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America's Spartans

The early amphibious operations of the war in the Solomons were of course puny compared with those of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, but the underlying doctrine for all the operations-the basic principles and prerequisites for success-had all been worked out before the war commenced. The differences between the early campaigns and the assault on Iwo Jima, the "supreme test" of amphibious operations, were not in the doctrine employed but rather in the means to put existing doctrine into effect. . . . The modifications wrought between 1942 and 1945 in the art of amphibious warfare did not seriously affect underlying principles. Those modifications, the production of materiel, particularly landing craft and weapons, and secondly in the refinement of certain techniques which had clearly been conceived before the war but which needed the experience of combat itself to achieve any degree of perfection."

The amphibious assault is similar in objective and follows the same principles of fire and maneuver as a basic ground assault. But at command level, amphibious operations require mastery of a highly specialized set of procedures and coordination of landing craft and fleet protection both from sea and air. Ground troops must disembark in landing craft at regular intervals, widely dispersed, and their movement ashore must be very closely coordinated with naval gunnery fire and air attack. Special ammunition for these naval guns had to be developed, and the absence of artillery meant that enemy positions up high on cliffs sometimes had to be reduced by air power alone, the trajectory of most naval guns being too flat to aim high. Specialized beach parties, composed of both sailors and Marines, had to be able to communicate with the fleet to manage both the type and flow of supplies and equipment as required by rapidly changing circumstances on the shoreline and the urgent needs of the infantry assault commanders.

The amphibious assault, World War II-style, belongs to the past, but forcible entry from the sea is an indispensable-even vital-capability for the United States. Effective implementation of foreign policy rests squarely on our ability to quickly project military forces with real power anywhere. Marines are the masters of such amphibious operations.

Iwo Jima is the most famous battle in the storied history of the Marines. It was proof of the Corps' unique, highly aggressive style. It has also become a landmark in the American people's conception of the Corps as a martial institution second to none. Some people were horrified at the casualties, and along with heaps of praise from a grateful nation there emerged some strident voices castigating the senior leadership of the Corps for its willingness to assault concrete bunkers with human flesh day after miserable day. But soon after the guns fell silent, the critics' voices subsided, and the vast majority of Americans were left with an enduring affection and respect, even reverence, for the courage and fortitude of their Marines.

The Seventh Bond Drive, for which President Franklin D. Roosevelt selected the Suribachi flag image as a symbol, raised more funds than any previous drive. And the flag-raising image was soon on postage stamps, paperweights, posters, and billboards in theaters. was visible in more than one million retail-store windows, sixteen thousand movies theaters, fifteen thousand banks, thirty thousand railroad stations, and on five thousand billboards along highways.

As the Pacific war approached its conclusion, Americans knew that the Marine Corps was a very special organization, peopled by ordinary young Americans who had become fierce warriors, men who lived to fight: America's Spartans. General Lewis Walt, who won a Navy Cross in the Pacific and commanded all the Marines in Vietnam in the early years of the ground war there, believed that the amphibious nature of the Marine Corps accounted for a number of the characteristics that separated the Corps from other elite fighting organizations. Those qualities, he wrote, were "the aggressiveness inherent in an elite assault force; the versatility acquired by officers and men who must stand ready to land anywhere at any time, on short notice; and the high professional quality of a force that must understand ground, naval and air operations equally in order to fulfill its obligations." When Americans look at the iconic Rosenthal photograph of those six men raising the Stars and Stripes, they are seeing all these characteristics. Little wonder that the photo and the moment it captures are among the most inspiring in our history.

During World War II, the Marine Corps expanded to twenty-five times its prewar size. At war's end, the Corps counted 485,000 officers and men in its ranks. A total of 669,000 people served in the Marines during the conflict. The Corps still accounted for only about 5 percent of the U.S. armed forces during the war years. The Marine Corps fought some of the toughest battles in the Pacific. After the loss of Wake Island in the first weeks of the conflict, it was never again defeated on the battlefield.

Yet it could be argued that the Marine Corps' greater contribution to World War II was in the realm of doctrine as opposed to combat. Long before the Pearl Harbor attack, a coterie of Marine officers had refused to accept the conventional military wisdom of the 1920s and 1930s — that the amphibious assault against a hostile enemy was doomed to fail in the modern age of the machine gun and the fighter-bomber. The disastrous British campaign at Gallipoli in 1915 confirmed this view in the eyes of the U.S. Army. The senior leadership of the Marines after World War I, led by Commandant John A. Lejeune and Major General and Assistant Commandant John H. Russell, by contrast, saw Gallipoli as a case study that could be improved.

The work of Russell and Lejeune was taken up by other Marines at Quantico, resulting in the groundbreaking 1934 publication of Tentative Manual for Landing Operations. Here for the first time the complex process was broken down into its essential parts, and key problems were isolated for study. The Tentative Manual was far from the last word in amphibious operations, but it put forward a new vocabulary and helped to structure new ways of thinking. It stirred the navy into participating in the ongoing discussions: When should command be turned over to the ground commander? Could preparatory naval gunfire and air bombardment be simultaneous? What was the optimum size of the amphibious boats or tractors required to bring the landing force ashore with its heavy weapons and supplies?

The Tentative Manual was refined in light of field experimentation and published by the navy as Landing Operations Doctrine, United States Navy (1937). Between May 1941 and August 1943 it was further revised three times, and the U.S. Marines used it to train most of the army commanders who led amphibious operations in both the European and Pacific theaters of war. The Marine Corps spearheaded the development of American amphibious operations before and during World War II. Had they not done so, many of the great battles of that conflict might have ended in disaster.

Marines were an expeditionary outfit, and they lived up to that name: 89 percent of the enlisted men and a remarkable 98 percent of the officers who served in the Corps during World War II were posted overseas. No other service could boast figures even remotely that high.

The rapid expansion of the Marine Corps had, of course, created problems. The newly minted Marines thrown into Iwo and Okinawa had not been as well trained as had the select few who were accepted into the fold in the years before Pearl Harbor. And the war exposed some of the inefficiencies in the Corps' logistical and training apparatus as well as its equipment-procurement procedures. But, on balance, the expansion was managed by the senior officer corps with alacrity and sure-handedness.

From an institutional point of view, perhaps the most significant result of the explosive growth of the institution between 1942 and 1945 was the creation of a large population of reserve and former Marines who could spread the Marine Corps gospel to the American people in the postwar era. Commandant Alexander Vandegrift got to the heart of the matter when he said, "It is a notable fact that few men have ever left the Marine Corps without a feeling of undying loyalty toward it."' The veterans were not hesitant about displaying that pride in the years after the war. In the immediate postwar period, when many high-ranking officers and officials associated with the U.S. Army and the fledgling U.S. Air Force attempted to limit the size and capabilities of the Marines on the grounds of "efficiency," the men who had served in World War II consistently frustrated such efforts. No individual was more important in keeping public image and public relations front and center than John A. Lejeune, commandant from 1920 to 1929. "The future success of the Marine Corps," Lejeune wrote, "depends on two factors: First, an efficient performance of all the duties to which [the Marine Corps is] assigned; second, promptly bringing this efficiency to the attention of the proper officials of the government and the American people."

Robert Denig and his band of public relations Marines took General Lejeune's statement very much to heart. So did the World War II Corps as a whole. At the height of the Pacific war, the Public Relations Division pumped out an astonishing three thousand stories a month for public consumption. Many of these were about individual Marines, designed for the local papers. The strategy worked: after the war, the public displayed a deep and enduring affection for the Corps that members of other services sometimes found puzzling and frustrating.

James A. Warren. . Free Press. 2005.

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