An outside guest watching this ritual, usually conducted under subdued lighting and with all the reverence of Holy Communion, can feel like a jungle explorer who has stumbled onto natives performing a tribal rite. “The mystique of the Corps transcends individuals,” wrote Victor H. Krulak in his book First to Fight. Krulak retired as a lieutenant general, a three-star. His son, Charles, became commandant. “The Corps is in a sense like a primitive tribe where each generation has its medicine men—keepers of the tribal mythology, protectors of the tribal customs, and guardians of the tribal standards,” Victor Krulak wrote.
This cultivated tribal mentality—some prefer to call it “warrior culture”—stems from the Marine Corps’ unique history. Today the Marine Corps is known as the toughest and most elite of America’s armed services, the one that has fought and won many of the nation’s bloodiest battles. For much of its first two hundred or so years, though, the other armed services treated the Corps like a bastard child. Created in 1775 to provide the Navy a landing force, keep order aboard ships, and fire down from the tops of masts onto enemy crews in sea battles, the Marine Corps has always been the smallest of America’s armed forces. Today it numbers just over 200,000 officers and enlisted personnel. The Army has more than 530,000 active-duty members and the Navy and Air Force more than 300,000 each. Their budgets are also far larger. Yet from the Marine Corps’ earliest days, Navy and Army leaders resented the Corps and coveted the money spent to maintain it. The Marines had to wrestle the other services politically every few years just to stay in existence. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson urged Congress to merge the Marine Corps into the Army. A similar proposal provoked hot debates in Congress during the Civil War. The Marines beat back such moves through a potent combination of glory in battle and crafty lobbying on Capitol Hill, and those victories entered their tribal mythology. The battles for survival also bred tribal unity—and a distinct Marine Corps paranoia.
Proposals to abolish the Marine Corps rose again with the advent of steel ships powered by steam around the turn of the twentieth century—no more firing down from masts on exposed enemy crews. The Marines decided they needed a new mission to justify their existence. They found it in amphibious warfare, which they made their specialty between World War I and World War II. They acquired landing craft known as “Higgins boats” and other amphibious warfare gear. They developed tactics that brought them glory in the Pacific during the island-hopping campaigns of World War II. Their reputation flourished. When five Marines and a Navy medical corpsman raised a U.S. flag on Mount Suribachi during the pitiless battle of Iwo Jima—in five weeks Marine casualties on the five-mile-long island totaled 25,581, including 738 Navy doctors and medics—Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal famously said that “the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.”
Barely eighteen months later, all that became ancient history. The U.S. military set off two atomic devices at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in July 1946 to gauge the new weapon’s effects on ships and their equipment. Out of more than 90 surplus ships assembled for the test and anchored offshore, 16 were sunk and the rest were drenched in radioactive fallout. Commandant Alexander A. Vandegrift had sent Lieutenant General Roy S. Geiger to observe the Bikini tests. Geiger could see it would be suicide to mount a traditional amphibious assault in the age of the A-bomb “since our probable future enemy will be in possession of this weapon.” He reported back that the Marines needed to do “a complete review and study of our concept of amphibious operations.”
“The Marine Corps was in a quandary,” remembered Thomas H. Miller, Jr., who retired as a lieutenant general in 1979 after four years running Marine Corps aviation. As a young captain, Tom Miller flew F4U-1 Corsair fighter planes in the Pacific during World War II with his best friend, John Glenn, the future astronaut and U.S. senator. In an amphibious landing World War II- style, ships carrying troops and their Higgins boats had to be brought near the beach, usually within a few thousand yards. “Well, if they get in that close to shore and you get enough ships assembled around there to protect them from submarines and air strikes, you’ve got a task force that can be wiped out by one atomic bomb,” Miller observed.
This revelation came at an awkward time for the Marines, for in addition to the atomic bomb, in 1946 they were facing another new threat to their existence. His name was Harry S. Truman. He was president of the United States.
With Truman’s backing, the War Department was proposing that Congress create a unified Department of Defense that would have little room for the Marine Corps. Until then, the Army had come under the War Department and the Navy and Marines under the separate Navy Department. The new Defense Department would oversee the Army, the Navy, and a newly independent Air Force, until then an arm of the Army. The Marines would be a mere element of the Navy, their commandant excluded from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Alarmed at this prospect, Marine leaders were gearing up for battle on Capitol Hill when the Bikini tests vaporized one of their strongest arguments: their amphibious warfare prowess.
The Marines quickly formed a special board of three generals to consider the possibilities. Their answer was a new tactic called “vertical envelopment.” No longer would Marines mount amphibious assaults primarily by splashing ashore in wave after wave of landing craft. Instead, they would stage from dispersed ships sailing over the horizon, twenty-five miles or more out to sea, leaping over enemy shore defenses in helicopters. In 1947, the Marines formed their first helicopter squadron, Marine Helicopter Experimental Squadron One, known as HMX-1, each letter and the numeral pronounced distinctly: “H-MX-One.” They bought two small Sikorsky helicopters big enough to carry a pilot and two combat-equipped troops. They started training pilots. They began rewriting their amphibious assault doctrine, the template for how to conduct such operations. They fell in love with the helicopter. “The Marine Corps just latched on to it and went hook, line, and sinker for it,” Miller remembered.
The new doctrine, along with some fancy footwork on Capitol Hill, helped the Marines win their battle to remain a serious armed service. As Congress debated the National Security Act of 1947, which created the Defense Department, amendments drafted by Marine officers and slipped to friends in Congress found their way into the legislation. The new law specified that the Marines were to have their own air and ground forces “organized, trained and equipped” for “the seizure or defense of advanced naval bases and for the conduct of such land operations as may be essential to the prosecution of a naval campaign.”
“Congress is, of course, what saved them,” Miller said of the Marines. “They wrote into the law what’s called Title 10. That has been our savior.”
Truman later cemented the Marines’ victory when Congress revisited the law in 1950. Irked by the Corps’ lobbying, Democrat Truman wrote a scalding letter to one of his Republican congressional critics. “For your information, the Marine Corps is the Navy’s police force and as long as I am President that is what it will remain,” Truman wrote. “They have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin’s.”
His critic promptly put the letter into the Congressional Record. Marines were fighting and dying in Korea at the time and the letter ignited a political firestorm. The president ended up publicly apologizing to the Marine Corps.
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The helicopter wasn’t advanced enough by the Korean War for the Marines to truly use it for “vertical envelopment,” though they tried some aerial assaults. It would take another decade or more, until the Vietnam War, for helicopters to become sturdy and reliable and numerous enough to carry serious numbers of troops into battle. Mainly they used helicopters to haul supplies, lay communications wires, and evacuate the wounded or pilots who had been shot down. But the Marines became the helicopter’s biggest user among the U.S. armed services. When the conflict ended, the Corps had more helicopters and more trained pilots per capita than any other military service in the world.
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bsp; By the end of that war, Tom Miller recalled, “The helicopter had now proved itself and the Marine Corps could see its way.” The helicopter would allow the Marines to launch amphibious assaults from “ships widely separated and further off the shore than ten or fifteen miles,” Miller explained. “That’s why it was so important to the Marine Corps, because it enabled them to continue amphibious landings into a hostile shore. That’s their reason for existence.” The Korean experience, though, left the Marines hungry for more speed. In 1954, an Army pilot had set a new world helicopter speed record of 156 miles per hour. That wasn’t enough for the Marines.
In January 1956, an article in the inaugural issue of the Journal of the American Helicopter Society noted that the Marine Corps “has shown as much interest as other branches of the armed services in the possibilities of combining the advantages of rotary-wing and fixed-wing flight in some type of convertiplane. . . . A speed of better than 200 knots [230 mph] is considered a requisite for the Marine assault aircraft of the next decade.”
By then, the military services had begun their experiments with such aircraft, but the convertiplane was still just a dream machine. In the 1960s, like the Army and Navy, the Marines bought more and more helicopters, especially during the Vietnam War. They bought small Huey utility birds and agile Cobra helicopter gunships from Bell. They bought tandem-rotor CH-46 Sea Knights from Boeing Vertol of Philadelphia to carry troops and do other “medium-lift” missions. They bought massive twin-engine CH-53 Sea Stallions from Sikorsky to haul heavy cargo and equipment. None could cruise at anywhere near 200 knots. But the idea of getting a rotary-wing aircraft that could didn’t go away.
One Marine officer interested in convertiplanes was Keith McCutcheon, a pioneer in helicopter tactics. As a lieutenant colonel, McCutcheon commanded HMX-1 in its early days and led a helicopter squadron in the Korean War. As a two-star general in the late 1960s, he ran Marine Corps aviation. Tom Miller was a colonel on McCutcheon’s staff and revered him. “McCutcheon used to say, ‘Don’t get enamored with helicopters, now. They’re very limited in speed and range,’ ” Miller told me shortly before he passed away in 2007. “ ‘It’s an interim vehicle.’ That used to be his word, ‘It’s an interim aircraft.’ He kept saying, ‘We’ve got to find something [faster]. We can’t go into the twenty-first century with no better performance than a helicopter carrying our troops.’ ”
One of Miller’s assignments was to study how the Marines should replace their CH-46 Sea Knight assault helicopters. The CH-46 was a tandem-rotor that cruised at about 125 miles an hour. Its main mission was to haul up to eighteen Marines at a time to the beach in amphibious assaults launched from fifty miles or less offshore and get back to the ship. That was roughly the limit of the CH-46’s endurance with that kind of payload. Its official nickname was “Sea Knight,” but because it made short hops to shore from the lily pad of an amphibious assault ship, Marines affectionately called the CH-46 the “Frog”—often spelled “Phrog,” either to be cute or to distinguish it from nature’s amphibian. During the Vietnam War, the Marines had bought 600 Sea Knights to carry troops and supplies into battle. As part of his study in the late 1960s, Miller wrote up requirements for a new helicopter, a list of what it would need to be able to do. Miller didn’t know that much about helicopters—he was a fighter pilot by trade—so he decided the Marine Corps’ next troop transport should cruise at 200 knots. He based that on his experience in Vietnam, where he’d seen small patrols of Marines get into firefights with bigger forces and have to wait hours for helicopters to bring reinforcements or evacuate them. Miller thought the Marines needed aircraft that could get troops to a fight within thirty minutes, the same time goal the Corps had for responding to calls from ground troops for fighter-bomber attacks on enemy forces. Helicopter company marketers he talked it over with told Miller he was dreaming. “I didn’t know that they couldn’t reach two hundred knots at the time, but they told me that I was out of my mind because they couldn’t make a helicopter that would cruise at two hundred,” Miller said.
By 1975, Miller was a lieutenant general and, like his mentor McCutcheon before him, deputy chief of staff for aviation, in charge of all Marine Corps aircraft matters. Nearly a decade after he’d started working on the problem, the Marines were still trying to figure out how to replace their Sea Knight troop transports, and now the issue was taking on more urgency. In Vietnam, the Marines hadn’t relied on amphibious assault. They had fought much like the Army, though armed far more lightly. Their last major amphibious landing under fire had been in 1950 at Inchon, Korea. No one was openly advocating the abolition of the Marine Corps just yet, but with the Vietnam War over, the Soviet Union throwing its weight around, and the American public soured on the idea of U.S. military intervention in “small wars” overseas, some defense experts in Congress and think tanks were arguing that the Corps had to change. It should either be cut way down in size, they argued, or start spending its money on heavy weapons so it could fight the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact in Europe, if that day came. Once again, the Marines were searching for a way to preserve their status as the nation’s “power projection” force, the one presidents would turn to first in a crisis—“First to Fight,” as one of their slogans put it. Finding a way to get Marines into battle faster than a Phrog could carry them would help, Miller reasoned.
One day in 1978 one of his subordinates showed Miller a film of an experimental Canadian aircraft called the CL-84, a propeller plane that could take off vertically by tilting its whole wing upward. The film showed the tilt-wing CL-84 operating off an amphibious landing ship and doing almost 200 knots as it flew like an airplane. Miller and his staff were intrigued. Miller was already a believer in VTOL aircraft, as people were calling convertiplanes by now. Back in 1968, when he was still a colonel working for General McCutcheon, Miller had been the first Marine to fly a British-made jet fighter, the Harrier, that could take off and land vertically by swiveling exhaust nozzles under its wings downward. The Marines started buying Harriers in 1971, seeing the plane as a way to finally reach their goal of providing close air support to troops within thirty minutes of getting a call. The “jump jet” could take off from a road or even a clearing in the jungle, which meant it could be based just back of the front lines. Miller also had never forgotten his mentor McCutcheon’s admonition that the helicopter was just an “interim aircraft.” The Canadian tilt-wing he was seeing in the film didn’t look just right, and it was incredibly noisy, but if the Marines only had a troop transport that could take off and land vertically, yet fly as fast as this tilt-wing could, getting reinforcements into battle within thirty minutes might be possible—and the debate about amphibious assault might be over.
“I asked my staff to check into what did we have in this country that was anywhere close,” Miller recalled. “Well, the answer came back, ‘The XV-15.’ ”
The little experimental tiltrotor Bell had built for NASA and the Army had just starting flying the previous year, but all those briefings and meetings Dick Spivey and Bell’s other marketers had done in the past few years—“Twice as fast and twice as far”—were beginning to have their intended effect. Word of the tiltrotor was getting to the right places.
Before long, a wrenching event would provide a vivid new argument for their sales pitch and dramatically expand the ranks of the converts.
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A military helicopter is a relatively slow and extremely noisy way to fly. At times, it can be a treacherous way to travel as well. Especially at low altitude in hostile territory. Especially at night without lights. Especially through desert dust and unfamiliar canyons. That was where Marine Major James H. Schaefer and fifteen other handpicked U.S. military pilots and copilots found themselves the night of Thursday, April 24, 1980. They were at the controls of eight RH-53D Sea Stallions, a Navy variant of the Sikorsky CH-53 built for minesweeping and equipped with extra fuel tanks. They were churning through a navigator’s nightmare of darkness and dust above Islamic
revolutionary Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran. They were also flying under radio silence, and at gut-wrenchingly low altitudes to avoid radar detection.
The Sea Stallions were a crucial element in Operation Eagle Claw, an audacious secret mission of Rubik’s Cube complexity. The mission’s goal was to rescue fifty-three Americans held hostage in Iran over the previous five and a half months, since Islamic radicals had seized the 27-acre U.S. Embassy compound in Tehran on November 4, 1979. Without helicopters, Eagle Claw’s planners had decided, there was no good way to get the 118 Delta Force commandos and other troops chosen for the mission close enough to the Iranian capital to infiltrate the city of five million, rush the embassy, overpower the estimated 200 guards, and free the hostages. Without helicopters, there would be no good way to get the hostages and commandos out of Tehran. The choppers were to pick them up there and take them to Manzariyeh, thirty-five miles south. There, a detachment of U.S. Army Rangers was to descend upon an airfield and take it over so Air Force C-141 Starlifter cargo planes could swoop in and spirit everyone away to safety.
If the helicopters were essential, Delta Force’s founder and commander, Army Colonel Charles Beckwith, also deemed them one of the riskiest elements of the plan. Beckwith didn’t like helicopters. He thought they were all ugly. He’d been shot down in helicopters three times in Vietnam. He came out of that war believing that while choppers often saved lives, they could be undependable as well. A helicopter has thousands of moving parts, and when the engines are roaring and the rotors are whirling at several hundred miles an hour, those parts and the liquids that keep them working—oil, grease, and hydraulic fluid— vibrate constantly. In helicopters of that era, the shaking often caused tubes and hydraulic seals to spring leaks or led mechanical parts to malfunction. If helicopters were needed for a mission, prudent military planners often asked for extras in case of breakdowns. Operation Eagle Claw’s intricate choreography demanded six Sea Stallions at minimum to succeed, which was why eight were in the air as the mission began. Yet even with that insurance, the helicopters would prove the opera-tion’s undoing.
The Dream Machine Page 8