James V. Edmundson Lt. Gen. U.S. Air Force (Ret.) 813 Marbury Lane Longboat Key, Fla

Transcription

1 1 James V. Edmundson Lt. Gen. U.S. Air Force (Ret.) 813 Marbury Lane Longboat Key, Fla THE UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS Talk to the Kiwanis Club of the Sarasota Keys, 2 February 1995 As program chairman for the month of February, I was directed to line up speakers from the four services for the four Thursdays of the month. I succeeded in getting outstanding speakers from the Army, Navy and Air Force who, I m sure, will hold your attention during the following three weeks. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a Marine who could accept the job. This is hard to understand, because legend has it that the standard 8 man Marine Rifle Squad consists of four riflemen with their guns and four public relations types, with their notebooks and cameras. In spite of the Marine Corps noted ability at public relations, I drew a blank for today. Actually, I probably know as much about the Corps as most Marines do. During 36 years of service, I was in close contact with Marine Corps units on many occasions. In fact, in the South Pacific during the Guadalcanal operation, my Army Air Corps B-17 Squadron was attached to the First Marine Division, Reinforced. We were included in the Naval Presidential Unit Citation awarded to the First Division. Today, I am a member of the First Marine Division Association, and here is my bumper sticker to prove it! The United States Marine Corps is one of the oldest and most distinguished of our military branches. During the Revolutionary War days, when the Navy was composed of wooden ships and iron men, Marines were indispensable. They led war parties ashore and they did most of the fighting aboard ship when sailing vessels were locked together in mortal combat. The Marine Hymn begins, From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli. The Shores of Tripoli refers to the part the Marines played in subduing the Barbary Pirates on the north coast of Africa that is now Libya. The Halls of Montezuma recalls the several Marine occupations that took place in Central America. In the 1960s, I had an assignment that took me to Nicaragua for several weeks. You may recall that the Marines occupied Nicaragua for several years during the 1920s. I was amazed that once I got out of Managua and got up into the villages in the mountains, how warmly the Marines were remembered by the old folk. Old women would tell me about Sgt. Bill who lived with their families when they were little girls. They would ask me if I knew him. It s no wonder that the national pastime of Nicaragua is baseball, not bullfighting. The Marines taught them how to play ball. Our Marines occupied Haiti from 19 years, too, from 1915 to It s quite clear that the occupation was far from a roaring success, but that was not the fault of the Marines. They received some pretty stupid guidance and no support at all from Washington during those years. Even the Marines can t win them all.

2 2 Since the early days of ship-to-ship fighting by boarding parties, the Marines have expanded their role and their mission. They are the Navy s Army and they have their own small and dedicated Air Force. The Marines are the only one of our services that can fight their own joint war alone and unassisted, if it doesn t get too big. The Marine specialty is amphibious warfare. There is no question that they got a lot of practice at it in the Pacific during World War II. It is an anomaly that the most massive amphibious assault of all times, the Allied Invasion of the Normandy beaches on D-Day, was pulled off without the help of any Marines. It still upsets them. When the Department of Defense was established in 1947, there were three members on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the commanders of the Army, Navy and Air Force. The law specified that the Commandant of the Marine Corps would sit with them whenever they discussed matters of concern to the Marines, and he never missed a J.C.S. meeting. Needless to say, when the law was revised a few years later, the Marine Corps Commandant was included as a permanent member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Marines are a special breed. Their system of training recruits with specially selected Drill Instructors builds a sense of pride and esprit-de-corps into Marines that I have never seen duplicated by any other service, even my own. Talk to a retired Marine and you will soon learn the truth in the saying, Once a Marine, always a Marine. My first direct contact with Marines in a combat situation was during the Battle of Midway in June of The Jap codes had been broken. We knew they were going to try to take Midway. We had ample time to prepare ourselves. To the best of my memory, four Squadrons of B-17s, including my own, were moved from Hawaii to Midway to be part of the greeting committee. The Navy wasn t too happy to have us out there messing in their war but that s another story that I can tell you some day. On Midway, while waiting for the festivities to begin, I met a lot of Marine pilots. There were Marine fighter, dive bomber and torpedo bomber Squadrons on Midway and they were all flying ancient, castoff airplanes handed down to them by the Navy. Their attitude was typically Marine. They were philosophical about their airplanes, confident of their ability to fly them and fight with them. They accepted the fact that Marines would always get the dirty jobs, that was part of being a Marine and they were proud of it. They were nice guys and I was impressed by the attitude. They fought well, they took a lot of losses and when we left to fly back to Hawaii, they were still there. When I landed my B-17 at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal several months later, I met several of my friends from Midway. They had moved directly from Midway to Guadalcanal. This time they had newer airplanes. There were two Marine aviators I met on Guadalcanal that were special people. Although quite different, they were both superb pilots and natural leaders. One was Pappy Boyington, who commanded the Black Sheep Squadron and he became quite well known from his book, which was made into a movie, Baa-Baa Black Sheep. The other was Joe Foss. Joe went on to become a general in the Air National Guard, Governor of

3 South Dakota, Commissioner of Football, and a very good friend of Pete Brzica. 3 I want to digress for a moment to tell you about a group of Marines that I have never met, but would like to some day. On the 19 th of August 1942, just 4 days after the initial Marine landings on Guadalcanal, things were pretty quiet. My Crew and I were sleeping under the wings of our B-17 on the airfield at Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides, when our boss, Colonel Blondie Saunders woke us up early in the morning. I jumped out in a hurry, because he had Admiral McCain with him off his flagship in Sagun Channel. The Admiral had received a call for help from Guadalcanal. A group of Marines were on the beach at Lunga Point who were being shelled by a Jap warship. He came to Blondie to see what the B-17s could do and they came to wake us up because we had the only B-17 on the island that was in commission, fueled, bombed up and ready to go. It took us about 3 hours to get to Guadalcanal and, sure enough, there was what looked to us like a light cruiser, steaming back and forth shelling the shore. We had four 500- pound bombs and we bombed from 5,000 feet so he couldn t dodge. We released the 4 bombs in minimum train and got two hits just aft of the rear turret and a close-in near miss on each side. It started to burn and to spin in a very tight circle. Our near miss had damaged her steering gear. We were elated and saw some Marines on the beach that had been under fire, so, like a nut, I dove down and we made a pass along the beach waggling our wings. The beach was full of Marines who had watched our bombing and they were shouting and waving and jumping in the air as we flew by. We were running low of fuel and had to head back to Espiritu Santo. They guys on the beach continued to celebrate as the cruiser exploded and sank. Some day I would like to meet a Marine who had been on Lunga Point that day, when we flew by in our B-17. The Marines have put their special stamp on every war I had anything to do with. The Inchon landing in Korea was beautifully planned by General McArthur and perfectly executed by the Marines. They sealed off thousands of North Koreans and liberated Seoul. The courage with which they fought around the Chosin Reservoir after the Chinese entered the war and the bitter retreat through the snows of a frigid winter, badly outnumbered, wrote a chapter of American military history that will live forever. No wonder the Marines refer to the survivors of that battle as The Chosin Few. And Vietnam. There were many wars going on in Vietnam at the same time. There was the war up north, the war along the Ho Chi Min Trail, the jungle war in Laos and of course, the in-country war, which was limited to South Vietnam, south of the DMZ. This was the war in which our Army took part and so did the Marines. The Marines literally carved out a hunk of the in-country war and placed if off limits to anyone else. South Vietnam was divided into 4 Corps Areas, each commanded by a Vietnam Army Corps Commander. American support to this in-county war was massive.

4 In the 3 southern Corps Areas, ground fighting was an Army effort, supported by the air by the Air Force. But the northern Corps area Corps Area I was Marine country. The Marines fought the ground war and their air support came from Marine Air Units. It is a Marine tradition that Marine ground units can be supported ONLY by Marine air units. This concept was strictly held to in Vietnam. Air Force aircraft that strayed into Corps Area I would frequently return home full of holes. Corps Area I was referred to caustically by the Air Force as Indian Country. The war against Iraq was a big disappointment to the Marines. True, when the air war was taking place and ground operations were fairly static, the Marines had a narrow sector along the coast on the east flank south of Kuwait City. But on the 24 th of February, when the ground war kicked off, it was a massive Army flanking movement around Kuwait from the west. 4 There was a large Marine contingent, embarked in landing type craft that was itching to demonstrate their amphibious skills by landing behind the Iraqi forces on Bubiyan Island. But the Schwartzkopf plan called for this force to feint, tying down Iraqi units, but the ground war in Desert Storm was Army all the way and the Marine amphibious ability was never used. I would like to wind up this little talk about the Marines by reminding you that this month will mark the 50 th anniversary of the Battle of Iwo Jima. On the 19 th of February 1945, 60,000 Marines landed on the beaches of a tiny little volcanic island on the Northern Pacific. Four days later, the troops had scaled Mt. Suribachi and planted the American Flag. This bloody battle cost 6,000 lives. Iwo Jima was the costliest piece of real estate we captured during World War II, in terms of lives lost per square foot of land. It was also one of the most important campaigns of the war, yet few people are aware of the importance of Iwo Jima and why it was worth such a bloody price. We must remember that it was the combination of the B-29 bombing of the Japanese home islands and a Naval blockade that brought Japan to her knees without the need for a beachhead assault. Had we been forced to hit the beaches of Japan as we did the Normandy beaches on D-Day in Europe, the loss of life would be catastrophic well into the many hundreds of thousands maybe more. The B-29 campaign may have made the amphibious assault on Japan unnecessary, but the B-29 operation was not cut and dried. The 5 Wings of B-29s were based in the Marianas Islands Guam, Tinian and Saipan and these bases were 1,500 miles away from Tokyo. Directly on course half way between Guam and Tokyo was Iwo Jima. The taking of Iwo Jima assured the success of the B-29 effort, for four reasons. First, it denied the island to the Japanese. The Japanese Army had been using Iwo as a base for fighter planes to shoot down crippled B-29s on the long haul home from their targets. Too many bombers were being lost to Jap fighters going to and returning from their targets.

5 5 Second, it was a safe base where crippled B-29s could land that could never have made it back to the Marianas. My group alone had over 50 airplanes land at Iwo that otherwise would most probably have been lost. That s 500 of my troops that Iwo Jima saved. And I had only one out of the 21 B-29 groups. Iwo provided a safe haven for hundreds of B-29s and it saved the lives of thousands of airmen. Third, Iwo Jima, in our hands, served as a base for a force of American P-47s and P-51s which escorted B-29s up to Japan and back and gave them protection over their targets. After endless missions without escorts, it was a wonderful feeling to have some little friends along to keep the Zeros off our backs. And fourth, Iwo was used by B-29s as a staging base to hit targets on northern Honshu and on Hokkaido that would otherwise have been out of our reach. I staged to Sapporo once from Iwo Jima. So, while the capture of Iwo Jima was the toughest job American Marines have ever been asked to do, it also had the biggest payoff. There were millions of fighting men of all the services that were scheduled for and positioned to take part in the assault on Japan, against a determined and fanatical Kamikaze enemy. It would have been brutal. The island of Tinian, from which I flew, was being established by the Army as a hospital island, to receive the invasion casualties and stabilize their condition, before evacuating them to the States. There were five huge hospital Groups being set up. It was a massive effort and it recognized the number of casualties that would have been involved. There is no escaping the truth. Hundreds of thousands of Americans who survived the war owed their lives to the thousands of Marines who paid for the little island of Iwo Jima with their blood. This is a story that many people have never heard. It is a story that needs telling, as we approach the 50 th anniversary of the capture of Iwo Jima. We could probably have been able to find a Marine to tell the story better than I have been able to do. But we couldn t have found a Marine who believes it any more deeply than I do.