U.S. Marine Corps

Branch of the U.S. armed services specializing in amphibious and combined land–sea–air operations. Marines, historically defined as soldiers who are transported by sea but fight on land, have a long combat history. Ancient navies often carried significant land forces into battle. For example, in the second century BCE, the Romans conquered their longtime rival Carthage with a seaborne invasion. The Dark Ages following the fall of the Roman Empire was a time of little maritime activity in Europe, and marines disappeared as a significant military force for several hundred years. However, expanded naval activity during the Age of Exploration in the 16th and 17th centuries revived the marines as part of European military forces.

History of the U.S. Marines

By the time of the American Revolution in the late 18th century, all of the world's major navies included marine detachments. The U.S. Marines trace their history to November 15, 1775, when the Continental Congress decided to create two battalions of marines to add to the colonies' existing military forces. These two battalions were never actually formed, due primarily to a shortage of manpower, but small bands of U.S. marines did see action in the Bahamas. By the end of the war, marines had seen action on both land and sea, but their numbers remained small and they were a relatively insignificant part of the U.S. armed forces.

In 1798, the U.S. Congress passed an act to attach a Marine Corps of 33 officers and 848 soldiers to the U.S. Navy. One of the notable early missions undertaken by the new U.S. Marine Corps was an engagement with Barbary Coast pirates who had been threatening U.S. shipping interests in the Mediterranean Sea. After landing on the coast of North Africa and crossing the Libyan Desert, the Marines captured the city of Derna in Tripoli. This, however, was one of the few significant military roles the marines played in early U.S. history.

Though originally the marines focused on hand-to-hand combat aboard ship, due to the changing nature of technology, by the second half of the 19th century the U.S. Marine Corps began to train in amphibious warfare. Marine Corps participation in U.S. military campaigns increased steadily throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries. During the Spanish-American War [Page 777]of 1898, the corps played a larger role than it had in previous conflicts, attacking both Manila Bay in the Philippines and Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. President Theodore Roosevelt also frequently used the U.S. Marines to project U.S. power in Latin America during the early 1900s.

Although the United States entered World War I quite late in the conflict, the marines played a part in the Allied victory over Germany. The most notable example of the marine contribution was their reinforcement of the French troops at the Bois de Belleau against a major German advance. It was reportedly during this engagement that Marine Corps captain Lloyd Williams uttered the famous line, “Retreat, hell! We just got here!” During World War II, the corps, with its training in amphibious assaults, played a decisive role in the fighting in the Pacific against the Japanese. From 1942 to 1945, the marines fought a series of brutal and costly battles against Japanese island fortresses such as Guadalcanal, Wake, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. In the battle for the small island of Iwo Jima off the coast of Japan, 23,000 out of the 60,000 marines who landed on the island were killed or wounded. Fighting against Japanese forces that refused to surrender even in the face of overwhelming odds, the marines proved victorious despite suffering extremely high casualties.

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