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The Nation's Peacetime Minutemen

Fourteen months after the secretary of the navy had told "Howlin' Mad" Smith that the raising of the flag over Mount Suribachi would ensure the Corps' survival for the next five hundred years, the commandant of the Marine Corps, Alexander Vandegrift, worried if it was true. Headquarters Marine Corps (HQMC) in Washington was scrambling to maintain order and discipline amid a rapid and precipitous demobilization. Tough decisions were being made every day about the shape, structure, and personnel of a drastically reduced Corps. From a high of 485,000 men during the war, the active-duty Marine Corps was winnowed down to 155,000 by August 1946.

The Marines knew what they wanted to be in the postwar era: the nation's peacetime minutemen, a "force in readiness" with at least two battalions perpetually deployed at sea. One reinforced battalion with an aircraft squadron would sail the Pacific, and a similar ground-air unit would cruise in the Mediterranean or Caribbean. These forces would form the sharp edge of a Corps with at least three full divisions and three air wings. The Corps defined itself as a combined arms, groundair force, capable of deployment on almost any coastline. Although World War II had not afforded the Corps the opportunity to prove the effectiveness of an all-Marine ground-air campaign, its leaders believed the drive across the Pacific had shown the Marines to be the best general-purpose military organization in the world. The skeptics-and there were many in the army and in Washington-rolled their eyes and said it was just so much Marine propaganda.

After months of drafting and redrafting and lobbying, the president signed the National Security Act of 1947. The idea of a single, all-powerful military chief of staff was gone. The act stated that the Marine Corps had primary responsibility for developing amphibious warfare doctrine and equipment; that it was a separate service within the Department of the Navy; and that it should include land combat, service, and aviation units. It went on: "The primary mission of the Marine Corps shall be to provide fleet marine forces of combined arms, together with supporting air components, for service with the fleet in 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."

The act's becoming law was a cause for celebration among all Marines on active duty and in the reserves. Remarked General Vandegrift, "It is the first time in the history of the Marine Corps that the roles and missions have been spelled out in language that an eighteen-year-old could understand."`

General Vandegrift retired as 1947 came to a close. His successor, a tall Virginia Military Institute graduate named Clifton B. Cates, had fought with distinction at Belleau Wood as a young officer with the 4th Marine Brigade. Wounded three times during World War I, he had won the Navy Cross, the nation's second-highest medal for bravery under fire. By the time he assumed the cornmandancy, Cates had the unusual distinction of having commanded every level of infantry unit in combat from platoon all the way up to division. His tenure (1948 to 1951) was mostly a time when the nation was at peace, yet there were battles of a different sort fought in the vicinity of the Potomac River-the battles of the budget.

Marines have earned a reputation for being zealous to the point of paranoia in the defense of their service's missions and budget. In reviewing the first three years of Cates's tenure, it is easy to understand why. As Cates told correspondent Richard Tregaskis in 1948, his "biggest worry is to keep the Marine Corps alive, to keep it the potent element of national security it has been in the past, to develop its unique capabilities.”

While desk-bound Marines worked political and PR battles, and toyed with helicopters, a different PR operation went into effect on the other side of the planet. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese surrender put General MacArthur in charge of a new, temporary empire in occupied Japan. Elements of both the 2nd and 5th Marine Divisions joined the 6th Marine Division in occupation duty. Their area of operations was the island of Kyushu, the southernmost of the two islands. There they repatriated Korean and Chinese laborers and joined the Japanese in helping to clear away vast amounts of rubble from the American bombing campaign. At Sasebo, a city of three hundred thousand that had been savaged by B-29s, Marines found the business section of the city leveled flat, and there were sixty thousand homeless. Refuse and rubble was general, as was the stench of untreated sewage. When the 2nd and 6th Marines came ashore at Nagasaki, the conditions were much worse. One grunt said with typical Marine candor, "It was a filthy, stinking, wretched hole, and the sooner we get out, the better we will all like it."

Once fully established in the predictable rhythms of occupation duty, which included a great deal of guarding of installations, endless patrolling to ensure order, and performing small-scale cleanup projects, the Marines joined one of the most remarkable sea changes in attitudes between two peoples in world history. Soon the "duplicitous" and "savage" Japs appeared docile, and even childlike - in need of support, advice, and direction from their big Western brothers, the Americans. As the historian John Dower has pointed out, the cover of Leatherneck magazine's September 1945 issue "introduced a subtle and significant metamorphosis: it depicted a smiling Marine with an appealing but clearly vexed monkey on his shoulder dressed in the oversize uniform of the Imperial Army. Heretofore the Japanese had been depicted as apes and gorillas; immediately after the war they became transformed into clever, imitative, domestic pets."

As legions of Marines and other service people who served in Japan have testified, the Japanese were good losers. Indeed, most ordinary Japanese welcomed the conquerors. For the Marines, occupation duty was relatively short. All but a few 2nd Marine Division units departed by February 1946, replaced by army units. There was, of course, the usual carousing that attends the occupation of a defeated enemy's home cities, but for the most part the Marines in Japan acquitted themselves with discipline and professionalism. General MacArthur, who ran the country for six years after World War II not unlike a regent and who was no great friend of the Marine Corps, remarked, "Their general conduct was beyond criticism … They were truly ambassadors of goodwill."

There did remain some hostile fire for the Marines in Asia-but not in Japan. The Marines soon had to go back to China, where they had been intermittently active for decades. Whether they arrived in ships at the mouth of the Hai River or in the railway station, throngs of boisterous Chinese greeted the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines with cheers and wide grins. Children waved, laughed, and scurried about amid the novelty of seeing such large, tough-looking American troops. The 3/7 was in the vanguard of General Keller Rockey's III Amphibious Corps force of fifty thousand Marines en route to duty in war-wracked northern China. The first landing of Marines in China had taken place in Canton in 1844 to protect an American trading post. In 1856, Marines had led a combined navy-Marine assault on several barrier forts manned by Chinese who sought to prevent the U.S. Navy from resupplying the U.S. legation in Canton. More famously, the Marines engaged in heavy combat in Peking and Tientsin in defense of American and other foreign nationals during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. They stayed from 1900 to 1941, giving rise to the term China Marines.

The new deployment marked a departure, for postwar north China duty was the first of many inspired by the cold war. For the next four years ever-smaller numbers of Marines found themselves embroiled in the bizarre, highly unpredictable, and often violent landscape of China's civil strife. Sino-American diplomacy of this era was attended by more than a little naivete on the part of American policy makers, and the costs of America's well-intentioned but wrongheaded policies were paid in large measure by Rockey's force of Marines. The China deployment would come to an abrupt conclusion in May 1949 with the Marines' evacuation of American dependents in Tsingtao, just as Mao Tse-tung's troops were about to crush the remnants of Nationalist resistance and give birth to the People's Republic of China.

The Marines had been sent to Hopeh Province and the Shantung Peninsula at the behest of the State Department, for it was a major objective of postwar U.S. foreign policy to ensure a strong, unified, and democratic China as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. According to U.S. intelligence, the Soviets had designs on mineral-rich Manchuria. The publicly stated mission of the Marines put forward by Truman administration spokesmen was to orchestrate the surrender of several hundred thousand widely dispersed Japanese troops in the strategically essential northern industrial region of the country and to ensure the order and economic stability of the country as a whole. The diplomats instructed the Marines to assist the Nationalist Chinese government under Chiang Kai-shek in repatriating both the Japanese soldiers and more than 250,000 Japanese and German civilians who had joined Japanese forces in their invasion of the country in the early days of World War II.

The Nationalists, however, were only marginally cooperative. They had different priorities than the United States. They routinely ignored American military and political guidance, seeking to maximize their position vis-a-vis Mao's Communist guerrilla army by moving many divisions of troops into mineral-rich Manchuria and leaving only poorly trained militia forces to help the Marines dealing with Communist provocations and Japanese repatriation.

It was clear to Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung - but to neither Truman nor his long-suffering diplomatic emissary to China, General George C. Marshall - that full-scale civil war for control of the entire country was inevitable. As events would soon prove, Chiang was as inept an army commander as he was a statesman. The Communists brilliantly exploited his weakness. Mao's People's Liberation Army (PLA) was highly disciplined and well led. As the months went by, they steadily gained the support of the peasantry, tossing away Marxist doctrine where practical to do so, and staying clear of engagements against the Nationalists in and around the cities where the Nationalist army enjoyed advantages against the lightly armed PLA.

Once the 6th Marine Division had set up headquarters in Tsingtao and the 1st Marine Division at Tientsin, General Rockey deployed his Marines along the railway lines between Tientsin and Tsingtao, and between Peking and Tientsin, to protect trains from sabotage and to ensure the delivery of coal to China's major cities. Without coal deliveries, Peking and Shanghai were in danger of economic collapse and wide-scale famine.

Even before Rockey's entire force had deployed, Mao had formed the correct impression that U.S. forces ostensibly in the region to keep peace and order in effect freed up Nationalist soldiers to challenge his growing strength and prestige. And so Mao ordered his commanders to conduct a low-intensity harassment campaign against the Marines' train patrols.

The days of relative peace for the China Marines were short. On October 6, while General Rockey presided over the surrender of fifty thousand Japanese on behalf of the Nationalist government, a detail of Marine engineers protected by a single rifle platoon came under heavy fire from about fifty Communist infantrymen while trying to clear the road between Tientsin and Peking. The Americans were forced to withdraw. Two days later, the engineers returned, this time with an entire rifle company - and air cover - and completed their mission without incident. Similar harassment occurred whenever the Marines traveled in vulnerable numbers throughout Hopeh and the Shantung Peninsula.

When Communist forces in the fall of 1945 attempted to block a Marine landing in the port of Cheefo on the Shantung Peninsula, Rockey wrote to Vandegrift that he "felt that any landing there would be an interference in the international affairs of China; that it would be bitterly resented by the Communists, and that there would be serious repercussions. Although the opposition would not have been very serious, there was apt to be some fighting, sabotage and guerrilla warfare thereafter." Rockey promptly diverted the landing from Cheefo to Tsingtao to avoid trouble, but evidently the very presence of Americans was a thorn in the side of the Communists, for ambushes and harassment along the roads and rails continued. One Marine died and ten were wounded between October 1945 and January 1946.

Meanwhile, the 1st Marine Air Wing under Major General Claude E. Larkin was soon transporting the Nationalist 92nd and 94th Armies to Peking for billeting. Chiang's forces showed no inclination, however, to relieve the Marines strung out along the railways. To fill the gaps, the Marines rearmed a number of Japanese units and deployed them throughout the railway net. Regular air patrols were essential in support of III Amphibious Corps ground troops, and Marine fighter pilots were always at the ready when American infantry was patrolling outside the city boundaries or running security operations on trains.

The Marines administered the repatriation of some 630,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians during its deployment. This duty tested the diplomatic skills of III Amphibious Corps' officers, for both the Communists and the Nationalists were often reluctant to turn over Japanese with technical and military expertise, because they could be put to good use in the civil war. On November 14, Communist infantry stopped a train along the Peking-Mudkin line carrying Major General DeWitt Peck, commander of the 1st Marine Division. He was conducting an inspection of Marine outposts along the railway when the train was halted six miles north of Kuyeh by rifle fire. Peck ordered his escort platoon to return fire and called in reinforcements. The Communists continued sporadic fire until Company L, 7th Marines arrived on the scene and began to mortar the Chinese positions.

The reason for Communist hostility was not obscure. Chiang was using the Marines in Chinwangtao to protect his base of operations for attacks into Manchuria. In the wake of the incident, General Rockey contacted his superior, army general Albert C. Wedemeyer, in the hopes of securing permission to conduct air strikes. Wedemeyer's response conveys some notion of the complexity and awkwardness of the rules of engagement the Marines had to work under:

If American lives are endangered by small-arms fire ... it is desired that you inform the [Nationalist Chinese] leader or responsible authority in that village in writing that fire from that particular village is endangering American lives and that such firing must be stopped. After insuring that your warning ... has been received and understood, should firing that jeopardizes American lives continue, you are authorized to take appropriate action for their protection. Your warning and action should include necessary measures to insure safety of innocent persons.

Operating under such rules of engagement placed great pressures on Marine commanders to ensure discretion and fire discipline on the part of their men. It was a tough and thankless job, rewarded not by praise but by silence. With each incident, tensions and negative feelings toward the Communists increased. Matters were made more difficult by the departure of hardened combat veterans, who were replaced by inexperienced Marines fresh from training in the United States.

The months of frustrating duty rolled forward. In addition to their various security patrols, Marines were closely involved in support of General Marshall's continued efforts to broker peace between two armies increasingly bent on outright war. The Corps supplied six teams of truce negotiators to work with the Nationalists and Communist forces beginning in March 1946. The Marine teams quickly gleaned that the Nationalist troops were poorly led and lacking in motivation. The reverse was true of the Communists, whose land-distribution policies won them many friends among the peasantry.

General Marshall's efforts and the efforts of the Marines were confounded by a basic contradiction in American policy: the United States was officially neutral in the conflict between Mao and Chiang Kai-shek, but, in practice, Chiang was an ally, and Mao was not. The Nationalists won several victories in Manchuria in the spring of 1946, but they failed to accomplish the essential task: the destruction of the lion's share of Mao's forces. The fighting went on, punctuated by a series of fragile truces.

On July 26, 1946, came a major ambush of a Marine convoy near Anping, forty-four miles from Tientsin: nine supply trucks escorted by about forty men from the 11th Marines were attacked - just as they approached a roadblock of oxcarts - with small-arms fire and hand grenades by a force of three hundred Communists. A grenade killed the escort commander, Sergeant Douglas A. Corwin, among others. The Marines stood and fought a desperate battle for three and a half hours, while one Jeep in the rear guard managed to turn around and head back to Tientsin. Colonel Wilburt S. Brown's llth Marine Regiment rushed a heavily armed four-hundred-man rescue patrol to the scene. By the time reinforcements arrived, four Marines were dead and ten wounded. Communist casualties were estimated at fifteen dead. The Communists claimed that the Marines had opened fire on them, and refused to produce the officer who had led the attack. Thereafter, Marines patrolled only in considerable strength.

Thankfully, Anping was the last major engagement the Marines would endure in China, though harassment continued. On April 5, 1947, a considerably emboldened PLA unit attacked a large Marine Corps ammo dump at Hsinho, killing three Marines and wounding eight in a fierce firefight. Eight more Marines were injured in another firefight while coming to their comrades' aid. The remaining Marine force in China, three battalions based at Tsingtao, was assigned to guard the U.S. naval base there. They were the force that evacuated the last American nationals from Tsingtao when Mao's Communists won a tremendous battle at Huai-Hai and conquered both Peking and Tientsin. By the end of May 1949, the last Marines had left China for good. But the Marines were destined to confront the PLA - and other Asian communists - in two major conflicts that would follow World War II: the Korean and Vietnam wars.

James A. Warren. . Free Press. 2005.

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