War: The First Team

“Hatches were opened, sailors in blue shirts and dungarees oiled up the winches, coiled ropes, listened to the roar of the engines as Higgins boats were tested, unlashed, swung out from their davits . . .

Marines checked their packs, made camouflage nets for their helmets, sharpened knives and bayonets. It was hushed, tense activity which did not slacken until daylight was fading. And as night fell and the wind whistled through the rigging, ‘Darken Ship’ rang out . . .”

Just eight years ago, an officer aboard a U.S. transport standing off the Solomon Islands wrote these words in his diary. It was the evening before the newly created 1st Division of the U.S. Marine Corps landed on Guadalcanal. After many a stinging U.S. defeat at the hands of the Japanese, the bloody Guadalcanal campaign was the first U.S. land offensive of the Pacific War.

Last week advance elements of the 1st Marine Division—a “reinforced regimental combat team” numbering about 5,000 men— landed at Pusan in South Korea. The marines, who carried, along with their shiny new equipment, a large ration of glory in their packs, arrived at the critical moment in the Korean fighting—which was also a critical moment in U.S. history.* Korea would not turn out to be much less tough than Guadalcanal; it might turn out to be tougher. The commander of the Marines in Korea, Brigadier General Edward Craig, has recently expressed an opinion on how his men would handle themselves in this situation. Said he: “They are ready for anything that can be thrown at them.”

On the Eve of Battle. From the combat-loaded holds of their ships, the marines brought forth great shiny bulldozers, wreckers and heavy road equipment the like of which Korea had never seen before. The marines had their own flamethrowers, amphibious tractors, Pershing tanks whose 90-mm. guns were a match for the Reds’ Russian-built T-34s. The 1st Division’s advance team also had its own air wing—a force of about 200 Corsairs (see The Air War), commanded by veteran Brigadier General Thomas Cushman.

Nearly all the officers and three-fourths of the noncoms were combat veterans of the Pacific war. The youngsters who formed the main bulk of the team might be green to combat, but they were superbly conditioned and trained. Even headquarters clerks, cooks and orderlies were crack riflemen and machinegunners. As they landed, some of them exchanged the usual cocky banter with watching Doggies (as they call the Army men). Sample: “You can go home now, Junior. Us men have taken over.” But for the most part the leathernecks had a humility not usually found in marines. In Korea, unlike Guadalcanal and many another battle, it was the Army that had been poured into the breach first, the marines who came later. If for the past six weeks the Army had not put up a magnificent fight, there would not have been a place for the marines to land.

General Craig arrived at his preliminary command post in a helicopter, just as Red artillery started shelling the area. These shots, smiled the general, were the first he had heard fired in anger since Iwo Jima. While waiting to fight the Reds, the marines made awkward headlines for themselves by starting a nocturnal fight against a phantom enemy far behind the front. U.S. correspondents reported that some of the marines were nervous and trigger-happy, fired at anything that moved at night under the eerie moonlight, including shadows, correspondents and other marines (with Red guerrillas apt to infiltrate almost any part of the U.S. positions at any moment, this was hardly surprising). The marines killed two of their own number, wounded others. General Craig himself emerged cursing from his tent, and restored order.

But this week, as the marines went into action against the enemy, they did not appear noticeably nervous. Sergeant Bethea McMullan of Oceanside, Calif, pulled the lanyard for the first round from the first gun. “If it hit anywhere near where it should,” said McMullan, “it did a lot of good.”

Then the marines joined Army units in a counteroffensive against the Reds.

“You Gotta Be Mad.” The marines are supposed to be the assault troops of the U.S. Navy, and that is the role they like best. They have always considered themselves an elite corps.* One Marine historian has described them as “a number of diverse people who ran curiously to type, with drilled shoulders and a bone-deep sunburn, and a tolerant scorn of nearly everything on earth. They were the leathernecks, the old breed of American regular, regarding the service as home and war an occupation . . .”

The history of the 1st fits that description.

Ten months before Pearl Harbor, the 1st Marine Division was formed from the 1st Brigade, whose training had been so severe that they were called—in a polite translation—the “Raggedy-Rump Marines” to distinguish them from the 2nd Brigade, which was stationed in California and had been christened the “Hollywood Marines.”

The 1st Division was not only the first in name but the first in Marine history (the Corps had never had units of division size before). Its first commander was hard-boiled Holland M. (“Howlin’ Mad”) Smith, who won fame as leader of the Marines’ island assaults in the Pacific. The division was too big to base at Quantico, Va., home of its parent brigade, so the Corps bought 111,000 acres of ground (and swamp water) along the coast at New River, N.C. There, the division moved in with the sand flies, ticks, chiggers and snakes. There were no buildings, only tents, which were heated in winter by kerosene stoves. As one enlisted man doped it out: “This is the way they want things. You don’t make a good fightin’ man if you’re in love with everybody. You gotta be mad.”

After Pearl Harbor, the 1st took it for granted that it would be the amphibious spearhead against the Japanese. Said the division intelligence officer (later killed in action): “We’re the first team, and we should be the first sent in.”

Like Bunker Hill & Gettysburg. When they sailed from Norfolk, Va. the marines had never heard of Guadalcanal. Major General Alexander Archer Vandegrift, who had by then taken over the division, had been given almost no time for practice, planning and staging. On Aug. 7, 1942, the marines went ashore on Guadal, without meeting resistance. The only first-day casualty was a leatherneck who cut himself trying to open a coconut.

But they soon found what the island had in store for them. When the supporting Navy took a pasting in the Battle of Savo Island and went off to lick its wounds, the 1st was left alone on Guadalcanal with the Japanese, the jungle, malaria, dysentery, fungus disease. In control of the sea and air, the Japanese constantly reinforced their positions, managed to put 40,000 men on the island against the marines’ 10,000. The 1st suffered hundreds of air raids and a devastating shelling from Japanese battleships and cruisers. One of Guadalcanal’s heroes was Colonel Merritt (“Red Mike”) Edson of the 1st Raider Battalion (he later became a two-star general), who used to walk from group to group, yelling: “Listen, all those Japs have that you haven’t got is guts.”

The marines proved they had plenty of guts. They held their ground until, in November, the resurgent Navy under “Bull” Halsey finally drove the Jap warships out of the area and put 2nd Marine Division and Army reinforcements ashore. Among Americans, Guadalcanal has become a household word, as familiar as Bunker Hill and Gettysburg.

The Japanese lost a staggering 30,000 men there. The 1st suffered more casualties from malaria (5,601) than from the enemy (621 killed, 1,517 wounded). Badly battered and bone tired, the division went to Brisbane, then Melbourne, for rest, replacements and refitting. After a year, it was ready for the next battle.

18,337 Purple Hearts. General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the Southwest Pacific Theater, wanted a certain airfield at New Britain’s Cape Gloucester (the Japanese base at Rabaul was at the island’s other end). On Dec. 26, 1943, the 1st Marine Division landed on Gloucester. The jungle was worse than the Japanese. Twenty-five men were killed by the fall of giant, rain-rotted trees. Men sank in the swamps up to their waists. In the constant rain, food turned to slop. Letters fell apart in pockets; every day bright blue-green mold had to be scraped from shoes. There was bloody fighting for Hill 150, Hill 660, Aogiri Ridge, “Suicide Creek.” But General MacArthur got his airfield.

The 1st had another period of recuperation (on a nightmarish island called Pavuvu, which had been picked as a “rest area” in one of the war’s major snafus), then tackled its next assignment—Peleliu. It was the division’s first strongly opposed landing and its bloodiest, hardest battle of the war. The Navy and air preparation had knocked out only a small part of the cleverly protected Jap installations. On the beach the marines were caught in a tremendous torrent of fire. The division took Peleliu at a cost of 6,000 casualties out of 23,000 men (of whom only 9,000 were infantry). The real tragedy was that the price had been paid in vain. Peleliu was to have been a base for the U.S. invasion of the Philippines, but before mopping-up on Peleliu was over, MacArthur had landed at Leyte.

The division fought its last and most important battle on Okinawa, which was to become the base for the B-29s’ final murderous raids on Japan. At Okinawa, the division was no longer alone—it was part of an amphibious force with the 6th Marine Division and the XXIV Army Corps. By V-E day, the 1st had won 19 Congressional Medals of Honor, 71 Navy Crosses and a large number of other honors, including 18,337 Purple Hearts.

Conversation in a Foxhole. Peace, of a sort, came to the 1st Marine Division. Its first postwar station was Tientsin, China, where it helped Chinese forces manage Japan’s surrender. One regiment returned to the U.S. and was disbanded; most of the career fighters were sent to Guam, where they lived in wretched ramshackle huts. On Guam, they came to know better the tall, quiet, professional general whom they had “taken aboard” in China as assistant division commander.

Edward Arthur Craig had also fought his way across the Pacific, in battles other than theirs. He had been a combat commander (9th Regiment, 3rd Marine Division) at Bougainville and Guam, a crack operations officer for the V Amphibious Corps at Iwo Jima. He won the Navy Cross, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit.

An officer who fought with Craig on Guam relates: “After I ran ashore, the bullets were raining in from several pillboxes, so I dived into the nearest foxhole. Who in hell was in there but Eddie Craig. He was lying there with a phone and a notebook, talking to a runner. He was so quiet and collected he could have been at a desk in the Pentagon. ‘We got to get those damn pillboxes!’ I yelled at him. ‘Now sit down there a minute,’ Craig says, ‘we’ll get to ’em.’ He just looked at me and smiled. In a few minutes we had the pillboxes. There’s one thing about going to war with that man: there’s no need to worry about who’s running the show.”

Craig used to drive around the front lines in a mud-spattered jeep, toting a carbine (he is an even better shot than most marines). Some marines claim that Eddie Craig has steel wool instead of hair on his chest and a 40-mm. gun barrel for a backbone. But he is no military tyrant. Like many another Marine Corps officer, Craig believes that the welfare of enlisted men comes first. On Bougainville (which rhymes, in marine parlance, with Hoganville), officers slept in foxholes if the men slept in foxholes, ate whatever rations the men ate. On postwar Guam, although the roof leaked in Craig’s hut, he refused to detail carpenters to repair it until they had finished work on the enlisted men’s recreation club (with six bowling alleys).

Also Edgar Guest. Eddie Craig was born (1896) in Danbury, Conn. His father (who is 78 and to whom Craig still writes a letter once a week) is a onetime Army medical officer. Eddie went to St. John’s Military Academy at Delafield, Wis., jumped at a chance for a second lieutenancy in the Marines, sulked because he saw no action in World War I. His first overseas duty was in the Dominican Republic.

Craig is now regarded as a model of decorum, but there is evidence that in his youth he was something of a gay blade. On weekends he used to ride at breakneck speed into the town of San Pedro de Macoris on a noisy, dust-spurting motorcycle, seriously disturbing a Marine captain attached to Santo Domingo’s Guardia Nacional, who rode into town at the same time on a mule named Josephine. The mule-rider, Gregon Williams, is now chief of staff of the 1st Marine Division and he and Craig are close friends.

Craig climbed up the ladder of routine peacetime duty from Haiti to China, acquired the reputation of a steady, thoroughly professional soldier. His first wife was an invalid for a dozen years; during those years, Craig spent all his spare time at her bedside. He rarely appeared at officers’ clubs. She died in 1943; he got the news just as he was about to go into battle at Bougainville. He married again in 1947, has become a contented homebody. Of an evening, he likes his wife to read to him from the poems of homespun versifier Edgar A. Guest.

What Makes a Marine. In postwar Japan, Craig spent several months teaching amphibious tactics to Douglas MacArthur’s 1st Cavalry and 24th Infantry Divisions, now in Korea. From April 1949 to his departure for Korea, Craig was the 1st’s assistant division commander at Camp Pendleton, Calif., in charge of training under bull-roaring Graves B. (“The Big E”) Erskine, a stickler for perfection who “turned over” (i.e., relieved) 15 colonels in one year.* To marines, the fact that Craig survived under Erskine is the proof that he is good.

At Pendleton, the 1st’s postwar training was the most rugged and exacting that any peacetime U.S. outfit got. Explained one Marine officer: “A kid reports for boot camp and we challenge the s.o.b., we dare him to try and be a Marine. We give him so much of that in boot camp—and even flunk some of them out—that when he gets out, he’s the proudest damn guy in the world, because he can call himself a United States Marine. He’s nothing but a damn private but you’d think he’s just made colonel.”

The marines continued training under live ammunition, a practice which the Army discarded but recently resumed. This year they rehearsed an amphibious demonstration, “Operation Demon III,” for the Army’s Command & General Staff College. One of the 1st’s companies ran off a cold-weather landing exercise in Alaska; a regiment put on an airlift assault on cactus-covered San Nicolas Island off the California coast. If & when the time comes for the U.S. units to break out of the beachhead in Korea, Craig’s great store of amphibious know-how will come in handy for assault landings behind the North Korean lines.

“I’ll Do My Best.” Craig drives his men unflaggingly. They grumble about it, but they worship Craig. At Pendleton’s Navy relief carnival last month, when Craig had already been ordered to sail for Korea with his combat team, a Marine corporal approached Mrs. Craig and said: “Excuse me, ma’am, but I’d like to talk to you, if you don’t mind.” As Mrs. Craig continues the story, “The man said he was a little drunk, and he was, but he wanted to say that he had been posted away from the brigade to another outfit. Then he said, ‘But you see ma’am, I want to serve with General Craig. I want to go with him.'”

Mrs. Craig was moved to tears, and the corporal gallantly offered her his handkerchief. He went with Craig to Korea.

In Korea last week, General Craig had quite a reputation to uphold—for himself and for the Corps. Said he: “My boys will do their best. I’ll do my best. Let’s hope we’ll be good enough.”

* Marines have landed in Korea five times in the last 80 years to protect U.S. interests, but only once before did they have to fight. In June, 1871, as a result of Korean attacks on U.S. ships and sailors, a U.S. assault force including 105 marines stormed several forts on the Han River. Marine casualties: one dead, one wounded.

* In The Old Breed, by Combat Correspondent George McMillan, appears the apochryphal but illuminating story of what happened when the first marine reported for duty in 1775. “What, the hell is a marine?” barked the bewildered officer of the deck. “You go aft and sit down till I find out.” A few minutes later the second marine-recruit reported aboard and was also sent aft. From the lofty eminence of his seniority, the first man scornfully contemplated the newcomer and snarled: “Listen, boy, you shoulda been in the old Corps!”

* General Erskine recently finished his tour as commander of the 1st and went off on a military mission to Indo-China. The present division commander is Major General Oliver Prince Smith, a veteran of New Britain, Peleliu, Okinawa.