Honoring 241 years of the Marines

The late novelist Tom Clancy once made an appearance on C-SPAN. Clancy fans were delighted; fans of the U.S. Marine Corps were delirious when a caller (obviously a jealous, envious-of-Marines individual) demanded that Clancy explain why he wrote so glowingly of Marines.

{mosads}Clancy measured his words carefully. Basically, he said that in the 20th century, four new combat systems changed warfare for all time: amphibious warfare (massive troop movements from the sea to land); vertical envelopment (helicopters); close air-to-ground fire support (strafing, bombs — including fiery napalm — and air-to-ground missiles); and armor/tanks.

Of the four, one — armor/tanks — was developed by the British.

The Marine Corps developed the other three.

Ground-to-air close support was first used in Nicaragua where the Marines fought guerrillas in the 1920s. Marine Corps Aviation exists to this day.

When the Continental Congress chartered the Continental Marines on Nov. 10, 1775. The Continental Marines made their first amphibious landing in the Bahamas on New Providence Island on March 3, 1775.

Almost two centuries later, add to that Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Okinawa, Iwo Jima or Inchon as hugely successful example amphibious operations by U.S. Marines.

Helicopters were used by the Army and nascent Air Force in the 1950s to move supplies around and to reconnoiter. The Marines — without authority from anyone — stuffed Marines into them and used them to move men around. By the Vietnam War, helicopters moved many fighting men around by helicopter. The Air Cavalry rode “helos,” not horses, into battle.

Clancy’s answer embarrassed the caller.

There are Americans that criticize the U.S. Marines at every turn. President Harry Truman even went so far as to insult what he called the Navy’s “police force,” or as some called them, “sea-going bell-hops.”

Truman also complained that the Marine Corps had “a propaganda machine that is almost the equal to (Soviet leader Joseph) Stalin’s.”

When North Korean communists invaded South Korea in June 1950, however, the 1st Brigade of the 1st Marine Division of the U.S. Marines in San Diego County, California, were called up, some 5,387 miles away.

This writer was 9 years old when he watched the 1st Marine Brigade of the 1st Marine Division arrive in trucks and buses from their Camp Pendleton base to load onto ships for the trip to Korea.

There, they would save the tiny Pusan perimeter in four weeks and keep a handful of U.S. Army troops from annihilation. Then, without rest, they would load up on ships again and sail north to the Port of Inchon, were the Marines would pull off a brilliant landing and slash through North Korean troops to the capital city of Seoul.

The Marines would fight street to street, house to house for two weeks, defeating the North Korean Army before other troops could arrive from the United States.

They took Seoul and moved north to a key dam and reservoir at Chosin. The entire 1st Marine Division was deployed accompanied in subzero temperatures. Blinding snow and ice were the highlights of each hour, each day.

On Nov. 27, 1950, the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army (PVA) attacked the Marines; the Chinese had snuck into Korea under cover of night and weather. What followed was the Battle of the “Frozen Chosin,” in which thousands of Marines were killed or wounded in days of hand-to-hand fighting. The Marines succeeded in fighting their way through the frozen mountains to the Korean East coast, from where the Navy evacuated them. The Marines left behind an estimated 30,000 dead Chinese from the PVA.

Marines would fight and die a dozen years later in Vietnam, and they, too, would leave behind thousands of dead communists like they did in Korea. Their next battles would be fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq’s Battle of Fallujah would join the Frozen Chosin in history. Marines would enter Baghdad hundreds of miles from the sea and fight in Afghanistan, which doesn’t even have a coastline.

From the Bahamas in 1775 to Belleau Wood (France) in 1918, to 1945’s Iwo Jima to 1968 Hue (Vietnam), to 2000s Baghdad, Fallujah and Kandahar (Afghanistan), there have been 241 years of national and Marine glory.

It is what we honor on Nov. 10.

Contreras formerly wrote for the New American News Service of The New York Times Syndicate.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.