Heirs to a storied past and glamorized as modern-day knights, the Marine Corps—the elite fighting force in America's military—in fact has not always been so highly regarded. As Jack Shulimson shows, only a century ago the Corps' identity and existence were much in question. Although the Marines were formally established by Congress in 1798 and subsequently distinguished themselves fighting on the Barbary Coast, their essential mission and identity remained unclear throughout most of the nineteenth century. But amid the crosscurrents of industrialization, technological change, professionalization, and reform that emerged in Gilded Age America, the Corps underwent a gradual transformation that ultimately secured its significant and enduring military role. In this enlightening study, Shulimson argues that the Marine Corps officers' inextricable ties to the Navy both hampered and aided their attempt to define their own special jurisdiction and professional identity. Often treated like a poor relation, the Marine officers frequently found themselves in direct competition with their counterparts in the Navy and at times the object of the latter's scorn. Shulimson reveals the processes, politics, and personalities that converged to create these tense and sometimes embattled relations, but he goes on to show how Marine officers (with the Navy's blessing) eventually transcended their second-class role.

The planning that allowed for the successful amphibious landings at the end of World War II actually began during the 1880s as the Marine Corps sought to define its role in the new Steel Navy. Officers braved skepticism, indifference and outright opposition to develop an amphibious warfare doctrine, with each service contributing. From the 1898 war with Spain through the disastrous 1915 Australian landing to the successful World War II assaults in the Pacific and northwest France, this chronological history explores the successes and failures pivotal to the concept of amphibious warfare through the lives and careers of fourteen officers instrumental to its development. Profiles include General George S. Patton, Jr.; Rear Admiral Walter C. Ansel, USN; Lieutenant General John A. Lejeune, USMC; Admiral William Sims, USN; and Colonel Robert W. Huntington, USMC.

What was it that transformed the United States Marine Corps from a quasi-constabulary in 1861 to one of the world's elite fighting forces by 1918? As there was nothing terribly unusual about the Corps' organization or bureaucracy, the only conclusion left is that it must have been its extraordinary people. The Civil War attracted to the USMC a handful of young men who were natural leaders. These men then trained another cohort of talented, tenacious leaders, who, in turn, molded the men who led the Marine Corps into the twentieth century. Many of their names have faded in the brighter lights of the campaigns in the Pacific, Korea, and Vietnam, but without men like Huntington, Cochrane, and Myers, there wouldn't have been Puller, Edson, or Pace in later years. Author Anne Cipriano Venzon selected ten men whose skills and leadership clearly contributed to the formation of the ethos, which became the modern Marine Corps. By examining each man's strengths and weaknesses, the continuum of leadership from the earliest days of the Corps becomes very clear for the reader. Based on extensive research, most of it in little-used primary documents, the biographies of the ten men featured in Leaders of Men look both at the men and their role in various engagements and events. From Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and the search for the Alabama during the Civil War to the Battle of Belleau Wood and "peacekeeping" missions in China in the 1920s, the examination of these careers will give readers a better understanding of what it means to be a Marine.

Preparing for Victory explains how and why Commandant Thomas Holcomb successfully supervised the dramatic expansion of the Marine Corps from 18,000 officers and men in 1936 to 385,000 in 1943. Not only did Holcomb leave the Corps much larger, but he also helped establish it as the United States’ premier amphibious assault force and a major contributor to victory over Japan. Despite Holcomb’s successes, he has been ignored or given short shrift in most histories of the Marine Corps. No book-length study of his commandancy exists until now. Drawing on a wide range of printed and archival sources, my book contends that Holcomb expertly guided the Corps’ preparations for war during the last years of the Great Depression and then provided his “Leathernecks” with astute direction during the first harrowing twenty-five months of World War II. When measured with principles of organization theory and leadership studies, Holcomb’s abilities and achievements match those of such outstanding American military managers as Dwight D. Eisenhower, Chester W. Nimitz, and George C. Marshall. Like these unassuming yet efficient officers, Holcomb shied away from the limelight and therefore never garnered the attention that “Chesty” Puller or “Howlin’ Mad” Smith have. This book fills a void and tells the story of one of the key leaders in World War II. More than any other marine, Holcomb molded his Corps into the modern force-in-readiness that would eventually help fight the Cold War and the Global War on Terror.

Joseph Arthur Simon’s The Greatest of All Leathernecks is the first comprehensive biography of John Archer Lejeune (1867–1942), a Louisiana native and the most innovative and influential leader of the United States Marine Corps in the twentieth century. As commandant of the Marine Corps from 1920 to 1929, Lejeune reorganized, revitalized, and modernized the force by developing its new and permanent mission of amphibious assault. Before that transformation, the corps was a constabulary infantry force used mainly to protect American business interests in the Caribbean, a mission that did not place it as a significant contributor to the United States defense establishment. The son of a plantation owner from Pointe Coupee Parish, Lejeune enrolled at Louisiana State University in 1881, aged fourteen. Three years later, he entered the U.S. Naval Academy, afterward serving for two years at sea as a midshipman. In 1890, he transferred to the Marines, where he ascended quickly in rank. During the Spanish-American War, Lejeune commanded and landed Marines at San Juan, Puerto Rico, to rescue American sympathizers who had been attacked by Spanish troops. A few years later, he arrived with a battalion of Marines at the Isthmus of Panama—part of Colombia at the time—securing it for Panama and making possible the construction of the Panama Canal by the United States. He went on to lead Marine expeditions to Cuba and Veracruz, Mexico. During World War I, Lejeune was promoted to major general and given command of an entire U.S. Army division. After the war, Lejeune became commandant of the Marine Corps, a role he used to develop its new mission of amphibious assault, transforming the corps from an ancillary component of the U.S. military into a vibrant and essential branch. He also created the Marine Corps Reserve, oversaw the corps’s initial use of aviation, and founded the Marine Corps Schools, the intellectual planning center of the corps that currently exists as the Marine Corps University. As Simon masterfully illustrates, the mission and value of the corps today spring largely from the efforts and vision of Lejeune.

Over the Beach, written by historian and retired Army Colonel Donald W. Boose Jr., is the definitive history of the extensive but little known US Army amphibious operations during the Korean War, 1950-1953. Building on its extensive experience in World War II, the Army conducted three major landing operations during the war, including the assault at Inchon in September 1950. After the massive Chinese attacks two months later the Army executed a series of amphibious withdrawals as it fell back to more defensible positions farther down the peninsula. Throughout the war the Army also conducted a number of massive and complex over-the-shore logistical operations, as well as several amphibious special operations along the Korean littoral. Colonel Boose's work, commissioned by DAMO-ODG, Operations and Technology Office, provides the historical context for any subsequent amphibious operations on the Korean peninsula. As such, this thought-provoking study may provide insights to modern planners crafting future joint or combined operations in that part of the world. -- Publisher's Description.

For more than half of its existence, members of the Marine Corps largely self-identified as soldiers. It did not yet mean something distinct to be a Marine, either to themselves or to the public at large. As neither a land-based organization like the Army nor an entirely sea-based one like the Navy, the Corps' missions overlapped with both institutions. This work argues that the Marine Corps could not and would not settle on a mission, and therefore it turned to an image to ensure its institutional survival. The process by which a maligned group of nineteenth-century naval policemen began to consider themselves to be elite warriors benefited from the active engagement of Marine officers with the Corps' historical record as justification for its very being. Rather than look forward and actively seek out a mission that could secure their existence, late nineteenth-century Marines looked backward and embraced the past. They began to justify their existence by invoking their institutional traditions, their many martial engagements, and their claim to be the nation's oldest and proudest military institution. This led them to celebrate themselves as superior to soldiers and sailors. Although there are countless works on this hallowed fighting force, How the Few Became the Proud is the first to explore how the Marine Corps crafted such powerful myths.

Traces the birth and evolution of America's elite military fighting units and general public's changing perception of them