Flight Pundit

This is an older article about the Marines and it is worth reading because it gives a brief history of the Corps and why they are so feared by so many.

Best-selling author Tom Clancy once wrote, “Marines are mystical. They have magic.” It is this same magic, Clancy added, that “may well frighten potential opponents more than the actual violence Marines can generate in combat.”

I don’t know if the Marines are really mystical and magic, but they sure are a fighting force I wouldn’t want be up against. Any enemy should be shaking in their boots when they hear that the Marines have landed.

Established in 1775, the U.S. Marine Corps came of age in World War I during the 1918 Chateau Thierry campaign near the French village of Bouresches. There, Marines assaulted a line of German machine-gun nests on an old hunting preserve known as Belleau Wood. The fighting was terrible. Those Marines who weren’t cut down by the enemy guns captured the nests in a grisly close-quarters slugfest.

The shocked Germans nicknamed their foes, teufelhunden (devil dogs).

“Marines are considered a sort of elite Corps designed to go into action outside the United States,” read a German intelligence report following the battle. “They consider their membership in the Marine Corps to be something of an honor. They proudly resent any attempts to place their regiments on a par with other infantry regiments.”

Twenty-four years later as the 1st Marine Division was steaming toward Guadalcanal, a Japanese radio propagandist taunted that which the Japanese soldiers feared most. “Where are the famous United States Marines hiding?” the announcer asked. “The Marines are supposed to be the finest soldiers in the world, but no one has seen them yet?”

Over the next three years, Marines would further their reputation at places with names like Tarawa, Saipan, and Iwo Jima.

That reputation carried over into the Korean War.

“Panic sweeps my men when they are facing the American Marines,” confessed a captured North Korean major. It was a fear echoed by his Chinese allies. In late 1950, Chinese premier Mao Tse Tung put out a contract on the 1st Marine Division. The Marine division, according to Mao in written orders to the commander of the Chinese 9th Army Group, “has the highest combat effectiveness in the American armed forces. It seems not enough for our four divisions to surround and annihilate its two regiments. You should have one or two more divisions as a reserve force.”

Though costly for both sides, the subsequent Chinese trap failed to destroy the 1st Marine Division.

U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Frank Lowe later admitted, “The safest place in Korea was right behind a platoon of Marines. Lord, how they could fight!”

Over a decade later, Marines were the first major ground combat force in Vietnam. Army Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who commanded all American military forces in that country, conservatively stated he “admired the élan of Marines.” But despite the admiration, some Army leaders found their equally proficient units wanting for similar respect.

This little section made me laugh because I can really see this happening:

In 1982, during the invasion of Grenada, Army General John Vessey, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, telephoned one of his officers and demanded to know why there were “two companies of Marines running all over the island and thousands of Army troops doing nothing. What the hell is going on?”

Go read the rest of this article and see how the Marines are really an American institution now, inspite of numerous attempts to dismantle the Corps.

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