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Marines Observe Anniversary by Paying Homage to Men Who Have Driven Back Japanese Soldiers
WASHINGTON D.C. – Nov. 8 – Marines, proud, cocky and just a thousand miles away from Tokyo, make their annual entry next Friday in the log they have been keeping for 169 years.
For the historical year ending Nov. 10, they can write “mission accomplished” after Bougainville in the Solomons, Tarawa in the Gilberts, Cape Gloucester on New Britain, Roi and Namur in the Marshalls, Saipan, Tinian and Guam in the Marianas, and Peleliu and other assorted islands in the Palau group.
In these twelve swift months the Marines have been the spearheads in performing what has been called by the Commandant Lt. Gen. A. A. Vandegrift, “the amphibious miracle of our time.”
These men, who boast they can land on the beachhead to Hell against the Devil himself, have bought with their lives and blood the island from which the U.S. Navy now dominates the Pacific Ocean areas, including the front and back doors to Japan itself.
As footnotes to the larger historical events, the Marines will add to their long list of immortals the names of Bill Bordelon, Bill Hawkins, and David M. Shoup, heroes of Tarawa. Men like Gurke, Dyess and Sorenson. Men they called “Butchering Bob” Hanson and “Pappy” Boyington. Places called Cibik Ridge, Hill 660, Flame Tree Hill, Purple Heart Run, and Bloody Nose Ridge.
Soberly and with full realization of their sacrifices, the Leathernecks will enter the names of those who gave their lives, or suffered grievous injury in the thunderbolt drives to the north and west. Since their previous anniversary, 6,946 Marines have died in combat and another 20,000 were wounded. These casualties have raised the total for World War II to 8,827 Marines killed and some 25,000 wounded.
YEAR BEGAN IN BATTLE
The year, which ends Friday, began in battle. Ten days after the Marines landed in Bougainville, they were locked in combat with the Japanese for possession of Piva Ridge. They won and pushed on to the foothills of the Crown Prince Mountains. Here on Cibik Ridge named for the first lieutenant whose men held the 500 foot height for two days against four strong counter-attacks, 1,196 Japanese Soldiers died.
The victory on Cibik Ridge virtually ended Marine participation. They had accomplished their mission – securing space for air strips – and so they retired and turned the job of holding the area over to the Army.
While the Third Division was still in action on Bougainville, the Second Marine Division was writing history in blood at Tarawa, and the First Division was landing on both sides of Cape Gloucester.
Tarawa was first.
Before the men of the Second Marine Division clambered into their landing craft Nov. 20, this slim coral sand strip had been heavily bombarded. Surely, thought the Leathernecks, not a single Japanese Soldier could have withstood that onslaught.
But there were Japanese Soldiers there, about 4,000 of them determined to defend tiny Betio, side of an important airstrip, to the death. For the first 24 hours the Marines clung to a stretch of sandy beach 100 yards long and ten yards deep. In these 24 and the next 48 hours, some Marine died on the average of one every four minutes. Total: 1,026 killed, 2,557 wounded.
A few hours following Christmas Day, the First Division made two landings on Gloucester and another on Long Island in the Vitia Straits, 80 miles to the west.
In less than a week of hard fighting, the territory’s airfield was captured. Air ground crews arrived and Army, Navy and Marine pilots were joining bombers from New Guinea and Bougainville in softening the Japanese Soldiers’ South Pacific anchor, Rabaul.
At the end of January, the then untried Fourth Division and the Army’s Seventh Division fooled the Japanese Army. The enemy had anticipated an invasion of the Marshall Islands, but had hoped for a strategy of “island hopping.”
Instead of darting into the Marshalls by the way of nearest atolls like Wotje and Jaluit, the invaders smashed successfully at the Roi-Namur bases on the islands on Kwajalein Atoll. Eight days later, other important islands in the group had been secured. By the end of the month, Eniweetok, essential for establishing air and sea bases from which the mighty bastion of Truk to the east could be bombed, was in American hands.
BRIEF PAUSE FOR REST
After a brief pause for rest and re-equipping the Second and Fourth Divisions, buttressed by Army infantry ripped into little Saipan, key to the Marianas.
The 25 days which followed was a battle of ridges and caves, of blasting unyielding Japanese Soldiers from their gopher like holes, of incessant mortar and machine gun fire, of grueling fights for such peaks as Mount Tapootclau and places like gurapan and charan Kanoa, first purely Japanese towns to fall, of suicidal “Banzai!” charges. It was a battle in which some 2,500 Marines were killed and more than 11,500 wounded. The Japanese causalities: 18,000 dead, 2,000 wounded or taken prisoner.
Guam, first piece of American territory to be seized by the Japanese after the assault on Pearl Harbor, was next.
After 17 days of powerful naval air bombardment, waves of men from Third Division came ashore on July 20. In the first minutes of battle, the American flag had been planted on that beach.
Despite adamant Japanese resistance, the Marines advanced steadily. By July 26, they and soldiers of the Army’s 77th Division linked their beachheads and cut Guam in two. From then on it was a steady advance against vicious opposition. By Aug. 9, Guam was ours once more.
Tinian, across the straits from Saipan, was third on the Marines’ schedule in the Marianas. It fell a week after the first troops landed on July 24.
While the Japanese still reeled from this bold blow, veterans of the famed First Division were ready.
These were only 560 miles east of the Philippines and had been the point of the Japanese sword which had slashed so deeply into the South Pacific early in the war.
MEET FIERCE RESISTANCE
Here, as at Tarawa, Saipan and Guam, the fighting was fierce and intense. But by Sept. 26 there were only isolated pockets of Japanese Soldiers still resisting in the northern end of the island. Seabees were at work reconditioning the airdrome for full scale operation, adjoining islets had been occupied, and the pause preceding further invasion had set in. Meanwhile, Marine Corsairs were taking off from Peleliu airstrip to bomb airfields and other motor concentrations on Babelthaup, largest of the Palaus, and warehouses and other installations on Koror and other isles.
Not all Marine activity last year was in the Pacific. They managed to get into the European scrap, too by serving as gun crews on secondary batteries aboard ships in both French invasions. Another unit of 90 men occupied three strategic islands off Marseilles and rounded up some 900 Nazi prisoners.
All these activities, whether in the Pacific or the Atlantic, whether on large of small-scale operations, whether bloody or bloodless are in tradition of this hard-fighting, closely knit force which had its official origin over a century and a half ago.
Shortly after Congress had approved the organizing of the Marine battalions on Nov. 10, 1775, Capt. Robert Mullin enlisted the first recruits in Tun’s Tavern in Philadelphia. These boots were promised six dollars a month, a liberal daily ration of run and plenty of action.
“Action” has been a key word in the ensuing years of Marine history.
BRIEF HISTORICAL SKETCH
In the Revolutionary War, Marines fought with George Washington at Trenton and Princeton. Disbanded temporarily in 1893, they set out seven years later to the “shores of Tripoli” to battle the pirates of the Barbary Coast. In the War of 1812, they were with Commodore Perry at Lake Erie and with Andrew Jackson at New Orleans. In the Mexican War of 1845, they were with a young Army lieutenant named Ulysses S. Grant when he marched to the gates of Mexico City. In the Spanish-American war, they won this country’s first victory. World War I gave new testimony to the Corps’ courage. The first American to win the Congressional Medal of Honor was a Marine hero of the Battle of Bellau Wood.
In the first phases of this war, the Marines made immortal the names of the Wake Island, Bataan, and Guadalcanal, where they struck the first offensive land blow in the Pacific. Now, as they move nearer to the final showdown with the enemy, they are ready and eager to add to their memorable list of triumphs, one more victory-in the Battle of Tokyo.
| Date Taken: | 10.09.2018 |
| Date Posted: | 10.31.2018 08:54 |
| Story ID: | 298355 |
| Location: | CAMP LEJEUNE, NORTH CAROLINA, US |
| Web Views: | 89 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, GLOBE FLASHBACK: 169th Year Most Eventful in Marines’ History, by Cpl Ashley Gomez, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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