Hirohito broke down in front of his cabinet, wept into his white-gloved hand, and announced that he was surrendering unconditionally. A farce followed. The Emperor recorded his first speech to his people, explaining things. Several bitter-enders sneaked into the Imperial Palace to steal the record before it could be broadcast; they failed and committed harakiri. Men knifed themselves in front of the palace, in an apology to the Throne for failing to win the war.
MacArthur staged the surrender ceremony. A white Jap plane marked with green crosses brought a delegation of enemy brass to Manila by way of Ie Shima, a little island off Okinawa (“Here the 77th Division Lost a Buddy: Ernie Pyle”), for the rehearsal. Halsey’s fleet sailed into Sagami Bay, southwest of Tokyo—it was greeted by the destroyer Hatsuzabura, with her three five-inch guns depressed, as though bowing—and on September second Jap diplomats in top hats and claw-hammer coats boarded the Missouri while the West Virginia, sunk at Pearl and now shipshape, stood by. Everything was smooth until Allied signers came to the Japanese copy of the document. They couldn’t read the characters, and four signed on the wrong lines. The Jap foreign minister protested, but he could scarcely be heard above the roar of two thousand American planes overhead. He was told it didn’t matter, he could get off the ship now; and bowing like the Hatsuzabura, he quietly did.
Corps d’Élite
In one of those flashes of recollection which illuminate early childhood, I am standing by my mother on a New England curbstone, Awalting a 1920s Memorial Day parade. From a wooded cemetery across the street comes the lilt of brassy music; it grows; there is movement among the greening trees, and the column appears, marching straight toward me, led by my father in his Marine Corps dress blues, favoring the arm that had been crippled in France.
Everyone was cheering, but I saw only him, his blouse a lyric of dark blue, red piping and gold. I don’t remember what uniforms the others were wearing—they were Army, or something. The parade halted smartly at the curb and fell out; my father draped that gaudy blouse over my shoulders, and blinded by what was later called Gung ho I took off at high port, tripped, and fell into a patch of dense shrubbery.
I emerged scathed, but uncured. The fact is I never abandoned that mummery—not even on the morning twenty years later when, groggy with morphine and swaddled in unlyrical gauze, I was evacuated from a violent Pacific beach to a Hospital LST. I can denounce the Marine Corps, and I frequently have. But so can lovers quarrel, and to those who have fought in it the Corps is like the memory of an old affair, tinged with sadness and bitterness, yet with the first enchantment lingering. It is a mystique, wholly irrational; and right or wrong, a legion of men will lay down their lives for its intangible honor tomorrow. Impossible? The youngest drill instructor on Parris Island will tell you there’s no such word in the Marine Corps.
For him there’s no such thing as a right way and a wrong way anyhow; there’s only the Marine Corps way—a liturgy as obscure as life in certain remote Tanganyikan tribes. It is select: even the model who poses for the recruiting signs outside post offices must belong. It is archaic: its attitudes have not changed perceptibly since, as the Navy’s army, the Corps was the striking arm of U.S. imperialism fifty years ago. It is xenophobic: the marine is touchier than a Reising gun, and assumes as an article of faith that everyone is against him, including the military and naval might of the United States.
His code is spartan. In garrison the Marine Corps is famous for fetishistic disciplines; one celebrated commander memorized the timetables of all railroads converging on his base and withheld transfer orders until the last possible moment before train time, to keep his men on their toes. In combat the Corps takes pride in cracking the enemy’s toughest nuts; Ernie Pyle was startled to find marines apologizing when their casualties were low. By a kind of inverted idealism, they sentimentalize antisentimentality; in two of their greatest battles, officers and noncoms inspired troops by insulting them: Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly led his men into murky Belleau Wood in World War I with the hoarse cry, “Come on, you sons of bitches—do you want to live forever?” and in the desperate night on Guadalcanal’s Bloody Ridge, Lieutenant Colonel “Red Mike” Edson rallied his Raiders by snarling, “The only thing the Japs got that you haven’t got is guts.”
In time of crisis America admires marines almost as much as they admire themselves. On Iwo Jima, James Forrestal could not see one “without experiencing a feeling of reverence.” In Korea, Douglas MacArthur, a late convert, discovered that “there is not a finer fighting organization in the world.” When guns are muted, however, marine popularity falls. Hecklers report that Corps rituals smack of bogus comic opera. They point out that the melody for the “Marine Hymn” was actually lifted a century ago from Offenbach’s Genevieve de Brabant. Even the marine’s military virtues become suspect. Like Tommy Atkins, the British foot soldier immortalized by Rudyard Kipling, he’s the “savior of his country” when the guns begin to shoot—and its “thin red line of heroes” when the drums begin to roll—but in peacetime we serve no redcoats here.
I have actually heard tweedy Remington Raiders—chair-borne critics, that is—compare marines to Nazi storm troopers, Rumania’s Iron Guard, the Spanish Falange. The French Foreign Legion is a little closer. Until 1940 the Corps, like the Legion, encouraged foreign enlistments, and some of its most memorable noncoms were White Russians, Germans and Poles. But the legionnaire of legend was shanghaied to Sidi-bel-Abbes. Marines are volunteers. Moreover, I watched the Legion in Indochina in 1953; in combat it is good, but on liberty it seems undisciplined, all muscle and no head. Head is a word in the Marine Corps, though it has another meaning.
Do not think that the marine’s vocabulary is limited—that he is, in the old Army jeer, a man with a size nineteen collar and a size four hat. Actually, his language is both colorful and special. His corps has no recruits, but it does enlist boots. Although the number of marines afloat is now one percent of the Corps, in shore stations the floors are still called decks, walls are bulkheads, doors are hatches. A toilet is a head, and you had better not call it anything else. Ask a buck sergeant the way to the rest room and you will meet a fixed stare, as though you mumbled something about No. 1, or mentioned your tummy.
A bar is a slopchute, a young marine is a chicken, swamps are boondocks, candy is pogey bait, rumor scuttlebutt, a deception a snow job. Every marine is “Mac” to every other marine; every soldier is a doggie and is barked at. Mac’s patois is not only vivid; it is astonishingly varied. Indeed, in the Marine Corps there is no such thing as no such thing. The term for anything that defies description is gizmo.
The gizmo that spurs the marine has been defined by Hanson Baldwin, the military analyst, as “moral superiority.” Others call it “esprit de corps.” The average marine regards discussion of such matters as infra dignitatem. He irreverently corrupts the Corps motto, Semper Fidelis, to “Semper Fi,” an expression of cloudy semantics which conveys contempt for insincere sentiment, and if you mention “esprit de corps” with scorn he will leer cheerily—unless you happen not to be a marine yourself, in which case you are in jeopardy. For he does consider himself unique. He may look like a doggie. Coat him with mud, as his habitat frequently does, and he is indistinguishable from one. But don’t bark at him. He might bite you.
He is, in fact, inclined to be fanatical about his individuality. Officially there are no more marine gunnery sergeants, but he persists in calling five-stripers “Gunny,” because the rank is unknown in the Army. He is proud of the frogged embroidery on marine officers’ hats and believes, in the total absence of evidence, that the practice started on ships during the War of 1812, to identify officers to their own snipers topside in the rigging. In combat he treasures his camouflaged helmet cover because it distinguishes him from soldiers, who don’t have them. To him the Army is a bland corporation, a kind of hotel chain. He bitterly watches every Department of Defense move toward unification. He is convinced that the Marine Corps attracts a different k
ind of recruit, and he is right.
Other branches stress security, travel, a chance to learn a trade. The ultimate Marine Corps bait is a poster with a clenched, hairy fist and the legend, “You’re not good enough to be a marine!” Since the first continental marine-recruiting station opened in a Philadelphia slopchute, the Corps has been daring men to become marines. The pitch attracts candidates who are interested not in milling-machine skills or retirement thirty years hence but in status. Inevitably the net cages a few specimens who have been answering Charles Atlas ads, but if they can pass the physical they’re welcome. They’ll fight, too, provided they’re properly motivated, and the hairy fist isn’t the only psychological trick in the Corps bag. Others are unveiled at boot camp, that remarkable inoculation of gizmo that converts a gawk into a rain-cooled, Spam-fed, more or less semiautomatic flat-trajectory weapon virtually incapable of a stoppage.
***
Andrew Jackson, the first of several Presidents to be infuriated by marine arrogance, recommended the abolition of the Corps in his first annual message to Congress, “there being no peculiar training requisite for it.” It was a curious misstatement. The training is nothing if not peculiar. The youth who accepts the fist’s challenge is taken to boot camp at Parris Island or San Diego, dressed in new dungarees studded with QM tags, issued 782 gear—hardware—and shorn of all lay accouterments, including his hair. In company with some 70 other bald young men, he is introduced to a magnificent starched, hashmarked sergeant who is to be his D.I. or drill instructor. In a typical scene the D.I. strolls up, glances at the platoon and reels backward, his bird-of-prey eyes glazed in an Asiatic stare. There is a moment of stunned silence. He speaks, hollowly.
Well, he’ll be a dirty bird. He’ll be a sad, son of a bitch. Upstairs must be pissed off at him. He knew they were scraping the bottom of the barrel for boots, but he’ll be deep-sixed if they haven’t given him the barrel itself this time. These are the saddest sacks he’s ever seen. He gives one or two orders, and is usually rewarded by the discovery of a nervous chicken who confirms his worst suspicions—a boot, told to fasten that button, timidly reaches out and fingers one of the D.I.’s, or an anxious boy snaps his rifle bolt at the wrong moment, jamming it on the D.I.’s finger with a sickening crunch. The sergeant swears mightily. Is he supposed to make marines out of these people? It looks impossible, but since there’s no such word—he flicks his swagger stick menacingly and intones the words his platoon will hear every minute on the minute for the next three months: “You better get hot, shitheads. You better move!”
Thus the boot opens his career in utter disgrace. His very existence is an insult to his D.I. Nothing he does is right, and for good reason—his manners are still those of a civilian, and the stated purpose of this training is to crush them. D.I. methods have varied over the years. A generation ago, physical drill was stressed, men caught eating pogey bait were ordered to carry an oozing mass of candy around all day, and sulkers were invited to meet the sergeant after dark behind the barracks. In the early 1940s a man who dropped a rifle had to sleep on eight of them; if anybody fell out with a dirty rifle bore the D.I. would field-strip the entire piece, bury the parts in the sand, and make the guilty boot uncover them with his nose. Today the old punishments are out. A red flag flies over the parade ground on hot days, enjoining drill, and parents are invited to visit their sons, as though they were Y.M.C.A. summer campers.
Nevertheless the basic concept remains: treat the shithead with contempt, march him a hundred miles, put him through a thousand drilled acts of obedience, taunt him with the fact that he volunteered, teach him to take aim on a target 500 yards away and hit it, and then, at the last inspection, grudgingly admit that he may make a real marine someday. After that final performance, the typical boot struts off the parade ground seething with pride. His élan, of course, is in direct proportion to his D.I.’s scorn that first day. He has done the impossible; he has come through. The whole show has been carried out with such a flourish that even though he may suspect it’s a fraud, he couldn’t be prouder if he had been commissioned in the Army.
In the process he has acquired a number of illusions, all valuable. He firmly believes that in 182 years of history the Marine Corps has never failed at anything, and that upon him rests the awful responsibility of upholding the most spectacular military tradition known to man. He is convinced his own incredible achievement in surviving boot camp entitles him to an insufferable air of truculence. And he is quite sure that his dazzling superiority is a source of nagging jealousy among the Joint Chiefs, who express it in mean and devious ways.
***
Marine invincibility is not all myth, but neither is it entirely true. The record shows that during the War of 1812 the commandant, leader of the whole Corps, fled Washington before the British, and that his successor was cashiered for being a drunk. Marines bolted at Bull Run, though they had an excuse; many of their officers had been Southerners and were over the hill. (Later they organized a Confederate States Marine Corps, which very nearly tangled with the U.S. Marine Corps at Port Royal, South Carolina.) There was no excuse, however, in 1942, when 222 of Carlson’s Raiders attacked forty-three Japanese on Makin Atoll, narrowly escaped defeat, and accidentally left behind nine men to be beheaded. Nevertheless the Corps cultivates the Atlantean legend of invincibility, on the theory that men who believe they cannot be beaten are very hard to beat. When embarrassing skeletons rattle in the closet, there is always an answer. “Surely,” Major General Ben Fuller said of the Bull Run debacle, “the marines must have been among the last to run.”
That marines are cocky is no news to anyone who has observed a stiff neck rising insolently from a standing blue collar. What is not generally understood is that to them attitude is a weapon. Because he was convinced that he was still a tough old bird, General Archibald Henderson, aged seventy-four, could saunter up to a Baltimore street mob’s cannon in 1857 and scornfully turn the muzzle aside, giving the marines behind him a chance to overrun the gun. Because he held Spanish marksmanship in contempt, Sergeant John Quick could climb a ridge at Guantánamo Bay in the Spanish-American War, turn his broad back to enemy fire, and wigwag artillery signals to American gunboats. And “Chesty” Puller, because he was a swashbuckler, could lead the First Marines through six attacking Chinese divisions after sweeping the frozen landscape with his field glasses at Chosin and announcing loudly, “Well, we’ve got the enemy on our right flank, our left flank, in front of us, and behind us. They won’t get away this time.”
Modesty is a soldierly virtue only in barracks. The Marine Corps acquired its thirty-four campaign streamers elsewhere: at Tripoli, captured by Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon after a 600-mile forced march in 1805; in the Aztec halls of the Montezumas, occupied by the marines who had scaled Chapultepec during the Mexican War; in the Boxer Rebellion, where young Smedley Butler stormed the Tartar Wall in Peking with a gaudy new globe-and-fouled-anchor tattooed across his chest, and had it gouged by a Boxer sniper. During World War I the Corps’ reputation was built by the troops in France who proudly advertised the apocryphal description of them attributed to a German officer’s diary—Teufelhunde, “devil dogs”; and twenty-five years later by the grimy divisions who answered the Japanese battle cry, “Blood for the Emperor!” with “Blood for Eleanor!” Marine éclat was won by men who strutted. They never intended the meek should inherit it.
Swagger is, in fact, handed down from one marine generation to another, like a prize recipe to be improved upon. It was a World War I officer who ignored a French withdrawal order with the curt, “Retreat, hell! We just got here.” Ten years later, during the marine campaign in Nicaragua, a marine who had served in France was ordered to investigate a complaint of an uprising, and, when an indignant planter demanded, “Are you the only man they sent?” replied, “There wasn’t but one uprising, was there?” I vividly remember a bearded gunnery sergeant, a Nicaragua veteran, who paused in a driving Okinawan rain and shook his fist at the
leaking sky. “You up there!” he bellowed. “Knock it off!”
Scoffers may doubt that the clouds broke ten minutes later, but the fact remains that flamboyance helps marines fight. Undeniably, however, it is a file on the nerves of other services. Admirals with long memories have never forgiven two enlisted marines named Corey and Marlow who, the night before the Panama Canal opened in 1914, hoisted a tiny scarlet-and-gold marine flag to the bow of a piragua canoe, bluffed their way past guards, and paddled the first craft into the locks wearing dress blues. Since then the Navy has learned to be charitable, and can even smile weakly over the unofficial medal Guadalcanal veterans had struck in Melbourne after their relief, which depicts an arm with admiral’s stripes dropping a hot potato into the hands of a kneeling marine, and bears the motto Faciat Georgius—“Let George do it.”
The Army, however, is another story. Harry Truman, a former artillery captain, never became reconciled to marine attitudes. Douglas MacArthur’s was so affronted by those of the Corps that just before leaving Corregidor in 1942 his chief of staff omitted from his general recommendation for unit citations the Fourth Marines, who were then manning his beach defenses on the Rock. The explanation was that the marines had had their share of glory in World War I and weren’t going to get any in this one.
Controversy And Other Essays in Journalism (1950–1975) Page 17
