US Marine Corps

Origins

The Continental Congress created two battalions of Marines on 10 November 1775, a date the Corps still celebrates as its birthday. Marines were shipboard soldiers: they fought from the rigging in sea battles, led boarding and landing parties, and kept order among sailors. The Corps has reinvented itself more often, and more successfully, than any other American service, from ships' guards to colonial infantry to the world's leading amphibious force. "First to fight" has been recruiting fact as often as slogan.

Organization & Training

The Marine Corps sits within the Department of the Navy but is a separate service. Recruits go through boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina, or San Diego, California, and officers train at Quantico, Virginia. Marine culture is its real weapon system. Every Marine, whatever his or her job, is trained first as a rifleman, and the Rifleman's Creed, written in the Second World War, begins "This is my rifle." In the 1920s and 1930s, planners led by Major Earl Ellis foresaw a Pacific war against Japan. The Corps formed the Fleet Marine Force in 1933 and wrote its Tentative Manual for Landing Operations in 1934, the doctrine that took Marines across the Pacific. Today the Corps fights as Marine Air-Ground Task Forces that combine infantry, armor, artillery, aircraft and supply under one commander.

Weapons & Equipment

The Corps' equipment story runs through this wiki. In the "Banana Wars" of the early twentieth century Marines carried the M1903 Springfield and the Thompson Submachine Gun. The island war was fought with the M1 Garand, the M1918 BAR, the M1911 Pistol, the KA-BAR Knife and the Marine Raider Stiletto, with grenades such as the Mk 2 Fragmentation Grenade and the M2 Flamethrower for Japanese bunkers. Vietnam brought the M16 Rifle and the M40 Rifle for scout-snipers. The Barrett M82 was used in the Gulf War, and a version of the HK416 was adopted as the M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle.

Notable Actions

Marines landed at Derna in 1805 against the Barbary states and stormed Chapultepec in 1847, "the shores of Tripoli" and "the halls of Montezuma" in the Marines' Hymn. At Belleau Wood in June 1918 they stopped a German advance and cleared the wood in weeks of fighting. The nickname "Teufelshunde", devil dogs, supposedly given by the Germans, is probably legend, but the Corps proudly keeps it. The Pacific war made the modern Corps: Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, the Battle of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. On Iwo Jima some 6,800 Americans were killed, most of them Marines, and Joe Rosenthal's photograph of the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi became the American war photograph. In Korea the 1st Marine Division fought its way out of the Chosin Reservoir in 1950. In Vietnam Marines held the Battle of Khe Sanh and retook Hue in 1968, and in Iraq they fought the battles of Fallujah in 2004.

Legacy

The Marine Corps is the smallest of the Department of Defense's fighting services and probably the proudest of its history. Its institutional memory hoards that history, from the Marines' Hymn to the Iwo Jima memorial in Arlington, Virginia. Its amphibious doctrine was copied by allies, and its claim that every Marine is a rifleman remains the core of its identity.

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