Happy 250th Birthday to the Few, the Proud, the Marines

America’s unique land, air, and sea force has a glorious history, and artists have taken note.

I revere the United States Marines, the fearless force whose 250th birthday was on November 10. I know, I’m late, but writing between the actual date, Veterans Day, and Thanksgiving works, too. We Americans owe our freedoms to many factors — including tradition, heritage, our own vigilance as citizens, and even our lawyers and teachers — but think of the battles in which the Marines fought bravely and decisively. It’s more than from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. Think about Washington crossing the Delaware, the Battle of Princeton, the Battle of New Orleans, and Belleau Wood in 1918, where Germans called them “Teufel Hunden,” or Devil Dogs, for their fearlessness and terrifyingly good aim.

Marines were the backbone of the American assault on dozens of islands in the Pacific in World II and were there to raise the flag on Iwo Jima, leading to one of photography’s most rousing and perfectly composed scenes of war; plus Inchon; horrible, heroic fighting in Vietnam; Afghanistan; and Iraq — twice. Each put thousands of Marine boots on the ground. “Semper fi,” short for “Semper fidelis,” or “Always faithful,” is the Marines’ famous motto. It means loyalty to God, country, the corps and one another — everyone knows this, since the Marines are among the anchors of American history and icons in the story of what makes us American.

What a history to commemorate, and what a subject for art. In painting and prints, music, recruitment posters, movies, and official war photography, the Marines make indelible, awesome subjects.

Yes, the Marines are part of the Department of the Navy, but they operate as a separate, distinct, hybrid force trained to fight on land and at sea. On November 10, 1775, the Continental Congress created two battalions of the Navy’s infantry arm that could make amphibious assaults, often in raids of British supply hubs, and clear the decks of enemy ships with musket fire. Their first amphibious landing, in 1776, was the Battle of Nassau in the Bahamas, taken without firing a shot. But the Battle of Princeton in 1777 was their first big test. John Trumbull’s Death of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton, from the late 1780s, doesn’t depict Marines, who were still an amorphous group; it focuses instead on the mortally wounded Mercer, General Washington on horseback, and the other British and American luminaries there, but Marines were on the scene shedding blood.

The Attack on Derna, by Charles Waterhouse, might have been painted in 1990, but it’s the best depiction of what happened in 1805, and it’s why we got “the shores of Tripoli” line in the Marine hymn. The attack, led mostly by Marines, was pivotal in the American subjugation of the Barbary pirates in the first Barbary War. It followed a 500-miles Marine trek westward across the desert from Alexandria, Egypt. It was America’s first land battle in a foreign country and our first entanglement with Arabs. Presley O’Bannon, a Marine first lieutenant, is arguably the corps’ first hero. He led a force of Marines, Bedouins, Greek mercenaries, and cannoneers in savage city combat. The sultan of Derna gave O’Bannon a Mameluke sword, which has been copied countless times and is part of Marine regalia.

Waterhouse (1924–2013) is a very good artist illustrator trained in the Brandywine tradition of romantic realism practiced by N. C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle. He was also a Marine badly wounded in the first wave attack on Iwo Jima in WWII, a civilian war artist for three tours in Vietnam, and, starting in the 1970s, the official Marine artist-in-residence. He painted hundreds of scenes of Marine history and portraits of Marines, nearly all at the National Marine Corps Museum in Quantico in Virginia.

By the Derna triumph, the Marines had the official status of a corps via an act of Congress in 1798 and an official uniform. The first incarnation of Marine wear was a green coat with white lapels, cuffs, and lining — green cloth was plentiful. But by Derna, they’d gone blue, edged in red. Since then, uniforms evolved to include light-blue trousers with a scarlet stripe down the seams, different types of hats, swagger sticks, service uniforms that are green, camouflage when needed, and light-weight fabrics for Marines in hot climates. Revolutionary War Marines wore light leather collars to protect against sword slashes. From this comes the moniker “leatherneck.”

Most Americans know the core characteristics of World War I recruitment posters: bright, bold, and direct. I Want You for the U.S. Army, with Uncle Sam pointing his finger at the viewer, is just about universally known, but there were hundreds of designs by dozens of artists. Some posters, used for both recruitment and fundraising, highlighted the drowning of women and children on the Lusitania, and the scary gorilla holding a bloody club in one paw and a half-naked, half-dead woman in the other. “Teufel Hunden,” the Devil Dog metaphor, was so well known in America that it could be rendered in German, with the Marine mascot, a bulldog, chasing a dachshund wearing a spiked Prussian helmet known as a a Pickelhaube.

James Montgomery Flagg, who created the image of Uncle Sam in the I Want You poster, produced an image of a happy Marine riding backwards on a jaguar or leopard. Travel? Adventure? Answer? Join the Marines promises exciting opportunities abroad that don’t involve trench warfare. Tell That to the Marines, another Flagg poster, is an “I’m mad as hell” image and meant to suggest that Marines aren’t gullible. It’s a line that Marine recruiters still use. It’s a badass image, to be sure, and, along with “Teufel Hunden” presents the Marines as the tough, take-no-prisoners type. Not that sailors in the Navy or soldiers in the Army are squishes, but “Retreat? Hell, we just got here” is Marine religion.

It wasn’t until World War II that frontline press photography developed as a staple of war news. Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, was snapped by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal (1911–2006) on February 23, 1945. Six Marines from the Fifth Marine Division do the heavy lifting atop Mount Suribachi. Thousands of publications printed it, and it won for Rosenthal a Pulitzer Prize at a time when the award still had credibility. The image appeared on millions of war-bond-drive ephemera.

Iwo Jima is a trapezoid-shaped volcanic island, not particularly scenic, but the Japanese used it for early-warning sightings of American bombers heading to the mainland. Enemy troops were in pillboxes, tunnels, and bunkers. Fighting was brutal, with Marines using flamethrowers and grenades to smoke out the Japanese and then endure gunfire. Four days after the Marines landed, they took Suribachi, the island’s highest point. There was more fighting, during which three of the six Marines who had raised the flag died.

The scene wasn’t posed, as some suggested, given its balanced, seemingly choreographed look, and it was the second flag-raising, the first using a much smaller, less visible flag, the second more likely to boost morale and demoralize the enemy. Rosenthal shot it in an instant, glimpsing a large flag-raising and not knowing whether he’d gotten a good image, much less a great one. It has both symmetry and irregularity and reminds me of the Laocoön, the Hellenistic sculpture of a Trojan priest and his two sons tortured by serpents the gods sent after Laocoön warned his city not to admit the Trojan horse, thereby opposing the will of the gods who favored the Greeks during the Trojan War. The sculpture is an effective depiction of agony, much as Rosenthal’s image evokes triumph, heroism, and team spirit. The flag makes for a strong diagonal and, along with the positions of the men, conveys dynamic movement. Captured a second earlier, the flag would have been too low; a second later, too high.

The history of official American war photography begins in the Civil War with Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner, both commissioned by generals and both ingeniously using a mobile studio and darkroom close to the front. The American military didn’t dive into official war art until World War II, with the Marines perfecting it from the days of the Vietnam War to the disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Marine website is the best repository of corps-sponsored photography, with bravery, endurance, danger, exceptional training, duty, and loyalty visible in hundreds of forms and situations. This isn’t calendar art, but tough art that gives us a “you are there” feeling, as do the best illustrations and documentary photography. Yes, some artworks are lighter than others, and some are ethereal, but many convey pure grit. I wouldn’t have survived the crew-cut phase of Marine training, so I can look at these with awe.

The National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico is big — 240,000 square feet — and in a building that opened in 2006. There’s no admission charge, and it’s well worth a visit, though it’s been closed for the past six weeks because of the useless, extreme, and disruptive Schumer Shutdown. Its new home echoes in an abstract way Rosenthal’s Iwo Jima photograph, which also inspired the official Marine monument in Arlington bordering on Arlington National Cemetery.

It’s a comprehensive, surprisingly stirring history museum covering the corps from the Revolution to today, thanks to a new wing that opened a year ago that covers the Marine barracks bombing in 1983 in Beirut, Lebanon; Desert Storm; and the Afghan and Iraq calamities. It’s a shame the museum was closed for its 250th birthday.

The high points for me on my one and only visit there a couple of years ago were the Leatherneck Gallery, which presents basics like the corps’ charge to fight on land and sea and, since World War I, in the air; a jalopy of a plane from the Banana Wars of the 1920s; a sleek but devastating Corsair from World War II; and an amphibious beach tractor to remove enemy embankments, showing vividly how courage and firepower work together. There’s a gallery on boot camp and drill instructors. This fortified my judgment years ago that the Marine Corps wasn’t for me, hothouse flower that I am. Almost 500,000 Marines served in the Vietnam War, and 13,000 died. The Vietnam gallery was the most moving and the saddest given the war’s litany of government lies and its catastrophic end. A reimagination of house-to-house fighting in Hue, in South Vietnam, must be instructive to young people. There are hundreds of artifacts, among them a blood-encrusted war medal and the Suribachi flag.

There’s also a section of Medal of Honor awardees. A close Marine friend who served in the 1950s told me that every Marine learns in boot camp about John Basilone, a Medal of Honor winner badly wounded at Guadalcanal, in the South Pacific. He demanded to return to action, where he was later killed. At Guadalcanal, he commanded a machine gun section beleaguered by Japanese attacks until only Basilone and a fellow Marine were left. He fought through enemy lines to get resupplied but, when that ammo ran low, he fought with a pistol and machete. At Iwo Jima, he rescued a Marine tank trapped in a minefield and then died trying the capture an airfield.

Then there’s Chesty Puller, who fought guerrillas in Haiti and Nicaragua in 1919 and again in the early 1930s. He was at it again in World War II, fighting like a tiger on Guadalcanal and, also in the South Pacific, Peleliu, which was a bloodbath for the Marines. He fought in Korea, too. He’s the most decorated Marine in Corps history. He looks like a crusty hard ass.

Jack Lucas is the youngest-ever recipient of the Medal of Honor during World War II. He was awarded it at 17 for his heroism at Iwo Jima, where he threw himself on a Japanese grenade to protect two of his fellow Marines. He scrambled to bury it, but it exploded, severely injuring but not killing him.

I’m looking forward to visiting the museum next time I’m in the Swamp. It gets around 500,000 visitors a year, making it one of Virginia’s top draws.

I’m not a film critic, but there are dozens of good Marine movies from Guadalcanal Diary in 1943 to Full Metal Jacket in 1987 and the documentaries Combat Obscura (2018) and Once a Marine (2020). I’m not a music critic, either, but I have to note that John Philip Sousa was a Marine and the director of the Marine Band for years. His marches have Marine muscle and bravura.

My father was in the Navy during World War II, in the submarine service in the Pacific. My family’s military service goes back to the Revolutionary War and, for all I know, to Boudica’s revolt against the Roman Empire. Though never in the military, I feel gratitude and awe when I learn that someone’s a Marine, past or present, though I suspect that once a Marine, always a Marine. Happy 250th!