Semper Fighting

MOST PEOPLE HOLD STRONG OPINIONS about the United States Marine Corps. That can be both good news and bad news for anyone writing on the subject. The good news is that there seems to be a virtually inexhaustible market for books about the Marine Corps. The bad news is that any approach the author takes will inevitably run afoul of many readers’ views.

For similar reasons, writing an objective review of American Spartans is also a challenging assignment, particularly for someone whose career spanned roughly half the period covered by the book, and who served with many of the characters described in the narrative.

Having revealed my potential bias, I must first give James Warren credit for staying true to his theme of likening U.S. Marines to the ancient Spartans. The dictionary gives several meanings for the term Spartan, including self-disciplined, frugal, and courageous in the face of pain, danger, or adversity. American Spartans uses selected battles and campaigns to illustrate how those same Spartan qualities have characterized the modern Marine Corps. The account is largely favorable, but the author does not gloss over details such as racial incidents, drug use, and other discipline problems that plagued the Corps in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, a period the author calls the “abyss.”

For a short work, the author does a good job of covering not only the Marines’ well-known combat record, but the administrative battles as well, such as the fight following World War II to retain a viable Marine Corps in the face of efforts by President Harry Truman to relegate the Marines to a largely ceremonial role. One of the book’s few serious omissions involves its treatment of the end of the Vietnam war.

Although the author mentions that Marines remained in Vietnam as advisers to the Vietnamese Marine Corps after U.S. Marine combat units departed in 1971, he largely ignores the contribution of the advisory effort to the war in general. As a result, he jumps directly from the departure of the last American combat units in 1973 to the final North Vietnamese offensive in the spring of 1975 that ended the war with a decisive Communist victory.

Also missing from this account is any description of the North Vietnamese “Easter Offensive” of 1972 in which Vietnamese Marines, assisted by U.S. Marine advisers, played a major role in defeating the North Vietnamese attack.

While emphasizing the combat prowess of Marines, American Spartans does not neglect other qualities that have characterized the modern Marine Corps. One is the Spartan quality of frugality. Marines take great pride in their ability to provide a disproportionate amount of the nation’s combat power for the portion of the defense budget that they receive.

Another characteristic that the author discusses is that of innovation. Given the image that most Americans have of Marines, many are surprised to learn that the Corps has been the driving force behind many important developments in modern warfare, such as amphibious operations, close air support, helicopter operations, maritime prepositioning, and counterinsurgency doctrine. Warren not only covers those innovations, but also ties them into his Spartan thesis by noting that “the U.S. Marine Corps, because it is the smallest service and because it has always had to fight for its place at the table, has been better at adapting than its sister services.”

Another positive aspect of American Spartans is its maps: Each chapter has at least one, and although the scale of the maps is not always adequate to allow the reader to follow the battles described in detail, the map coverage is better than in many military books being published today.

Although Warren has done a good job of dealing with the broad scope of Marine Corps history since Iwo Jima in a balanced way, his grasp of the details leaves a lot to be desired. Throughout the book there are a significant number of generally minor, but annoying, errors. Many are technical in nature, and often involve weapons. His very first sentence provides an example: “The tranquil silence of a Pacific Ocean dawn is shattered by the percussion of the big guns of a huge American naval armada–battleships, cruisers, destroyers–joined by a host of LSTs (Landing Ships, Tank) that had been converted to rocket-and mortar-firing gunboats.”

The LST was one of the great amphibious innovations of World War II and a genuine workhorse during that conflict. Sixty-three LSTs took part in the landing at Iwo Jima, but not in the role described above. The mortar and rocket craft employed there were smaller landing craft, LCS (L), Landing Craft Support (Large), a British innovation, and LCI (R) and LCI (M), rocket and mortar craft that had been converted from Landing Craft, Infantry (LCI).

Another example of this type of error is taken from the author’s description of the breakout of the 1st Marine Division from the Chosin Reservoir during the Korean war. In describing the actions of a Marine artillery unit in repelling a Chinese attack, Warren notes that “the unit’s howitzers were used as direct-fire weapons, blasting flachette [sic] rounds at Chinese soldiers as close as forty yards away.” The official Marine history of the Chosin Reservoir operation describes this incident, but doesn’t tell what type of ammunition was used. Other accounts mention white phosphorous, high explosive, antitank, and even star clusters.

One thing is certain, however: They didn’t use flechette rounds. That type of ammunition, containing thousands of small, dart-like flechettes, was developed by the Army in the late 1950s and was not employed in combat until 1966 in Vietnam.

Other errors involve the interpretation of facts, such as the assertion that “the Marines attributed the failure of the British at Gallipoli largely to the lack of an amphibious vehicle that could cross from sea to shore and keep moving inland, thereby reducing congestion of the beach and keeping a steady flow of supplies to the front lines.”

The problems that caused the British and French to fail at Gallipoli ranged from the strategic to the tactical level, and covered almost all aspects of amphibious warfare. Between the two world wars, the Marine Corps studied Gallipoli in great detail, with the objective of solving the problems that caused many military experts to conclude that modern weapons had made opposed landings too costly to be feasible.

The idea that the failure at Gallipoli could be attributed “largely” to the lack of an amphibian landing vehicle is an odd one. In describing the development of amphibious warfare between the wars, Warren mentions two manuals that resulted directly from the study of Gallipoli, The Tentative Manual for Landing Operations and Landing Operations Doctrine, United States Navy. Both of those discuss the use of landing boats in detail, but neither even mentions the idea of an amphibian vehicle that could operate on land as well as in the water. Unfortunately, no indication is given of the source for this assertion.

Many readers will probably consider such criticism to be overly technical nit-picking. If the errors were limited to the ones I have described, I would agree. Unfortunately, the errors are numerous enough to indicate a superficial knowledge of the material and a lack of rigorous research. The general reader who is looking for a popular history that accurately captures the essence of the U.S. Marine Corps will find that American Spartans fits that bill. Knowledgeable students of military history should look elsewhere.

Theodore L. Gatchel is a colonel, U.S. Marine Corps (ret.), and professor of Joint Military Operations at the Naval War College. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Naval War College, U.S. Navy, or Department of Defense.