By Water Beneath the Walls

Because nothing else at Tarawa had made so terrible an impression as the reef, nothing else had so proved its value as the LVTs, a triumph dimmed only by their scant armor, slow speed, and the Navy’s reluctance to bring extras. As a result, the solution for future reefs, according to the 2nd Marine Division’s after-action report, was summed up in t

In January 1942, two memoranda arrived on Holcomb’s desk within a week of each other suggesting the creation of Marine Corps commandos. The first was from his superior, Admiral Ernest J. King, the recently appointed Chief of Naval Operations. As enamored with defense as he was with temperance—“When they get in trouble they send for the sons-of-bitc

Admiral King “listened with utmost enthusiasm,” wrote Captain James Doyle, Turner’s operations officer, when describing the UDT efforts at Flintlock. “Excellent,” King interrupted in the middle of Doyle’s briefing, “that business of the hydrographic survey at the first possible moment is a pet hobby of mine.” For Turner, however, a unit capable of

Fresh from the first successful ground reconnaissance in the Central Pacific Theater, General Smith sent forth his VAC Recon Company like the twelve spies into Canaan. At Majuro Atoll, one of the VAC Recon platoon commanders, Lieutenant Harvey Weeks—a former Yale wrestler, former attorney, and former enlisted man—captured the Japanese commander wit

Chapter 1 The Reluctant Creation and Violent Demise of the Navy’s First Commandos, the Marine Corps Raiders

As the Navy was pressuring the Marine Corps’ planners to create island raiders and the Army was begrudgingly partnering with the Navy to create Scouts and Raiders for marking beaches but not really raiding anything beyond the high-water mark, another unit had already started performing the actual mission of the commando raid. Because that unit wasn

So, how did this happen? How did the US Navy create a unit whose operational center of gravity is not only directed at a mission performed on the 29 percent of the earth’s surface that its ships cannot touch, but one so fraught with difficulties that most units of the Army and Marine Corps—the US military’s traditional tenants of its land operation

Except for some magnificent excursions into the deserts of Libya and up the slopes of Chapultepec, the US Marine Corps—from the American Revolution to the American Civil War—was mostly an indentured adjunct of the blue-water American Navy. In peace, a ramrod insurance against mutiny; in battle, mast-clinging marksmen intended to replicate Admiral N

Because the Recon Marines had not yet arrived, the man who read Joy’s order was technically at liberty to do nothing but wait. Yet because the reader was James Doyle—a man as thin as a cadaver and just as warm—he did no such thing.