They got a lot, but the feud between Douglas MacArthur and the Marine Corps continued through the Pacific war. It abated in Korea, when MacArthur asked a marine division to lead the Army ashore at Inchon, but by then it had amassed a lore of its own: the epithet “Dugout Doug”; the sign on the Luzon gun, “With the help of God and a few marines, MacArthur took back the Philippines”; and the savage parody which opens,
Mine eyes have seen MacArthur
With a Bible on his knee,
He is pounding out communiqués
For guys like you and me,
and ends:
And while possibly a rumor now,
Some day ’twil be a fact
That the Lord will hear a deep voice say,
Move over, God, it’s Mac.
No one infected with that bitterness will ever forget it. Unquestionably it contributed to the feeling between the services which reached a climax on Saipan, when the marines’ “Howlin’ Mad” Smith relieved an Army commander after the Army Twenty-seventh Division had broken in front of marine howitzers, forcing the Tenth Marines (artillery) to cut the fuses of their shells to four tenths of a second and meet a banzai attack with point-blank fire.
After that, marines in the Pacific had no use for any Army outfit, including what was then the Air Corps. To men who took a conservative view of medals, fliers seemed like inflationists. On one island taken for its landing strip, a marine company left in garrison observed that the squadron using the field held weekly decoration ceremonies. One Saturday, when pilots and gunners fell out on one side of the strip, marines fell out on the other side wearing pith helmets and camouflaged underwear shorts. As the ranking Air Corps commander pinned Air Medals and Distinguished Flying Crosses, the marine captain went down his ranks, awarding each man a cellophane-wrapped cheroot. It was a model formation. No one smiled. The first sergeant held the cigar box.
***
An old sea story attributes the origin of interservice rivalry to the battle of the Bonhomme Richard, when John Paul Jones cried, “We have not yet begun to fight!” and a marine in the rigging allegedly muttered, “There’s always some son-of-a-bitch who doesn’t get the word.” A more appropriate opening would be the issuing to marines, in 1798, of old uniforms from Mad Anthony Wayne’s Legion—which, incidentally, had the red piping and seam stripe seen on blues today. The Corps has been an Ishmael among the services ever since, a Navy outfit using Army gear. The Army, understandably, supplies its own units first, which means that innovations are a long time reaching the marines. Inevitably this leads to friction. When the Army decided, in World War II, that combat infantrymen were entitled to a shiny badge and a ten-dollar monthly pay hike, marines, who received no badge and no raise, worked themselves into one of the great rages of the war, and in Korea’s opening stages marines wearing canvas leggings fought beside Army units that had been equipped with combat boots almost a decade before.
This very argument is used by those who would lower the boom on the Marine Corps. It does nothing, they insist, which couldn’t be done more humanely by the Army. Since Andrew Jackson’s time there have been nine other attempts to wipe out the Marine Corps, with Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Hoover and Truman in the assault and Congress, on each occasion, holding the Main Line of Resistance. Unquestionably some hostility can be traced to the old officer class. Fifty years ago the Marine Corps began committing the social gaffe of commissioning “mustangs,” men up from the ranks. Its roll of heroes since reads like a roster of Mafia suspects,—“Johnny the Hard,” “Hiking Hiram” Bearss, “Horrible Herman,” “Old Gimlet Eye” Butler, “Dopey” Wise, “Red Mike” Edson, “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, “Chesty” Puller—and its status at the Army & Navy Club has suffered as a consequence.
The public line taken by critics of the marines is that America’s civilian military establishment has no place for a corps d’élite. Here the carpers have a case. The stock Corps answer, that it is the nation’s expert on amphibious warfare, begs the question. The real issue is its concept of itself as the first team. Significantly, marines take enormous pride in the official German report on Belleau Wood, which mentioned defeat at the hands of a “shock unit.” They have always relished European praise. Their Corps is an American institution, but its debt to Frederick II, the Prussian who invented military drill, and Kipling is large. It stands, today, as one of the last strongholds of nineteenth century martial chauvinism.
Skeptics are advised to visit the Corps’ oldest post, at Eighth and I streets S.E., Washington, D.C., on a Friday summer evening for the weekly sunset parade. To pass through the gate is to pass into another century. Modern armies believe in utilitarian uniforms, but no man here could be mistaken for a truck driver or a Good Humor man. Each private wears tailored blues and carries an immaculate rifle; officers and noncoms flourish swords; atop the Beau Geste stonework of the barracks parapet, field musics in scarlet tunics sound the sad sweet notes of retreat. The gold-frogged Marine Band passes in mandarin splendor at a slow march—a formation abandoned elsewhere in America two generations ago—and as the flag floats down between two ancient cannon, the post battalion parades with fixed bayonets, looking like soldiers of the Queen leaving to deal with an insurrection in the Punjab. The band, naturally enough, plays the melody pirated from Offenbach. All hands approaching shipping-over time—when a man is thinking of re-enlisting—fumble for their ballpoint pens.
The ceremony is laconically observed by a bulldog mascot in a blue blanket and gold P.F.C. stripe who answers to the name of “Chesty.” This Chesty was a gift of the British Royal Marines, Kipling’s “Jollies.” There have been other Jolly gifts, and all underscore the European ancestry of the United States Marines. Over 200 years ago the Royal Marines began wearing leather collars to improve their bearing on parade. They were called “boot-necks,” and when the custom crossed the Atlantic their American cousins became known as “leather-necks.”
Britain’s most lasting contribution to the Marine Corps, however, was made by one man. In the late 1890s, when marine functions were confined to service aboard ships, and shore posts were maintained solely to supply the fleet with replacements, leatherneck strength totaled 3000 men. There was only one sergeant major in the entire Corps, and he lived in austere solitude at Eighth and I. His name was Thomas F. Hayes. He stood six feet, three inches, weighed 250 pounds, and had fought with Kitchener in the Sudan as a Color Sergeant. There was no boot camp then. A man who had been sufficiently badgered by a recruiting sergeant was issued a Krag rifle, put in the awkward squad, and drilled by the sergeant major, who also trained all fledgling officers. Thus Hayes, the very model of a regimental sergeant major, became the Corps’ first D.I., and when boot camps were set up at Port Royal, South Carolina, and Mare Island, off California, on the eve of World War I, the men picked as D.I.’s were his protégés.
His legacy is evident today in sunset parades, in ornamental Marine Band baldrics, and in the custom, revived in the 1950s by a company commander at Camp Pendleton, of taking a snare drummer along on a forced march to beat out cadence. It is seen in the Corps’ love of tradition and set forms, in the emphasis on the externals of soldiering which set apart the Mulvaneys of Victoria’s Empire, and which give the Marine Corps its quaint color today. Hayes’ influence had another aspect known to every man ever to be addressed by a gunnery sergeant in the imperative mood: the perpetuation of regimental honors. It is found in the best Army divisions—the most obvious example is the Big Red One—but in the Marine Corps it is the heart of a whole complex of values which bestow what might be called invisible rank.
There are many kinds of invisible rank in the Marine Corps: time in service, combat experience, duty status. Marines perform a variety of duties, but tradition still gives caste to the infantry soldier—one marine pilot apologetically described himself as “a rifleman who at present is flying a plane.” The greatest caste goes to the men in the old-line regiments. It may surprise some to know-that the Twenty-ei
ghth Marines, whose men planted the flag on Suribachi Yama, and the Twenty-ninth Marines, who took Okinawa’s Sugar Loaf Hill, lack glamour within the Corps. They were the last two regiments formed in World War II and though their men are honored, their outfits weren’t around long enough to become properly encrusted with salt.
The really briny outfits are the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Marines—the Fourth, because it is inseparably identified with China and went down gloriously on Corregidor, and the Fifth and Sixth because they seized the Hun by the short hair and were on Guadalcanal. A chicken assigned to, say, the Fifth Marines is entitled to wear the French fourragère (pogey rope) and a presidential unit citation ribbon; if he meets a high-school classmate in the Eighth Marines he invisibly outranks him, and may scorn him as a “Hollywood Marine” because the Eighth was the last marine regiment to arrive on Guadalcanal—despite the fact that both taunter and taunted weren’t even born when Washing Machine Charlie, the Jap bomber of ’42, flew back to Rabaul for the last time and the island was secured.
The Fifth is one of three regiments belonging to that Marine Corps within the Marine Corps, the First Division. Outsiders who have been outraged by marine pretensions will be cheered to learn that there is bickering within the Corps, and that sometimes it’s pretty petty. It doesn’t always involve chickens either. When the Sixth Division spanned Okinawa’s Asa Kawa under fire, engineers erected a sign advertising the bridge as the longest ever built by the Marine Corps in combat. Major General Pedro A. Del Valle, commander of the adjacent First Division, heard about it, flung a plank across a gully outside his tent, and posted it as the shortest combat bridge built by the Corps. The curious thing is that, despite this, there are Sixth Division veterans who secretly wish they had served with Del Valle. Like all marines they are social climbers, and the First is the Corps’ haut monde.
Like all traditionalists, marines resent change. Happily this does not apply to weapons, but it covers just about everything else: gear, uniforms, formation, terminology. In 1940, when the massive infiltration of reserves began, a tremor ran through the ranks, and there were sergeants who strode toward the nearest adjutant’s office to put in letters for retirement. The tremor became seismic on that bleak winter day in 1943 when the Women’s Reserve was established; that very evening, General Thomas Holcomb later recalled with awe, General Archibald Henderson’s portrait toppled from a wall in the commandant’s house, ricocheted off a sideboard and crashed to the floor. Females and reservists remain today. But it is significant that the Corps has brought back squad drill, that applications to D.I. school and rifle teams are encouraged by issuing successful candidates archaic campaign hats—and that there are boondock types who run around correcting everyone who calls them campaign hats because, by God, they were field hats in the old Corps.
The essence of marine nostalgia is in that phrase “the old Corps,” which is heard every day on every post in each of the seventy-seven countries where marines are on duty. A pleasant fable has it that when the second continental marine to enlist met the first in 1775, he was greeted with the hoot, “You should’ve seen the old Corps, Mac.” The old Corps, everyone agrees, isn’t what it used to be. Cynics add that it never was. To some ex-marines who wear the Corps’ old-school tie (there is one), it is a gilded, impossible memory of a time when every captain was a Flagg and every first soldier a Quirt, and all marines were stationed in golden Shanghai—advertising for valets in Walla Walla, the Fourth Marines’ newspaper, guzzling Haig & Haig at ninety-five cents a fifth, and wolfing “shit on a shingle,” as chipped beef on toast is elegantly known.
Nevertheless there was an old Corps. It existed and is definable. It was born in 1899; led by company commanders who had seen action in the Civil War, the tiny Marine Corps had just defeated a superior force with a fraction of the Army’s medical casualties, and now an expedition was needed to deal with the Philippine insurrection. Congress made the obvious conclusion: Corps strength was doubled to 6000 men. Campaign hats were obtained from the Army QM, the first khaki was issued, and the old Corps marine made his twentieth century debut.
He bowed out in late 1941, when the First Marine Division landed in North Carolina after Caribbean maneuvers and was herded into 1,000 chigger-infested tents. The months bracketing that encampment saw the shelving of squad drill and the campaign hat, together with the iron kelly—the World War I steel helmet—the square field scarf, high-top dress shoes, and the ’03 Springfield rifle. The whistle was blown on foreign enlistments; an expansion began in which the old-timers were lost. There were so many promotions that chevron stocks ran low, and new noncoms wore stripes on only one sleeve.
Between the Spanish-American War and Pearl Harbor, the Marine Corps had been a hard, salty outfit of seasoned troops, so small that the officers knew the names of most of the men, and so rigidly disciplined that it could always move out on an hour’s notice. Almost everybody had been under fire somewhere. The old Corps fought a dozen banana campaigns in the Philippines, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, Vera Cruz and China, and it survived World War I’s brief expansion without losing its integrity. Of course there were changes. At the turn of the century, when marines wore spiked Kaiser helmets, privates were likely to be illiterate; during the depression there were recruiters who wouldn’t look at a man unless he had a high-school diploma. But lettered or unlettered, all old Corps marines had this in common: they considered themselves professionals.
There were no Mauldins among them. They worked at soldiering, holding informal speed contests after hours, digging positions for mortar base plates, field-stripping Browning automatic rifles blindfolded. When a man made a rate he moved into another world; P.F.C.’s spoke to corporals only on business. They did not object to falling out with one foot bare for feet inspection. They took it for granted that an officer in a sparkling belt of shell cordovan would call Saturday mornings, wearing white gloves to grope for dust and carrying a half dollar to snap on taut bunks to see if it would jump back into his hand. And if a man floundered in slopchute suds Saturday night he expected, and was awarded, five days’ “piss and punk”—bread and water.
It was a frugal Corps. About the only way a private could improve upon his twenty-one dollars a month was to master the ’03 rifle and qualify as an expert rifleman for another five dollars, and he was docked each month for the hospital fund and the Marine Band. He achieved chic through a blend of thrift and ingenuity: campaign hats were blocked with raw sugar, shoes spit-shined with shoe polish and shaving lotion, legging eyelets polished with steel wool, leather belts saddle-soaped until they were limp.
If the Corps was careful with money, it was parsimonious with promotions. The thirty-year private wasn’t unusual; a man would be acting corporal for a year before he even took his test for promotion, and if he made it, his entire company was called out in the kind of formation reserved, today, for awards of valor. The rule was, one stripe to a hash mark, and there were no slick-armed sergeants in the old Corps.
War is a great destroyer of military traditions. “It will be good when all this is over,” a British general reportedly moaned to an aide as shells crashed around his command post, “and we can get back to real soldiering.” But the hard fact is that soldiers are trained for war, and the threat of war is the only excuse for building barracks. The old Corps was more than a showpiece, because in its heyday great powers could get away with showing the flag in sulky jungle capitals. Situations are no longer taken well in hand that way, however. That kind of diplomacy died in Vietnam, and not all the ruffles and flourishes at Eighth and I can bring it back, or take the Marine Corps back to the shores of Shanghai’s Soochow Creek. Today’s marines divert themselves by stringing yo-yos for needy children, or parading for visiting dignitaries, or putting out brush fires. Occasionally they flex their muscles—as in the rescue of the Mayaguez and its crew from Cambodian pirates. But the whiff-of-the-grape way of the old Corps is as obsolete as wrap leggings.
Does al
l this have any meaning for the new Corps—the Fleet Marine Force, the F.M.F.? It has plenty. The making of a lady starts with her grandmother. The F.M.F.’s grandmother was not genteel, but it was everything a crack outfit should be, and it left its life, its liens and its sacred honor to its successor. To those who believe uniforms make the soldier, the bequest was lost. There was nothing smart about the faded dungarees and tattered helmet covers the F.M.F. wore in the Pacific during World War II and continues to wear today. But when word was passed to darken ship—when the cargo nets went over the side and the Higgins boats swung out from their davits—there was something in the air the old Corps would have recognized. Dan Daly might have watched aghast as eighteen-year-olds camouflaged Khe Sanh gun positions with comic books and called their despairing sergeant Daddy-O. But he would have known them, and tipped his iron kelly to them, when they held their position against all odds.
There is a seed, pride. It is planted in every man during boot training and grows to be tougher than he is. He may want it gone, but can’t shuck it. He may jeer at all heroes as Gung ho. Still the thing stays inside him, and when he finds himself on the line he’s got it, and it him. The dead in their wire-trussed poncho shrouds don’t scare it out of him. He can’t go back—everybody around him has got the same thing; even cooks and bakers are armed when the Marine Corps goes to war, and the doctors and medical corpsmen and chaplains are Navy men. He may never have heard the Marine Band, may not even know where Tripoli is or who the Montezumas were. Still he’ll jump when Daddy-O pumps an arm, because someone once told him it is better to die than to let the Marine Corps down, and he believed it then, and part of him always will.
Nobody told him he would fight for his country. He doesn’t think of it that way. I once attended a Marine Corps anniversary which reached its climax in a series of toasts: to the Continental Congress which authorized the Corps on November 10, 1775; to the Philadelphia bartender who organized the first two battalions by offering likely boots free grog; to the marines who fought at New Orleans; to the Corps’ first Korean landing in 1871; to all the old battles and old regiments and old marines, including Captain Jimmy Bones, the old Corps ghost. Understandably, no toasts were offered to Bull Run. It was remarkable, though, I thought, that in all that beating of Marine Corps gums there was no such word as America.
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 18