Born in a bar: The Marine Corps turns 250 years old

Over the years they have received many monikers, some more irreverent than others.

Soldiers of the sea. Teufelhund. Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children. Leatherneck. Jarhead. Crayon eaters.

But at the end of 13 grueling weeks of boot camp the most important title remains United States Marine.

Monday is the 250th birthday of the Marine Corps, which will be celebrated at bases, aboard ships, out in the field (it will probably be raining) and in embassies around the world with cake -cutting ceremonies, readings of the annual birthday message, viewings of movies like “Sands of Iwo Jima” and “Heartbreak Ridge” and, in (more than) a few cases, alcohol.

Tun Tavern

The Continental Congress, enacted the Continental Marine Act, which called for the raising of two battalions of troops. Innkeeper Samuel Nicholas was given the rank of captain and charged with forming the Marines.

The official story, and we’re sticking to it, is that Nicholas, now known as the first commandant of the Marines, recruited men in a Philadelphia bar called Tun Tavern. The tavern manager, Robert Mullan, became the first Marine recruiter.

For people who have served as Marines, this all makes perfect sense.

Marines were assigned to serve aboard naval ships during the Revolutionary War, helping man the cannons, protecting the ships’ officers and serving as sharpshooters in the masts, targeting officers and helmsmen aboard enemy ships. They also conducted their first of many amphibious landings, raiding the British port of Nassau in the Bahamas.

With the surrender of the British Army at Yorktown, the Continental Marines were disbanded in June 1785.

Dress blues, 8th and I and a really long march

The Naval Act of 1794 resurrected both the Navy and the Marine Corps, a new commandant – William Ward Burrows – was appointed major, and the Marines went back on recruiting duty, this time to raise a single battalion of 500 men. Major Burrows was given a consignment of leftover uniforms that were blue with red trim, which unknown to Burrows, would much later become the basis of the Marine Dress Blue uniform.

Since the Navy had its own command post, the Washington Navy Yard, it was decided the Marines needed a barracks as well. Burrows rode around Washington in a horse-drawn carriage with President Thomas Jefferson until they found a suitable spot for the barracks between 8th and 9th streets and G and I streets. That’s quite a mouthful, directions-wise, so the Commandant’s House and Marine Barracks is commonly referred to as ‘8th and I.’

Burrows also decided the Marines needed some ruffles and flourishes and pomp and circumstance, so he ordered the formation of the Marine Corps Band.

With uniforms and a barracks and a band, the Marines needed something to do, and the pirates of the Barbary Coast in north Africa were more than happy to oblige. Pirates had captured the USS Philadelphia in Tripoli harbor and its crew were taken hostage. Navy Lieutenant Stephen Decatur led a small group of Marines to secretly board, seize and burn the Philadelphia, while another group of Marines got the opportunity to go for a long hike.

Seven Marines, led by Lt. Presley O’Bannon, and supported by 400 mercenaries raised in Egypt, marched 500 miles overland from Alexandria to Derna, a port city in what is now part of Libya. After the pasha refused to surrender, O’Bannon’s force assaulted Derna and seized the city.

Now you know where the phrase “to the shores of Tripoli” comes from in the Marines Hymn.

‘From the Halls of Montezuma …’

In 1845, the United States annexed the state of Texas, which didn’t sit well with Mexico. That country refused to acknowledge the 1836 Treaty of Velasco, which ended the war between Mexico and the Texicans.

With the United States expanding westward into the Oregon territory, and California (a Mexican territory at the time) and the border between the United States and Mexico in dispute, President James K. Polk attempted to buy the border region and California, which Mexico refused.

Tensions ratcheted up and soon enough the Mexicans and Americans were at war. The U.S. invaded Mexico, seizing territories in New Mexico, California and ports along the coast in Baja, including spring break destination Mazatlan.

While one force led by future president Zachary Taylor assaulted Monterrey from the north, a force of Army soldiers and Marines led by Gen. Winfield Scott landed to the south at Veracruz, which was taken after a 12-day siege. His force then marched inland for Mexico City.

The pivotal battle for the city came at Chapultepec, a castle that served as the Mexican Army’s military academy. Gen. Scott organized his force of soldiers and Marines into several groups and assaulted the fortress. At one point a small group of six Mexican Army cadets, known as the Niños Héroes, leapt to their deaths rather than surrender. The legend is that one of the cadets draped themselves in the Mexican flag before he jumped to prevent the Marines from capturing it.

The Marines’ effort in helping take the castle, which led to the taking of Mexico City, was immortalized in the first line of the Marines Hymn.

‘Retreat hell, we just got here.’

The Marines continued to serve “in every clime and place” for the next 70 years, participating in the Civil War, the Boxer Rebellion in China and the intervention in Haiti.

In 1914 war broke out in Europe, and it would be three more years before American entry into the war. Among the forces Gen. John J. Pershing landed in France as part of the American Expeditionary Force was the 4th Marine Brigade, attached to the U.S. 2nd Infantry Division.

During the German spring offensive of 1918, the 2nd Division was brought up the road from Paris to attack German positions in Château-Thierry and a forest 6 miles to the west called Belleau Wood.

The 4th Marine Brigade, with the 5th and 6th Regiments, was ordered to take the German positions in the wood, while the remainder of the division assaulted Château-Thierry. As the Marines advanced, they came upon retreating French forces. A French colonel told the Americans they should retreat; Capt. Lloyd Williams, a company commander in 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, replied, “Retreat, hell, we just got here.”

On June 6, 1918, the Marines began their assault on Belleau Wood. First Sgt. Dan Daly, a veteran of the Boxer Rebellion and the Haiti intervention who earned a Medal of Honor in each action, rallied his men by shouting, “Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?”

Over the next three weeks the Marines fought the Germans in some of the most brutal combat the Americans experienced in the war. Over 1,800 men were killed in fighting in the area, many buried in the shadow of the wood at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery. The French renamed the wood “Bois de la Brigade de Marine,” the forest has been preserved as a monument to the battle and legend has it the Germans begrudgingly nicknamed the Marines Teufel Hunden – Devil Dogs.

Island hoppers

After Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese Army hopped across the Pacific, from island to island, seizing territory from the United States. Guam was the first to fall on Dec. 10, followed by Wake Island on the 23rd. The last American positions in the Philippines fell at Corregidor in May 1942.

The Pacific Ocean would be a Navy operation, with the Marines and the Army island hopping westward. Starting at Guadalcanal in August 1942, the Marines fought a series of pitched battles against the Japanese, while the U.S. Navy tangled with the Imperial Japanese Navy in a protracted series of battles as part of the Guadalcanal campaign that resulted in the loss of a combined 111 Allied and Japanese ships. The area where the battles were fought is known as Iron Bottom Sound.

The Marines continued to island hop, from the bloody landings at Tarawa in November 1943 to Peleliu in 1944, Iwo Jima in February 1945 and Okinawa two months later.

During the fighting on Iwo Jima, the Marines captured Mount Suribachi on the fifth day of fighting and the order was given to plant the American flag at the summit. The first one was small so a second party, followed by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, was sent up with a larger flag. The second group raised the flag, Rosenthal snapped his famous photo and the Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, who had landed on the beach, looked up, saw the flag and remarked, “The raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next 500 years.”

‘In the air, on land and sea’

In boot camp, recruits are taught about the history of the Marine Corps. You memorize names and places and battles and important dates. You learn about people like Smedley Butler who, like Dan Daly, was one of two Marines who received the Medal of Honor twice; John Basilone, who held the line nearly single-handedly during the Battle for Henderson Field on Guadalcanal; and the first Marine aviator, Alfred A. Cunningham.

In 1912 Cunningham was a young lieutenant in the Marines who saw the future in the air. He received orders in May that year to report to Annapolis to begin training as an aviator, and the day he reported for training is considered the birthday of Marine aviation. He was the first of a long line of Marine aviators who took to the sky.

One of them grew up in Coeur d’Alene, went to school at the University of Washington, joined the Marines, became an aviator, fought with the American Volunteer Group (“Flying Tigers”) in China and returned to the U.S. to eventually raise up a new Marine fighter squadron.

That squadron was VMF-214, the Black Sheep, and their commander was Coeur d’Alene’s own Greg “Pappy” Boyington, a World War II fighter ace and Medal of Honor recipient.

Another Marine aviator flew a little bit higher – and a little bit faster – than the rest. This aviator was also a fighter pilot who flew in Korea and later, while flying as test pilot broke the transcontinental speed record in 1957 flying from Los Angeles to New York. That record wasn’t high or fast enough so, on Feb. 20, 1962, that pilot, Col. John Glenn, was taken to the top of a Mercury-Atlas rocket, climbed inside his capsule dubbed Friendship 7, and flew into space for three orbits around the Earth.

Four hours in space wasn’t enough time though, so he returned to space aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in October 1998. This time Glenn, who was 77, spent nine days in space.

Only one Marine has traveled beyond Earth’s orbit: Fred Haise, the lunar module pilot of Apollo 13. In all, 28 Marines have flown into space as astronauts.

‘No better friend, no worse enemy.’

Since World War II, the Marines have been dubbed America’s 911 force. When North Korea invaded the South, the Marines were called in for an amphibious left hook, landing behind the frontlines at Inchon. When they advanced north into the Chosin Reservoir, they were surrounded by 10 Chinese divisions.

Col. Chesty Puller, in typical Marine fashion, reported, “We’ve been looking for the enemy for some time now. We’ve finally found him. We’re surrounded. That simplifies things.”

The Marines fought the Chinese in a running battle south to the sea.

During the Tet Offensive in 1968, 6,000 Marines were surrounded by more than 20,000 North Vietnamese troops. For 77 days the Marines were under constant siege; as units defended the base and outlying hilltop outposts Air Force, Navy and Marine aircraft bombarded North Vietnamese Army positions while Air Force aircraft and Marine helicopters dropped supplies. President Lyndon Johnson ordered the base to be held at all costs as he did not want an ‘American Dien Bien Phu’ – referring to the disastrous French defeat against the Viet Minh in 1954 – and massive B-52 strikes from bases in Thailand, Guam and Okinawa leveled the fields surrounding the outpost. The Marines held the line.

Marines have been deployed around the world in war and peacetime since the end of the Vietnam War in April 1975.

When the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam, the Marines, led by future commandant Al Gray, took the lead in Operation Frequent Wind, evacuating civilians from the American embassy in Saigon. Two weeks earlier, Marines had successfully evacuated hundreds of people from the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh as the Khmer Rouge closed in on the city.

As forces were massing to push Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in January 1991, Marines were called upon to evacuate hundreds of diplomats and civilians from more than two dozen countries from Mogadishu, Somalia.

Japan was hit by a powerful earthquake and tsunami in 2011 and for several months U.S. forces, including Marines, brought in supplies and supported disaster relief efforts.

In the wake of Sept. 11, Marines were deployed to Afghanistan. Less than two years later the 1st Marine Division, led by Richland-native Maj. Gen. James Mattis, marched north to Baghdad. A year later, the division fought to clear insurgents from the town of Fallujah in al Anbar province, a bloody, month-long, house-to-house fight that drew comparison to the Battle of Hue City during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam.

Today, as Marines celebrate their birthday, they are deployed around the world, training in Australia and Okinawa, guarding U.S. embassies in 135 countries and cruising the seas of the Pacific and Mediterranean in expeditionary strike groups ready to respond to a crisis at a moment’s notice.

While Mattis popularized it for the 1st Marine Division, the Corps’ 250-year history in war and peace exemplifies his motto that “There’s no better friend, no worse enemy” than the Marine.