know what the Marine Corps means.” A colonel who approved heartily of the Marine practice of blooding troops in Korea was nevertheless horrified at one aspect of the war: “They’re learning defensive measures!”

To many an officer of the First Division in Korea, actual service in the line often seemed less important than training exercises the division was running along the coast every time it managed to wheedle enough ships from the Navy: battalion-size assault landings calculated to extinguish the defensive heresies picked up in combat, and to remind troops of the appetite for headlong attack expected of them in their kind of war. The discouraging stalemates and attrition of Korea, in a word, had only whetted the most gleaming weapon the Marine Corps carries when it is panoplied for war: the quietly arrogant certainty that U.S. Marines are the world’s best and noblest fighting men, that they always have been and always will be.

The Unique Breed. In a recent book on Korea, Marine Major Andrew Geer tried to describe the singularity of that unique breed: “Marines have a cynical approach to war. They believe in three things: liberty, payday and that when two Marines are together in a fight, one is being wasted . . . They are proud, sensitive and haughty to the point of boorishness with other military organizations. A Marine’s concept of a perfect battle is to have other Marines on the right and left flanks, Marine aircraft overhead and Marine artillery and Naval gunfire backing them up.”

That fierce pride in their own proud corps has carried the Marines through every major war in the nation’s history and through 200 or more lesser battles in the past 177 years—a record of almost continuous action that has led them literally from the shores of Tripoli to the Halls of Montezuma and on to the ridges of Korea. That record is sustained by the soul-shaking rigors of Marine training that turns a shave-headed boot into a dedicated fighting man whose faith is in his rifle and whose religion is his corps. And it is nourished by the legendary heroes of the Marines’ past: Commandant William Ward Burrows, who in 1800 ordered one Marine shavetail to redress an insult from a naval officer with his pistol; Brigadier General (now Congressman) James P. S. Devereux, the defender of Wake Island; General Thomas Holcomb, the father of the modern corps. The battle cry of a leathery Marine sergeant in World War I (“Come on, you sons of bitches. Do you want to live forever?”) had its echoes two winters ago in Marine General O. P. Smith’s description of the withdrawal from the Changjin Reservoir: “Retreat, hell. We’re just advancing in a different direction.”

As it celebrated its 177th anniversary last week (with stateside balls and pageants, with ceremonial “cake cuttings” in Marine messes everywhere), the corps could boast a growing weight of material advantages as well as these inner fires of elan. In the years after World War II, it had parried the persistent attempts of Army brass (including Army Chief of Staff Dwight D. Eisenhower) to whittle the Marines down to units of regimental size. It had hotly argued with critics who maintained that the A-bomb put its amphibious specialty out of business. And finally, amid the Korean emergency, it had won the right to rebuild from its postwar nadir of 67,000 to a ceiling of 400,000 men, organized in three divisions and three Marine air wings.

“Decks” in the Desert. Last week, as always, stiff-starched Marines (who are as thoroughly drilled in neatness, military niceties and pride in their gaudy uniforms as in the techniques of battle) stood guard duty at legations, embassies, naval yards, naval air stations, naval storage depots in the U.S. and abroad, played their ancient role as soldiers aboard battleships, cruisers and carriers of the U.S. fleets.

But the modern Marine Corps, in its essential might, is a rigorously trained, rigorously disciplined, self-contained striking force. It is naval infantry by tradition; Marines still call a dugout’s dirt floor a “deck,” speak, even in deserts and mountains, of “coming aboard” and “breaking out” flags. But in the last analysis it is subject to a President’s call for service anywhere, by any available transport. In 1952 the Marine Corps once more has foot soldiers enough—and the planes, tanks and artillery to support them—to think of itself without doubt or qualification as the nation’s Sunday punch.

A battalion of Marines is afloat in the Mediterranean, ready for any fire alarm. A battalion of Marines has just completed Arctic exercises in Labrador—for no one knows where Marines might go next. Besides the First Division in Korea, the corps has two trained divisions, each with its air arm, waiting stateside for trouble—the Second at Camp Lejeune, N.C., the Third at Camp Pendleton (see color pages), Calif. Boot camps at Parris Island, S.C. and San Diego are hup-reeping steadily away at rebuilding civilian youths to the sunburned, stiff-backed Marine mold, and pumping them into the service.

As he works these days in his big, soft-carpeted office at Marine Headquarters, which stands symbolically above and aloof from the Pentagon, Marine Commandant Lem Shepherd takes a flinty satisfaction in the heft of the weapon at his hand. He has grown up with the “modern” Marine Corps and few of its officers have been so intimately involved in its struggles—both in the field and the congressional committee room.

Scientists & Shoe Factories. In many ways balding, bullet-scarred, 56-year-old Lemuel Shepherd is a stereotype of that curious (to civilian eyes) phenomenon, the modern American general. Like scores of his kind, Shepherd, in war or peace, must be part military man, part lobbyist, and part public-relations man—never too busy to make a speech, receive a Congressman or hold a press conference. He draws his strength from appropriations. His divisions are irrevocably involved not only with scientists and arsenals, but with shoe factories and the New York garment district.

The general, however, is neither politico nor businessman. Turned loose amid the sharp-eyed denizens of the commercial world, he would probably perish miserably, the victim of his own rigid honesty, faith in his fellow man, and his instinct to command or be commanded. He is a man who is perfectly willing to be shot if logic or honor demands—or to order thousands to their deaths—and does not fall easily into compromise. Even Lem Shepherd’s small eccentricities are uncompromisingly military.

He invariably drinks a cup of tea on rising and takes an icy shower immediately afterward. At his mess, grace is said before each meal. He insists that his shoes be coated with a combination of vaseline and boot polish at night, left fallow until morning and then polished vehemently for maximum glitter. He fondly hopes that Marine officers will once more take to carrying swagger sticks, and in the field he is never without his own oversized version, a polished length of Haitian Coco-macaque wood. His hobbies are muscular: riding, spearfishing, fly-casting. A red-handled fly swatter reposes by his desk; few insects have profaned its orderly surface without becoming casualties of the U.S. Marine Corps.

His admirers in the corps invariably refer to him as a “real, old-fashioned Virginia gentleman.” The phrase is trite but true—it is easy to visualize him in the grey of the Confederacy. With his quiet, tidewater accent, he has little of the flamboyancy of such barnacled Marines as Holland (“Howlin’ Mad”) Smith, Lewis B. (“Chesty”) Puller, and Graves (“The Big E”) Erskine.

Marine Milestone. As the son of a prosperous physician in Norfolk, Va., Shepherd had few boyhood dreams of the military life. The family maintained a stable and so did many of their friends, who had farms in fashionably horsy Fauquier County. Lem just rode—and rode. He was sent to Virginia Military Institute because 1) he did not seem to have an aptitude for law (in which case he would automatically have been sent to the University of Virginia) and 2) V.M.I., in his family’s eyes, was much better than West Point. Young Lem was a reluctant student; he graduated 34th in a class of 58, still a private in the cadet ranks.

But he shortly proved that he had vast aptitude as a soldier. He finished at V.M.I, in May 1917, volunteered for the Marine Corps, spent one month in training at Parris Island, and was shipped forthwith to France as a second lieutenant, to help erect—although he did not know it then— a milestone in Marine Corps history. Marines had fought in every sort of battle—as riflemen in the tops of sailing vessels, as landing parties and assault units against every sort of foe, from the British at Trenton and Princeton to the Boxers in Peking. But in France they fought for the first time as a brigade within an infantry division.

It was their luck to be teamed with the 2nd U.S. Infantry Division, whose commanders believed implicitly in the efficacy of headlong assault. That was the Marines’ own traditional philosophy of battle : throwing the big punch, subjecting an enemy to constant pressure, risking big initial casualties in violent assault rather than submitting to a long, wearing attrition. Second Lieut. Shepherd, U.S.M.C., went into action as a platoon leader with the 5th Marine Regiment at Belleau Wood, was hit in the neck by a machine-gun slug, fought on with his men for three days and was hit again before he finally went to the rear.

He was back a month later as a company commander in the St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne offensive. He was wounded again. He came home a captain, wearing the Navy Cross, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Croix de guerre and two silver stars—and found to his horror that he could not stay in the service as a regular without a thorough knowledge of naval artillery.

Sandino & Liberty Boats. He learned. He kept on learning in the years which followed—years in which the Marines at one point had fewer men than the New York City police force. As always, some Marines were in battle—fighting in the Nicaraguan hills against the rebel Sandino. Others were engaged in a momentous experiment—perfecting the techniques of amphibious assault, the technique that was to carry the Marines in World War II from Guadalcanal to Tokyo.

It was hard, often frustrating work. At first, the Marines landed from a battleship’s liberty boats, often in water over their heads because the coxswains refused to take the chance of scraping paint on the beach. But as time wore on, the first ramp-bow boats appeared, ancestor of the nautical monsters of World War II.

Shepherd served around the world, in the leatherneck tradition: in Europe, on battleships with the Pacific Fleet, in Haiti, in China. He served as aide to Major General John Lejeune, the man whom Shepherd has always taken as his model. Already a marked man in the corps, he put in more time than most near official Washington, both as student and teacher in Marine schools. By Dec. 7, 1941 both Shepherd and the Marines were ready.

In World War II he proved his capacity for high command as the Marines fought their way up the Central Pacific amid the deadly crash of island war: Tarawa. Saipan, Iwo Jima, Peleliu. Shepherd whipped the 9th Marine Regiment into combat shape, went ashore at Cape Gloucester as assistant commander of the famed First Division. He invaded Guam at the head of the First Provisional Marine Brigade. In the last months of the war, he fought 82 days across Okinawa with his last and biggest command, the Sixth Marine Division. After the war, Shepherd moved on to China, commanded the Marines at Tsingtao. He was chief of Fleet Marine Forces, Pacific, in the summer of 1950, when the wire came from Washington: the North Koreans had invaded South Korea.

In the first disorganized days of the Korean war, the Marines were ready again, and it was Lem Shepherd who bore the brunt of getting them into the hard-pressed Pusan perimeter. The decision to take Inchon from the sea was General Douglas MacArthur’s; the men who did the detailed planning were a little group of Marine officers, and the first troops ashore were from the First Marine Division, with Lem Shepherd landing in the fifth assault wave. When Chinese hordes threatened to engulf the Marines below the Yalu River, Shepherd flew to the Changjin Reservoir by helicopter to be with them. Recalls Army General Clark Ruffner: “When our troops were heading up toward the Yalu we had lots of VIPs. But when we got hit by those seven Chinese divisions . . . the only VIP we had was General Shepherd. And he was around all the time.”

The Bayous of Strategy. As commandant for the past 10½ months Shepherd has demonstrated the same zestful appetite for keeping on top of the situation. Though Marines are traditionally content not to reason why, he has waded at least knee deep into the murky bayous of strategic thought; he is the first Marine to sit (although only in an advisory capacity) in the sacrosanct halls of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As in the ’20s and ’30s, the Marine Corps is wrestling with many a problem of combat yet to come. In Korea they have already proved to their own satisfaction the benefits of armored vests, of close air support, and of helicopter lifts to front-line areas. Marine planners of 1952 are already using the whirlybird as at. least a partial substitute for landing craft.

Last week in new “triphibious” landing exercises at Camp Lejeune, helicopters shuttled to and from an aircraft carrier in formations of six, and brought in 2,000 troops. The ‘copter groups flopped in behind theoretical enemy lines, disgorged their cargoes and were gone in less than 20 seconds. Many a Marine visualizes the day when a whole invading force might be shuttled ashore from scattered carriers, taking an enemy by surprise and eliminating the great clutter of small craft which is so vulnerable to atomic blast.

A-bomb or not, nothing can deprive the corps of its pride in itself and its past, and its confidence that those are the best guarantees against an uncertain future. Explained a World War II platoon leader at Camp Lejeune last week: “The only way I can describe it is like this: I was in three actions in the Pacific. I never had to look behind me.”