Professional Fighters

(See Cover) Above the Potomac on a hill southeast of Georgetown, not far from where the new national Capitol was abuilding, black-thatched, hot-eyed Lieut. Colonel William Ward Burrows, Commandant of the U. S.

Marine Corps, sat at his desk. Above the high scarlet collar surmounting golden epaulets, the Commandant's face was stern. Through the open window came the shouts and murmurs of the camp--the Marines' first headquarters camp in Washington. He set down the date--"Sept. 22, 1800." Over rough paper the quill began to scratch: "Lt. Henry Caldwell "Sir: Yesterday the Secretary told me that he understood one of the Lieutenants of the Navy had struck you. ... I can only say that a blow ought never to be forgiven and without you wipe away this Insult offered to the Marine Corps you cannot expect to join our officers. . .

I have wrote to Capt. Carmick, who is at Boston, to call on you & be your Friend. He is a Man of Spirit and will take care of you, but don't let me see you 'till you have wip'd away this Disgrace. ... On board the Ganges about 12 Mos. ago, Lt. Gale was struck by an Officer of the Navy. The Capt. took no notice of the Business and Gale got no satisfaction on the cruise; the moment he arrived he call'd the Lieut, out and shot him; afterwards Politeness was restored." Few days later "the Business" was settled to Colonel Burrows' satisfaction: Lieut. Jewitt of the Navy made public apology for his hasty blow. A month later, on Nov. 10, 1800, the Corps celebrated its twenty-fifth birthday.

This week in Tientsin, in Portsmouth, N. H., in Cavite and Shanghai, at Alaska, Guantanamo Bay, there will be parades, radio speeches and assorted red fire. Thus the Marine Corps will celebrate its 165th birthday. Since it was founded, the Marine Corps has had only 17 commandants; the head man of the birthday celebration will be William Ward Burrows' 15th successor: crop-headed, broad-chinned Major General Thomas Holcomb, spectacled veteran of more than 40 years' service. Burrows' command was only a few hundred men, armed with muzzle-loading muskets.

Tommy Holcomb's Corps musters close to 40,000, includes a small, well-integrated army (the Fleet Marine Force) equipped with tanks, airplanes, machine guns, artillery. But in Holcomb's day, as in Burrows', the Marines still insist on restoring Politeness.

Today the Marines still have a fanatic pride in their Corps, accumulated through the years by service in foreign parts, in troublous times. As in 1800, Marines are still preoccupied with smart appearance, cling jealously to fancy dress uniforms of blue, scarlet and gold, raise their sea soldiers in the spit-&-polish tradition. A pressing table and a board for polishing brass buttons are as much a part of Marine equipment as rifles and bayonets. Marines have never forgotten that their crack-shooting riflemen in the tops of the Bon Homme Richard helped John Paul Jones to glory against Britain's Serapis off Scotland's coast in 1779. Today the Marine Corps is the keenest rifle-shooting outfit in the world. On the walls of Tommy Holcomb's office in the sprawling Navy Building on Washington's Constitution Avenue hang the trophies of 15 first places won by Marine Corps teams in 31 National Team Matches. Not far away, under the portraits of his 16 predecessors, hangs a framed copy of the letter written 140 years ago by old man Burrows, ordering a subordinate to wipe out "this Insult." Boots into Leathernecks. Last week the U. S. Marine Corps was winding up a recruiting campaign to bring its strength to 38,600 men (from 17,000 in 1938).

It had no trouble getting men, even though Marine Corps enlistments are for four years. It still picks and chooses applicants, rejecting about 80%. By week's end the strength of the Corps, recorded daily on a chart in General Holcomb's office, stood at 37,500 (not including 4,000 reservists being called to active duty). At the training stations at Parris Island, S. C. and San Diego, Calif., young recruits were put in tow of hard-mouthed N. C. O.s in starched khaki, to be taught how to look, act and think like Marines.

To mold "boots" (Navy lingo for recruits) into the indefinable likeness of a Marine takes hard work on a rigid regimen; close order drill, combat exercises, firing on the range that goes with every Marine camp, endless heckling by N. C. O.s until the recruits learn to keep their eyes front, their chins in, their chests out. (Because in early days Marines wore high leather stocks that kept their heads up, sailors nicknamed them "leathernecks.") To mold a boot into the traditions of the Corps, to fire him with the conviction that a Marine is better than any other fighting man, requires an equally set course. Corps history is part of the training. A young Marine hears it everywhere, in lectures by N. C. O.s and officers. in yarns spun by oldtimers after retreat--yarns of Belleau Wood and the Argonne.

of shipboard service in the seven seas, of fighting in Haiti and Nicaragua, of duty in Samoa and Shanghai. He reads that history in campaign ribbons on oldtimers' blouses, in battle streamers on the regimental flags, in the Corps motto, "Semper Fidelis." He is first repelled, then fascinated by the shout of a sweating sergeant to his bleeding, hesitant platoon at Chateau-Thierry: "Come on, you -- , do you want to live forever?" When a detachment shoves off for service on a foreign shore, oldtimers who have been left out--both officers and men--pack their duffle and carry it down to the station or dock, hoping that someone may have to drop out at the last minute.

In such an atmosphere the Corps becomes, to a likely recruit, a sort of religion.

For, more than any other U. S. fighting man, the Marine is a professional. He does not mind being called a mercenary. Much of the Corps' fighting has been done while the nation was at peace. Without the thrust of wartime patriotism and the applause of the folks at home, Marines have gone thirsty and lousy, won medals, died. Today a whole regiment camps in Shanghai, the hottest spot in the troubled Orient, where a sergeant's blunder might throw the nation into war with Japan. In such spots, the Marine Corps' mercenaries do the job as they have been taught to do it. Their reward will be another campaign ribbon to pin on the breast of their blue tunics.

Marine Corps humor is also traditional, and the items fit for print are oddly in the Punch tradition, generally told with an air of we-were-gathered-over-the-cigars-and-claret. Once the Corps adopts a joke or limerick, its form is rarely changed, hangs on through generations. Typical toast:

Here's to Colonel T. M. Wood, He took a drink whenever he could, But be it distinctly understood, That the drinks were never on T. M.

Wood.

"To the shores of Tripoli." The Marine Corps is essentially a soldier outfit, but it is part of the Navy. That fact explains both the length and the breadth of its service. Since 1775 the Corps has served from Sumatra (against pirates in 1832) to Ethiopia (1903); from the Falkland Is-the Dominican Republic and Haiti, "intervened" again & again in Nicaragua. In World War I Marines fired the first U. S.

shot, a rifle bullet across the bow of a German cutter in the harbor of Guam.

World War I raised the Marine Corps' strength to 75,101 officers and men, put one of its brigades (Fifth and Sixth regiments, Sixth machine-gun battalion) in front-line service, where 8,211 Marines won more than 2,500 medals, suffered casualties of 108% (made up by replacements).

Many a Marine post can boast a Marine with the white-starred blue ribbon of the Congressional Medal of Honor (the U. S.

No. i honor for fighting men) on his chest. The station at Quantico (Va.) has two such men: Major Herman Hanneken, who got his medal for killing notorious Haitian Bandit Charlemagne Peralte, and Major Christian Schilt, who won his for landing his airplane ten times in the bullet-swept street of Quilali, Nicaragua, to bring in medical supplies and evacuate wounded.

Today the Corps is girding itself for what may come. It has its eye particularly peeled for the Caribbean. At Guantanamo Bay, 3,600 officers and men of the Fleet Marine Force last week waited and trained.

Fortnight ago Tommy Holcomb signed an order (sent down from Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox) for the organization of the first full divisions in Marine Corps history, two outfits especially designed for swift thrusts into troubled areas. They are "triangular," like the Army's streamlined divisions: three regiments of heavily armed infantry, three battalions of 75-mm. pack howitzers, one of 1555, and 72 tanks.

Fastest conveyances of the 1940 Marines will be six Navy "four-piper" destroyers, refitted to crowd 200 men below decks for a run at 30 knots. This fleet will transport a force closely patterned on the German combat teams--1,000-1,200 men with rapid-fire infantry weapons, artillery, tanks, engineer equipment. If trouble starts in the Caribbean, the Marines hope to get there first with the most firepower, have the situation well in hand, etc.

If trouble big or small breaks out elsewhere, Marines are just as likely to be on the job first, because the Corps has a detachment on every battleship and aircraft carrier, all the heavy cruisers (the newer light cruisers), some other Navy craft. In the old Navy, Marines not only manned the tops (and sometimes the guns) but policed the ship. Because they knew no friends when rules were broken, often brought up sailormen for flogging and imprisonment, they were something less than popular.

Today, in a model Navy where none of the old brutality is left, the Marine's police duty is little more than nominal.

Aboard ship he helps man the secondary and anti-aircraft batteries, acts as orderly, sometimes (as on the U. S. S. Pennsyl-tinguished marksman (a sort of super-expert) below the ribbons of the Navy Cross, Legion of Honor and other decorations. Most of them he won as a battalion commander in the Marine Brigade of the A. E. F.

Weekends he and Mrs. Holcomb (daughter of the late Rear Admiral Richardson Clover) drop down the Potomac in their 50-foot yacht Slow Boat, are sometimes called back for official business by a message carried down river by Marine Corps plane. On office days Tommy Holcomb goes home at 4:30 to the Commandant's quarters at Eighth and G Streets Southeast, alongside the Marine Barracks, where Commandants have lived in unbroken succession since the house was built in 1805. Quaint, spacious, fitted with authentic reproductions of its original furnishings, the house is also the centerpiece of one of the Corps' favorite yarns.

Colonel Archibald Henderson, fifth Commandant, lived there for 39 years, got so used to the place that he forgot it was Government property, solemnly willed it to his son.

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