by Mike Magner
Just about every former Marine from the eastern United States has memories of Camp Lejeune, many of them shaped by their marital status at the time they were stationed there. “A lot of brown-baggers [married Marines who live off-base] love it because the housing, schools and other facilities are really good,” said a 1981 article about Camp Lejeune in the Marine magazine The Leatherneck. “Many of the single Marines knock it because they live in squad bays and feel that it’s a long swoop to decent liberty. . . . Marines who have been stationed there are not wishy-washy about their feelings. They either love it or they don’t.”2
During the civil rights era, there were some ugly days at Camp Lejeune, although it was the site of the first training base for black Marines, a satellite facility called Camp Johnson that was built in 1942. In 1969, there were dozens of assaults and robberies with racial overtones. Some black Marines took matters into their own hands in midsummer that year by disrupting a party for a battalion that was shipping out the next morning for the Mediterranean. A white Marine died of head injuries, and two others were stabbed in the melee that broke out. Ultimately, charges were filed against forty-four men. More than a dozen of them were later convicted of violent crimes, including a black Marine who was sentenced to nine years of hard labor for manslaughter.3
Camp Lejeune was established in 1941 as an advance-force training base. It was named for General John A. Lejeune, who in 1915 had reshaped the mission of the Marine Corps to “be the first to set foot on hostile soil in order to seize, fortify, and hold a port from which, as a base, the Army would prosecute the campaign.” It wasn’t always so easy to define the United States Marine Corps. From the moment the Second Continental Congress established the Marines on November 10, 1775, the mission of the Corps was a work in progress, largely determined by the military needs at the time. The first assignment was to obtain gunpowder for the Continental Army by invading New Providence Island in the Bahamas, where it was believed the British had six hundred barrels in storage. The Marines landed at the island on March 3, 1776, and seized a British fort, but then proceeded to bed down for the night, giving the British time to load most of the barrels on a ship and send them off to Florida. The next morning, the Americans found only a couple dozen casks of powder and a few guns to carry home.4
The Marines began to distinguish themselves early in the nineteenth century, first on “the shores of Tripoli” in the First Barbary War of 1801–1805—one of only two military triumphs commemorated in the well-known “Marines’ Hymn” still sung today at bases around the world. President Thomas Jefferson had refused the tribute and ransom demands of pirates from the Barbary States—Algiers, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli on the North African coast—and his Navy fleet had managed to take control of the Mediterranean with the aid of ships from five European nations. But after the USS Philadelphia grounded while patrolling the coast of Tripoli in 1803, and its crew of more than three hundred, including forty-three Marines, was taken hostage, a small group of Marines joined forces with about five hundred mercenaries from Greece in April 1805 and marched across the desert to capture the coastal city of Derna, nearly five hundred nautical miles east of the port of Tripoli. It was the first battle fought by the United States in a foreign land. The Americans were preparing to advance toward Tripoli when they learned that a peace agreement had been forged by the United States. It stipulated payment of a $60,000 ransom for the return of the captives from the Philadelphia. The commander of the force, William Eaton, returned to the United States as an early Marine Corps hero, though it was not the end to the war with Tripoli he had envisioned.5
The Marines settled in during the War of 1812 to become a fierce fighting force within the Navy. They gained a reputation as some of the finest marksmen in the world, as many Marines had learned to shoot with great accuracy at long distances in the backwoods of America. Congress officially put the Marines under Navy command in 1834 with passage of a law that also made clear that the Army had no authority over Navy personnel. In fact, it elevated the status of the Marines to that of the Army, with equal pay, a similar command structure, and the same four-year enlistments.6
In 1845, Texas became a state, and a war with Mexico was looming, so President James K. Polk decided it was a good time to expand the United States to the coast of California. Over the next two years, units of the Army, the Navy, and the Marines overcame Mexican forces in cities from Sonoma and San Francisco (then Yerba Buena) down to Los Angeles and San Diego. Meanwhile, the Army and the Marines fought their way through Mexico. They converged on Mexico City on September 13, 1847, to take on the remaining army of Antonio López de Santa Anna. After numerous bloody battles that day, Santa Anna abandoned the capital. Early on September 14, Marines stormed Chapultepec Castle, which stood on a hill that was considered a sacred site by the ancient Aztecs because it was where the “Halls of Montezuma” had once been. The war with Mexico ended, the last pieces of the continental United States were in place, and the Marine Corps had one of its most famous moments to sing about for centuries.7
The Marines played a minor role in the Civil War, and for the remainder of the nineteenth century the Corps spent much of its time keeping sea lanes open and securing trouble spots, such as Nicaragua and the Fiji Islands. The Spanish-American War in 1898 marked a major turning point for the Marines, who conducted their first amphibious landing at Guantánamo Bay on their way to helping Cuba win its independence. As the twentieth century dawned, Marine Corps leaders pointed to the Guantánamo operation as the blueprint for the service’s future core mission.8
Japan’s 1905 triumph in its war with Russia heightened concerns about the defense of American interests in the Pacific, as it would take days for Navy ships stationed on the West Coast to reach far-flung destinations such as the Philippines. President Theodore Roosevelt convinced Congress to add fourteen battleships and cruisers to the Navy fleet and increase its manpower from 25,000 to 44,500, but proposals to build naval bases in China, Korea, and the Caribbean were rejected when the Army made a case that defending Manila and its vital harbor in the Philippines should take priority.9
Concerned that the Army was getting the upper hand in managing America’s role as a superpower, a group of Marine officers formed an association in 1911 to oppose any efforts to reduce the Corps’ traditional missions and to argue for an important new one, known as the “advanced base force.” The concept had begun to germinate in the Navy years earlier, when military leaders in Washington realized that a lack of bases left US possessions in both the Pacific and the Caribbean vulnerable to attack. Defenses could be strengthened if a force such as the Marines was capable of moving quickly to establish temporary bases wherever they were needed and then defending those advanced bases against enemy assaults.10
The idea was institutionalized in 1910, when the Marine Corps established an Advanced Base School at New London, Connecticut. But progress was slow, and in 1913, frustrated supporters of the Marines in Congress held a hearing to inquire as to why it was taking so long to organize and train an advanced base force. It was only after a twenty-five-year career officer named John A. Lejeune was appointed a top aide to Marine Corps Commandant George Barnett in 1915 that the new mission started to gain traction.
Born on the Louisiana bayou in 1867, Lejeune was the descendant of French Canadians who fled British rule and migrated to the South. His father was a Confederate officer in the Civil War who wanted his son to go to the US Military Academy. There were no openings at West Point, but his congressman found Lejeune a vacancy at the US Naval Academy, so he left Louisiana State University in 1884 and headed to Annapolis, Maryland.
The young naval cadet barely survived his first year after graduating from Annapolis in 1888. Lejeune was serving on the USS Vandalia as it was anchored in the Samoan harbor of Apia when a typhoon struck in March 1889. The waves were so powerful that the sloop was nearly swept out of the harbor; instead, it skidded along the water, dragging its anchor, until it grounded on a reef. Lejeune
, twenty-two at the time, climbed into the rigging. He watched in horror as many of his fellow sailors tried to swim to shore and became swamped in the waves. But he and some of his other comrades hung there for hours, looking death in the face, until another Navy ship, the Trenton, pulled up alongside the crippled Vandalia and rescued those who remained on board.11
A year after the near disaster, on July 1, 1890, Lejeune was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. “A stocky man of average height, with a square leathery face and jug ears,” according to one Marine Corps historian, Lejeune climbed the ranks quickly, leading several missions that helped secure America’s dominance at the start of the twentieth century. He became a top aide to Barnett, the Marine Corps commandant, at the beginning of 1915—the height of a redefining period for the Marine Corps. With its recent victory in the Spanish-American War, the United States had broadened its reach around the globe to include the Philippines, Guam, and the Hawaiian Islands in the Pacific; Puerto Rico in the Caribbean; and the all-important strip of land where the Panama Canal was built to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The Army and the Navy were engaged in intense battles over which service could best protect American interests abroad, and the Marine Corps needed to carve out a clear role for itself, lest it be left behind in the race for expansion funds and overseas missions.12
Barnett and Lejeune had earlier been impressed with plans laid out by a young officer from Kansas, Captain Earl Ellis, who had developed plans for a war against Japan. A core element of these plans was a strategy for seizing islands as advanced bases that could serve as stepping-stones toward Japan in the Pacific. Lejeune drafted Ellis to help plan exercises, and in early 1914, the first advanced-force brigade, from Philadelphia, joined a regiment that Lejeune had organized to test out the concept at Culebra Island in Puerto Rico. The exercise didn’t go perfectly, but the results were promising enough that in 1915 Lejeune went to Philadelphia to announce, on behalf of the commandant, that the advanced-base concept would be the heart of the Marine Corps’ mission.
Planning for the new mission was put on hold for the American entry into World War I in 1917, when US troops, including several regiments of Marines, were dispatched to Europe to help drive the Germans back to their homeland. Brigadier General John Lejeune arrived in France in 1918 to lead the 4th Marine Brigade that had fought at Belleau Wood, and he later took charge of the combined Marine and Army division that broke the German lines. He was the first Marine officer to hold an Army divisional command. Lejeune became known as “the greatest of all leathernecks” while earning the Distinguished Service Medal, the Badge of the Legion of Honor, and the Croix de Guerre for his wartime valor.13
Lejeune later offered a poignant description of military heroism:
In war, if a man is to keep his sanity, he must come to regard death as being just as normal as life and hold himself always in readiness, mentally and spiritually, to answer the call of the grim reaper whenever fate decrees that his hour has struck. . . . While war is terribly destructive, monstrously cruel, and horrible beyond expression, it nevertheless causes the divine spark in men to glow, to kindle, and to burst into a living flame, and enables them to attain heights of devotion to duty, sheer heroism, and sublime unselfishness that in all probability they would never have reached in the prosecution of peaceful pursuits.14
After World War I, Lejeune returned to his role as assistant to the commandant, but he and Barnett faced a new problem: with the world at peace, Congress slashed funding for the Marine Corps and reduced the size of the force from more than 75,000 at the height of the war to less than 30,000 in 1919. Barnett became so frantic in his efforts to preserve and promote the Corps that he began to annoy both Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels and the chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee in Congress, Representative Thomas Butler of Pennsylvania. The two pressured Barnett to resign in 1920—two years before his term as commandant was to expire—and Lejeune was tapped to succeed him.15
Lejeune seized the opportunity to lay the foundation for the mission he had defined for the Corps five years earlier. He immediately reorganized the advanced base force at Philadelphia as the East Coast Expeditionary Force and began staging maneuvers for military brass, key politicians, and even the general public. An astute politician himself, Lejeune knew there was no substitute for popular support in persuading national leaders to bolster the Corps. He had Marines volunteer for reenactments of Civil War battles, organized a Marine Corps League, and even had Marines help guard the mail from 1921 to 1926, just to show off their reliability and trustworthiness.16
At the same time, Lejeune was planning for a future war in the Pacific, as increasingly industrialized Japan showed signs of wanting to expand its empire beyond Korea, Taiwan, and parts of China. The US Navy’s so-called Orange Plan for a Pacific theater of operations was built around an amphibious campaign conducted by the Marines. Lejeune had an ace in the hole to help advance his plans for the new Marine Corps mission: he reminded military and political leaders that although the United States had agreed, along with Japan and Britain, not to build new naval bases in the Pacific for ten years after the end of World War I, there were no limits on the development of mobile forces within the Navy. In 1924, the commandant sent the new East Coast Expeditionary Force of 3,300 Marines to the Caribbean for a massive exercise at Culebra Island. It quickly became clear that there was still much work to do on the maneuvers. During a landing at night, the Marines hit the wrong beach and failed to get all their supplies on-shore. Another exercise was conducted in Hawaii in 1925, this time coordinated with the Army, and more lessons were learned about the need for better landing craft, improved communications, and adequate training.17
Lejeune retired as commandant in 1929 to become superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, but his mission had been accomplished. The stage was set for the Marines to play a pivotal role in the war with Japan that would begin a dozen years later. A final document defining the Marine Corps’ responsibilities that was issued before he stepped down said the Corps would conduct “land operations in support of the fleet for the initial seizure and defense of advanced bases.”18
By 1940, with war clouds hovering over the planet, the Marine Corps had adopted an official manual outlining the strategy and tactics for amphibious landings by an advanced force, and exercises were being conducted regularly in the Hawaiian Islands and the Caribbean. But the Marines were learning that they still needed not only better landing craft, better weapons, and better communications, but also a training base where the operations could come together. The Marine Corps commandant that year, Major General Thomas Holcomb, ordered one of his top aides, Major John McQueen, to “select a pilot . . . get a plane . . . and find us a training center.” After about a month of surveillance over the Atlantic and Gulf coasts from Virginia to Texas, the pair was most impressed by the miles of undeveloped beach near the mouth of the New River in North Carolina.19
It didn’t hurt that members of Congress from North Carolina were anxious to spur development of a new port that had recently been built with federal funds nearby at Morehead City. The Marine Corps received $14 million for a base called Marine Barracks New River, and by the summer of 1941, Marines were practicing landings on the North Carolina beaches that would prepare them for epic battles at Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and elsewhere in the Pacific Theater of World War II. After the death of John A. Lejeune in 1942, the name was changed to Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune.20
The base at first had only a summer cottage that served as headquarters, a warehouse placed in a converted tobacco barn, and a tent city for the Marines. But the forests, swamps, and hot weather at Camp Lejeune were ideal training grounds for troops who would be landing on tropical islands in the Pacific during the war. In fact, a Marine who fought at Guadalcanal was quoted as saying, “If this place had more snakes, it would be just like New River.”21
After the war, the base benefited from a consolidation of the Marine
s into three divisions, one headquartered at Okinawa, Japan, and two on the mainland: the 1st Marine Division at Camp Pendleton in California and the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, which became known as “The Home of Marine Expeditionary Forces in Readiness.” Lejeune became the largest Marine base on the East Coast. Eventually it became a fully equipped base, with schools, commercial strips, movie theaters, a golf course, stocked fish ponds, and recreational beaches reserved for Marine Corps personnel. And for its core mission, the base grew quickly in the postwar era into a massive complex, with an airfield, three urban-terrain battlefields, forty-eight landing zones along the beaches, eighty firing ranges, and enough housing and support buildings to accommodate 180,000 people at any one time. The base also includes an adjacent training facility called Camp Geiger where more than 24,000 Marines go through infantry school each year. “Entrenched into the Marine warrior ethos is ‘every Marine is a Rifleman,’ and it is at Camp Geiger where Marines learn and develop their war-fighting skills before they attend their secondary schools to learn their military occupational skill,” according to the Camp Lejeune website.22
A major challenge in developing this enormous base was providing adequate supplies of potable, nonbrackish water to a constantly changing population, particularly in the hot summer months when demand was highest and rainfall was lowest.
As construction was starting at the base in 1941, the Marine Corps asked David G. Thompson, a scientist for the US Geological Survey (USGS), to scope out the best way to provide water at an installation initially projected to house no more than 6,000 Marines at a time. Thompson looked first at the New River and its many tributaries, but he quickly determined that the water was too salty unless it was withdrawn above the tidal flow, perhaps miles upstream. An intake point would also be difficult to pin down because, when the river was running low, the tides pushed farther inland.
