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On November 20, 1943, the 2d Marine Division hit the beach on tiny Betio Island, Tarawa Atoll, expecting that its defenses had been "pounded into coral dust" by naval and air bombardment. They found instead that the Japanese had survived and held largely intact defenses. Three days of intense fighting secured the island at the cost of one thousand dead Marines and more than two thousand wounded. By early 1944 the Americans' westward drive across the Pacific required airfields in the Marshall Islands at Kwajalein and Eniwetok atolls. In late January, the 4th Marine Division and U.S. Army troops wrenched control of Kwajalein Atoll in three days of fighting. Then, beginning on February 18, the 22d Marine Regiment landed on three islands in Eniwetok Atoll. The newly rebuilt airfields would support future operations in the Mariana Islands as the Marines continued their island-hopping campaign to victory in the Pacific. Military historian Eric Hammel has delved deeply into the government photo archives and discovered a treasure-trove of rare, many never-before-published combat photos taken during these campaigns, unearthing hundreds of images.
Smedley Butler's life and career epitomize the contradictory nature of American military policy through the first part of this century. Butler won renown as a Marine battlefield hero, campaigning in most of America's foreign military expeditions from 1898 to the late 1920s. He became the leading national advocate for paramilitary police reform. Upon his retirement, however, he renounced war and imperialism and devoted his energy and prestige to various dissident and leftist political causes.
This is the second volume in a series of chronological histories prepared by the Marine Corps History and Museums Division to cover the entire span of Marine Corps involvement in the Vietnam War. This volume details the Marine activities during 1965, the year the war escalated and major American combat units were committed to the conflict. The narrative traces the landing of the nearly 5,000-man 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade and its transformation into the ΙII Marine Amphibious Force, which by the end of the year contained over 38,000 Marines. During this period, the Marines established three enclaves in South Vietnam’s northernmost corps area, I Corps, and their mission expanded from defense of the Da Nang Airbase to a balanced strategy involving base defense, offensive operations, and pacification. This volume continues to treat the activities of Marine advisors to the South Vietnamese armed forces but in less detail than its predecessor volume, U.S. Marines in Vietnam, 1954-1964; The Advisory and Combat Assistance Era.
The Marine Corps has always considered itself a breed apart. Since 1775, America’s smallest armed service has been suspicious of outsiders and deeply loyal to its traditions. Marines believe in nothing more strongly than the Corps’ uniqueness and superiority, and this undying faith in its own exceptionalism is what has made the Marines one of the sharpest, swiftest tools of American military power. Along with unapologetic self-promotion, a strong sense of identity has enabled the Corps to exert a powerful influence on American politics and culture. Aaron O’Connell focuses on the period from World War II to Vietnam, when the Marine Corps transformed itself from America’s least respected to its most elite armed force. He describes how the distinctive Marine culture played a role in this ascendancy. Venerating sacrifice and suffering, privileging the collective over the individual, Corps culture was saturated with romantic and religious overtones that had enormous marketing potential in a postwar America energized by new global responsibilities. Capitalizing on this, the Marines curried the favor of the nation’s best reporters, befriended publishers, courted Hollywood and Congress, and built a public relations infrastructure that would eventually brand it as the most prestigious military service in America. But the Corps’ triumphs did not come without costs, and O’Connell writes of those, too, including a culture of violence that sometimes spread beyond the battlefield. And as he considers how the Corps’ interventions in American politics have ushered in a more militarized approach to national security, O’Connell questions its sustainability.
A New York Times bestseller! An epic history of the decline of American military leadership—from the bestselling author of Fiasco and Churchill and Orwell. While history has been kind to the American generals of World War II—Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley—it has been less kind to the generals of the wars that followed, such as Koster, Franks, Sanchez, and Petraeus. In The Generals, Thomas E. Ricks sets out to explain why that is. In chronicling the widening gulf between performance and accountability among the top brass of the U.S. military, Ricks tells the stories of great leaders and suspect ones, generals who rose to the occasion and generals who failed themselves and their soldiers. In Ricks’s hands, this story resounds with larger meaning: about the transmission of values, about strategic thinking, and about the difference between an organization that learns and one that fails.
This book tells the story of the Marines spearheading the thrust through the Japanese outer ring of defences and recounts the brutal and important island-hopping Pacific campaign at its most gripping following the bloodbath at Tarawa. Contains 97 photos and 16 maps and charts. “As 1943 drew to a close, Marines had retaken Tarawa and portions of the Solomons from the Japanese invader, but the formidable enemy bases studding the vast Pacific, bases which had been built during the preceding 25 years, were as yet untouched by our amphibious forces. In early 1944 the first penetration of this prewar enemy territory was accomplished with the assault and occupation of Kwajalein and Majuro Atolls in the Marshall Islands. These were quickly followed by the seizure of Eniwetok Atoll. The major role in these over-all operations was undertaken by Marine units working in close coordination with elements of the Army, Navy, and Coast Guard. That they acquitted themselves with distinction is reflected in the rapidity with which they accomplished their missions. Operations in the Marshall Islands clearly indicated that Japanese bases in the Central Pacific could be by-passed. The way was now open for the neutralization of Truk and the assault on the Marianas, the next great step in the drive toward Japan.”-LEMUEL C. SHEPHERD, JR., GENERAL, U. S. MARINE CORPS, COMMANDANT OF THE MARINE CORPS