The Old Breed

From a crumbling French trench, 2nd Lieut. Clifton Bledsoe Gates reported, during 1918's battle of Soissons: "I have only two men left out of my company and 20 out of other companies. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here, as we are swept by machine-gun fire and a constant artillery barrage is upon us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." He was hit by a bullet in the shoulder and by a shell fragment in the knee; most of his clothes were torn off; but clad chiefly in helmet and pistol belt, he held.

Cliff Gates, an athletic Tennessean with cool blue eyes, was taking his bar exam in 1917 when favorable word came on his application for a Marine Corps commission; he walked out of the exam hall and never went back. In France his company of the 6th Marines suffered more casualties than any other American outfit (131 men killed, 491 wounded). He was wounded seven times. It was, he said dryly, "a life of hardship and hazard," but he wanted no other. He liked the work: fighting.

In 37 years, from Soissons to Shanghai, Gates earned 29 decorations and four stars along with his scars. He fought through ten campaigns, commanded every unit from platoon (45 men) to division (20,000) in combat, and led the first big Marine victory in the Pacific (on Guadalcanal, where his 1st Marine Regiment killed 1,000 Japanese overnight on the Tenaru River). Perhaps his hardest fight came after the war, when President Truman and Pentagon brass tried to make the Marines a lightweight police force.

As the corps' 19th Commandant (1948-52), General Gates did battle. The turning point was Truman's letter denouncing the Marine "propaganda machine"; Gates took Truman's autographed picture down from his wall, and thousands of ex-marines leaped to the defense of the corps. Soon afterwards the President formally apologized to Gates, and the Marines' survival was assured. His Commandant's term at an end, Cliff Gates served out his time as chief of the Marine Corps Schools at Quantico, Va. This week old (60) Leatherneck Gates, D.S.C., Navy Cross, D.S.M., Legion of Merit, Silver Star, was retired with a 17-gun salute and an elaborate ceremony. "Tripe," hard-boiled Cliff Gates called it, blinking down the mist in his eyes. The country needs toughening up, he said, and the Marine Corps needs "tough fighters." After all, "that's what we're for."

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