A CHANGED MAN
In February, 1933, Lewis was introduced to military society in Peking at the U. S. Legation: His commander pinned on his chest the star for the Navy Cross he had won in Nicaragua.
Less than a month later he took over the Horse Marines, the colorful symbol of American influence in North China, a fifty-man detachment of skilled riders mounted on fine Manchurian ponies. His boyhood riding had prepared him well; he was from the start one of the finest horsemen in the detachment.
One of his first lessons came from a close inspection of Japanese infantry in training; he began to understand the threat which was gnawing away at the Northern Chinese provinces in the bitter war to which Americans had paid so little attention.
Puller drove out with a friend to visit the Ming Tombs, some twenty miles away, and met a battalion of Japanese troops which had marched from the city. Puller retained a memory of the scene:
“It was freezing weather in March and our own Marines were indoors in the city. The Japanese were hung with belts such as we carried, with bayonets, but also had heavy marching gear with full ammunition belts—and on top of each pack was a bundle of firewood, for that barren country was picked clean of all fuel, even to the grass roots. When they passed us the uniforms of these soldiers were saturated with sweat.
“They formed ranks and had setting-up exercises to cool off, then paired off and for fifteen minutes massaged each other, especially on chests, legs and neck. They then stacked arms, got half an hour to cook rice and bean powder and take a look at the Ming Tombs, then fell in and marched back for Peking in that cutting wind.
“We ate a picnic lunch in our car, looked over the tombs and the immense statues of more than a hundred kings, then drove back. We entered Peking about 6:00 P.M.—and found the Japanese troops ahead of us at the gates. When I realized that this was their daily routine, I knew that they would be terrible adversaries in war.”
Lewis discovered that the 600-man U. S. Marine battalion held only one field exercise each week—and this was called off in extreme heat or cold or a dust storm—but that the Japanese did not cancel their training marches for any reason.
He put his Horse Marines through their paces daily, excluding Saturdays and Sundays, leading them on long cross-country rides with small dust storms boiling in their wake. He rode into areas where the Japanese were training, in an effort to observe details of their tactical work.
There was also a weekly sunset parade for the American colony of the ancient city—about 3000 strong—followed by the Colonel’s reception. A battalion of infantry and the cavalry detachment put on this show, the Horse Marines finishing it by passing at a walk, trot and finally a gallop, with sabers flashing.
Another bonus in his twenty-one-month stay for Puller was a glimpse of the Chinese Army. His commander sent him about fifteen miles north of the city to observe the Chinese troops as they passed southward from Manchuria, much of which had been ceded to Japan. Puller went on horseback with two Marines.
The Chinese poured past Puller’s roadside post for three days, a horde which seemed endless. They were well dressed in utility uniforms of the field green color Americans were to adopt many years later. Lewis was surprised to see that thousands of them were no more than fourteen or fifteen years old, and that about half the army was made up of boys in their teens. There was nothing of the mob about these troops, discipline was perfect. There was only a scattering of mortars and no artillery. The only vehicles were two-wheeled grain carts, each drawn by two or three mules in single file.
Puller and his men counted steadily, for their mission was to estimate the strength of this army. They met a few officers who spoke English and from them gathered the mood of the troops: They were depressed but not defeated. The men felt that they had been sold out in a truce and wanted only to return north and fight the Japanese. It was a scene Puller did not forget.
His count of the Chinese, reported in Peking, was 105,000; he was pleased to see a newspaper announce a few days later that the strength was 107,000.
One of Puller’s duties was locating and tracing Americans in Peking, missionaries, businessmen, tourists and retired service men. In an emergency he would gather them in the Legation compound for protection, and Marines made regular checks of the residences.
Peking’s weather varied from 120 degrees in summer to 20 below zero in winter and for months ice made the Horse Marines of little use, for even when roughshod the animals could barely walk on the stone-paved streets.
The U. S. Minister in the city was Nelson T. Johnson, a veteran of thirty years in China, with an intimate knowledge of its people and customs. Johnson took a daily walk through the streets and often stopped for a conversation in Puller’s office. He was full of stories of his career in China, dating to 1907, when he was an interpreter; he was the first man to make Puller aware of the growing menace of Japan and China to world peace. He also inspired Lewis to learn spoken Chinese, as he had learned native tongues in Latin America.
Puller was impressed by Johnson’s diplomatic parties, where only tea and lemonade were served, to the obvious delight of Oriental guests. Johnson spoke Mandarin and many other dialects and was evidently an ideal Minister. Lewis followed his later career: “At the outbreak of war with Japan Mr. Johnson was pulled out of China and stuck down in Australia, despite his priceless knowledge of the Chinese. I never knew why. It was little wonder to me that China went Communist, the way American affairs were handled out there. From what I saw, The Ugly American spoke the truth. During my twenty-seven years of foreign duty I saw all too many of our diplomats whose only qualification was private wealth.”
Puller was put in charge of the boxing team and drove the fighters with such vigor that there was soon a waiting list for the victorious team. Evening fight cards became a leading social event of the Peking season and drew service teams from throughout the Far East to meet the Marines. Once when Puller found that his team was out of condition a few days before a match he put all of them on a big coal pile and had them move it back and forth with shovels until they made the weight limits. They won the next match.
Another attraction of life in the city was the succession of fancy-dress balls, which drew most of the foreign colony. Once, when Puller’s friend John Thomason heard that some Marine officer was going to one of these balls as Robert E. Lee, he said, “I’d sooner go as God.” He expressed Puller’s feeling exactly.
Thomason, who became Puller’s most intimate friend in Peking, had been a platoon and company commander in the World War and was winning a name as an author and illustrator in these days. He was so senior in his rank that he often threatened to write a book titled Fifty Years a Captain in the Marine Corps.
Puller enjoyed Thomason and he often spent evenings listening to his talk with Jimmy Devereux and Marty Sommers, the foreign correspondent:
“John was writing for American magazines, and was always fighting a deadline. Often he would get a check for about two hundred seventy-five dollars and an order to deliver a story within six weeks. His first move was to call his Number One Boy, hand him the check and a list of whisky, and send him to the bank and the club. Mrs. Thomason would leave the apartment for a few days, and John would call up all his friends in Peking. We had some great old times, and they lasted until the checks ran out.
“All John ever did, then, about the story, was to circle a date on his calendar—and on the night or so before the deadline, when he knew he had to catch a mailboat to Frisco in order to get the story in on time, he sat down and wrote furiously and drew the pictures, too. He always made it. A great guy.”
Through Thomason, Lewis made an effort to modernize the post: “John, our evacuation plans call for taking our people out on horseback. You know we couldn’t do that in time. We have about thirty big trucks, and they would carry thirty or forty people each. Why do we have to keep up this nonsense?”
“Because it’s always been done, I suppose. Write out a new plan and bring it to Headquarters and I’ll help you get the Colonel’s approval.”
Thomason telephoned soon after Lewis submitted his scheme: “My God, Puller, don’t you realize that Washington will disband the Mounted Detachment when this thing reaches the Quartermasters? They’ll cut it out to save money.”
“Why shouldn’t they?”
He never got a satisfactory answer, but was told unofficially that, in case of trouble, civilians would be evacuated by truck. “It took me just twenty-four hours to learn to play this kind of make-believe game,” Puller said.
Lewis never forgot Virginia Evans and faithfully wrote her of his experiences in China and sometimes sent rather unlikely gifts. One of the better gifts was a copy of John Thomason’s book on service in the Far East, Salt Winds and Gobi Dust, with a scribbled note on the flyleaf: “Thomason can describe the life better than I.”
In one letter he wrote so emphatically that she could almost see him blurting out the words he wanted to say to her: “But dear, even if you do marry me and make me a happy man, even then, if I hear the beat of the drum, I must leave you. I want you to know that.”
The chief charm of Peking for Puller was polo. He had never played before, but he threw himself into it as if he were re-enacting a Civil War cavalry charge. His early training had prepared him for the rough-and-tumble, and he became the most daring of Marine riders.
Puller was chosen No. 1 “Griffin” of the season in 1933, the best beginning player-and was thus the finest of about a dozen neophytes. His detachment team also won the Hotel de Pékin Cup for the championship, and the next year won the Major McCallum Trophy. In two seasons of polo Lewis often played ten chukkers or more daily and finished his career there with a four-goal handicap.
Lewis had one serious accident, the most painful of his career, when a pony rolled over on him and pulled his rib cage loose from his spine down one side. Doctors were concerned, but though he remained in a cast for months, Puller was out of the hospital in a few days and back on limited duty.
In September, 1934, Puller joined the U.S.S. Augusta, flagship of the Asiatic fleet—but it was not his first choice. He had requested more schooling, at Quantico, or one of the Army schools. Even so, he went to sea with enthusiasm.
He came in from a cross-country ride at Peking one afternoon and was summoned to his colonel’s office. He was handed a letter from Admiral F. B. Upham, asking help for the Augusta, whose last two Marine commanders had been dismissed as unsatisfactory.
“It would be a fine tour for you,” the Colonel said. “They’ll call at every port in South Asia, and if you wish you can stay aboard a couple of years longer.”
“I’ll take it,” Puller said. But he first had to face a going-away party that caused a tumult in the Peking railway station.
After a few glasses had been raised at the Club the entire Mounted Detachment, on horseback, pushed through the doors of the station, thrusting back confused crowds of Chinese, and rode solemnly down the platform, escorting Lieutenant Puller to his car. The crowd made the horses frisky and it was only by a minor miracle that Puller was put safely aboard and sent away without accident.
He boarded the Augusta at Chingwangtao and passed immediately under the eye of Admiral Upham: “Lieutenant, they say you’re a soldierly fellow, a fine Marine. I hope that I’ll be able to say I was happy to have had you aboard, some day. I was not impressed by some of the officers who preceded you—and if you don’t improve the Marine guard, you’ll go fast.”
When he was dismissed Lewis assembled the seventy-five men of the ship’s detachment, and kept them less than two minutes. He rumbled at them: “My name’s Puller. I’m glad to have been assigned to command you. We’re going to work together, starting from scratch. We’ll see if we all can’t learn something, and do a little bit for our country. Dismissed.”
The next day he took half the landing force to a rifle range in Chingwangtao and for ten days drilled them with their weapons; the other half of the detachment followed before the ship sailed. Lewis acted as small arms officer as well as Marine commander, and soon became legal aide to Captain Chester W. Nimitz, the skipper.
Their first cruise took them to Shefoo and Tsingtao and other ports for two days each, to Shanghai, then on a six-day speed run to Guam, much of it in the wake of a typhoon which felled many men with seasickness and left too few officers to stand watches. Puller was one who escaped.
Admiral Upham soon left the ship, succeeded by Admiral Orin G. Murfin. In the change-of-command ceremony, as Murfin came aboard, Upham carried his game with Puller to the final moment. The Admiral shook hands with his officers, the band played, pipes wailed as he stepped toward the gangplank, and the Marines presented arms. Puller thought he would leave without a sign of approval for the improved state of the detachment—but just as his head and shoulders were on the point of disappearing, Puller caught Upham’s eye.
The Admiral returned to the quarter-deck, reached for Puller’s hand and said, “Glad to have had you aboard, Puller.” He vanished.
Lewis exhibited his well-trained Marines on several trips ashore, once in Japan, as an honor guard for the funeral of Admiral Togo, the Japanese hero of the battle of Tsushima during the Russo-Japanese War. The Marines were hand-picked men, all six feet tall or over, and Ensign O. D. Waters, a future admiral, thought Puller’s bearing so impressive that no one noticed that he was not as tall as his men, who towered over the surrounding Japanese.
Puller was aware of some American military errors aboard the Augusta, and he never failed to expose them in talks with his intimates: “Here we have a ten-thousand-ton heavy cruiser, with about eight hundred men aboard—just one on the Asiatic station. The British have three cruisers on duty here. You ever notice that we have thirty-seven typewriters on this ship? The British have just one machine on each of their cruisers. Why do you suppose that is? You know damned well they don’t read all those reports back in Washington, when they get there. Paper work will ruin any military force—they should have learned that from Smedley Butler. They’ll shed this monstrosity when war comes, though, and the fighting people take over.”
The Augusta turned south. When she crossed the Equator, Puller suffered the horseplay of Neptunus Rex with other “polliwogs”—and his detachment whooped with laughter when he was dragged before the tribunal, charged with “unmilitary bearing” and “gross display of medals.”
During a stay at Melbourne the Marines shot a match against Australians on a rifle range ashore and as they returned to the ship, crossing a river by ferry, an automobile carrying several young women plunged into the water. The vehicle floated briefly.
Puller was standing on deck and when he saw that no one was helping dived overboard. He wrenched open a door of the car and helped out two bedraggled and hysterical women, but the car then plunged downward, bearing the woman driver. Puller dived from the surface and found the car upside down, wedged tightly in mud. He came to the surface for air and returned several times, in vain.
Puller had no idea of the identity of the rescued girls and when the father of a survivor, Sir Frederick Mann, came to the ship to express thanks and invite the Lieutenant to dinner, Puller declined. Talk of the exploit seemed to embarrass him. Ensign Waters and other officers joshed Puller when he came aboard in his dripping clothes, supposing that he had fallen off a pier in horseplay. His shipmates knew nothing of his heroism until news of it appeared in the local newspapers.
The Augusta visited other Australian ports, then Borneo, Java, Sumatra, Celibes and Bali. They were in Manila over Christmas, and into January, 1935, where Puller acted as legal aide to the Commander-in-Chief of the Asiatic Fleet. On this run the equatorial crossing found Lewis one of the robed judges of King Neptune’s court and he enjoyed the discomfiture of Lieutenant Colonel Joe Stilwell, the Army’s Vinegar Joe of future fame. Stilwell recognized Puller. The conspirators had dressed a fat fireman of some 260 pounds in a baby’s pinafore. The senior judge ordered Stilwell to kiss the Royal Infant:
“Kiss the baby’s belly.”
Stilwell turned to Puller: “Do I have to obey that order?”
“Quick, Colonel, before they turn the baby upside-down.”
Stilwell leaned to kiss the huge stomach, and two sailors thrust his head until it almost disappeared in rolls of fat.
There was gunnery at sea and overhaul at Cavite, the annual speed run for Hong Kong, then up the China Coast to Amoy and Shanghai. Puller’s first year aboard was over.
The second year promised much the same schedule, but with a swing through the Dutch Islands and the Malay Peninsula, Singapore and Siam.
In January Puller’s name appeared on the list of Marine first lieutenants up for promotion to captain, and a note of congratulation came from John Thomason, now in Headquarters at Washington:
I am very glad to see your name on the selection list and I write to offer my congratulations. All that I hear of you confirms the opinion I formed of you in Peking, and I consider you one of the few officers I know who have a genuine military aptitude.
I knew a number of fine officers in the German war, men who, as platoon and company commanders, showed much promise and some talent in 1918. A good many of these same officers have shown nothing since then, and their names are not on any selection lists—that is, most of them are not.…
Napoleon’s receipt for proficiency in the military art was: to study and reflect upon, the campaigns of the great captains. He named Hannibal, Turenne, Saxe, Frederick the Great and Gustavus Adolphus and Charles XII. You can add Napoleon’s name, and much is to be learned from Lee, Jackson, Forrest, Sherman and Grant in our war.
Take care of yourself. The world does not promise peace, and they will need us combat officers before our time is up.
Puller smiled over the list of military reading, most of which he had been sampling since boyhood, but he pasted the letter in his copy of Thomason’s Marines and Others, which became a gift to Virginia Evans. As he did so he thought once more of Thomason’s oft-repeated threats, in Peking, to write a book about Puller and his exploits in Haiti and Nicaragua.
Lewis still made a great show of bachelorhood in these days, and he told his cronies, “The Marine Corps ought not to permit marriage. A monastic order, all the way. Married men make poor soldiers. If the Government wanted you to have a wife, they’d issue you one.”
There was, all the same, a steady correspondence with the brown-eyed girl in Saluda, Virginia.
In April Lewis requested an extended tour of duty on the Augusta so that he could become more proficient in naval gunnery. Nimitz approved, saying, “The work of Lieutenant Puller on board this vessel has been excellent.”
Yet when Puller took his examinations for Captain, the board turned him down for failure in ordnance and gunnery—four of his ten questions dealt with an obsolete antiaircraft gun. A new examination was ordered, however, and Puller passed with ease. His commission as Captain was dated from July, 1935.
In the spring of 1936 another honor came to Puller. Headquarters radioed that the Haines Bayonet Trophy, sought by every active Marine unit, had been won by the detachment of the Augusta.
Once more there was a call to unexpected duty. Colonel Hal Turnage, commander of the Basic School in Philadelphia, where all young Marine officers of the time were trained, needed the help of Lewis Puller. The Captain reported in late June.
Colonel Turnage explained his wishes simply: “Captain, we had a great class of young officers here last year, and a finer crop is coming up. They get all they need in the classroom and know military theory—but they don’t get the real Marine training I like.”
“You mean recruit training, sir?”
“Something like that. I’ll leave it to you. You have a reputation for discipline and common sense. You do the job, and I’ll back you all the way.”
Lewis simply added the hard routine of boot camp to the already-full schedule of the incoming officers, and was forced to begin at 6:00 A.M. Turnage soon took note of the change that came over his school:
“When Puller got to work, we needed no bugle in the Navy Yard. He had his men out before day working them on drill and command—teaching them to shout commands in turn. It woke up everybody on the post.
“Lewis left nothing undone. We had the best classes in 1935 and 1936 that I ever knew in the Marine Corps, and Puller did a great deal for that second class.”
His class of ’36 was made up of ninety-four honor graduates of college ROTC units and twenty-five Annapolis Middies. Among them were nationally known football stars, including Ben Robertshaw, Navy’s All-American center, and Lew Walt, a burly star of the Colorado Aggies who was destined to become a general. A little-known member of one class who would rise to fame was Gregory (Pappy) Boyington, who began here to form his opinion that Puller was “the greatest Marine of all.”
Lewis began well with these young men when they saw him decorated with two combat awards on the parade ground: the Nicaraguan Presidential Medal of Merit and Cross of Valor.
They also found him refreshing as a classroom instructor. Lewis knew that students frequently slept through the dull classes. He tried new tacks, adding hair-raising stories of battle to put over his points, but he did not always succeed. One day he saw a student snoring away with his chin on his chest and, speaking in a lowered voice, walked to the rear of the culprit, yanked the chair from under him with a foot and roared as the young officer candidate scrambled to his feet: “Now, sleeping beauty! Take your somnolent duff up to your sack and sleep it off. You stay there until you can remain awake in my classes!”
It was the last of that difficulty.
Lew Walt remembered much later, after combat in two wars had made him a general: “Puller was my company commander, and to me was the epitome of what Marine Corps training should do. Not only in weapons, or classroom or field training—he gave us everything hard. At every break in the field, though he drove us until our tongues were hanging out, men still gathered around him. He told us tales about fighting in Haiti and Nicaragua, of his patrols living off the land, and fighting natives—all his experiences, not just guff. Every tale had some point.
“Being under Puller in Basic School did more for me than anything I experienced until I got to Guadalcanal. He taught us the use of terrain like a master, how to use the tiniest bit of cover to our advantage. Ground form really meant something when he explained it. He taught us to use the bayonet with all the tricks of close-in fighting. You couldn’t mistake it, he knew the stuff cold.”
Lewis also intensified his siege of Virginia Evans, and had persuaded her to come up for the Army-Navy game of 1936. She was much interested in a young man in Boston but agreed to the trip.
The Turnages were amused by the Captain’s shy announcement: “I have a girl. Down home in Virginia, you know. She’s coming up for the game. I’m sort of looking for a place where she can stay.”
“Why, she’ll stay with us,” Mrs. Turnage said, and when Virginia Evans arrived she was installed with the commander’s family. After the Navy Ball during that weekend Colonel and Mrs. Turnage concluded that the two were in love, and were not surprised by later signs that Lewis was a lost man.
He made the long trip to Saluda almost every weekend now, courting Virginia with growing confidence. The girl told her mother: “I never had a beau like him. He’s always so positive about everything. He never pays the least attention to what I say. If I tell him not to come down for the weekend, there he comes, anyway. Yet, he’s the most attentive thing you ever saw. He writes me every day.”
In April, soon after she promised to marry him, Lewis wrote:
I, too, miss you dreadfully, but, as you know, I can stand on my head until The Day. Oh! Virginia, I am so very happy and contented and we will always be ever so happy. You have made my life worth while now.
Colonel Turnage showed me my fitness report today for the past six months and the report was perfect.… You are responsible, Darling, and from now on all my reports will be likewise.…
The weather is quite wet here now. Rain most of yesterday and all of today. The sun is shining for me, though, and always will.…
I would like to phone you every evening but will continue to confine myself to Sundays in order to save our money.…
On a freezing, rain-swept day just before Puller’s marriage the Class of ’37 had an uncomfortable experience with him on the drill field. They wore no overcoats as they marched. Teeth chattered, but the ranks moved with precision.
Lewis saw stray glances at the barracks detachment which came out for a brief drill wrapped in heavy overcoats, and then disappeared.
“Those are barracks Marines,” he said with an edge in his voice. “You’re fighting Marines.”
They completed the full schedule for the day, chilled to the bone and soaking wet.
Before the wedding Puller had made his annual request for choice of new duty: “It has been five years since I have attended school and this request is made in order that I may improve my professional qualifications.” Headquarters seemed to think more schooling for him unnecessary, for he remained a Basic School instructor three years.
Lewis and Virginia were married November 13, 1937, in Christ Church, Middlesex County, Virginia, near the homes of their childhood. The old church stood on land donated by a seventeenth-century Puller ancestor, one Captain Bocas. Despite the cold weather Virginia had asked if the Marines who came down with him couldn’t wear their summer whites to match her color scheme and he had replied patiently with a small joke: “Dear, perhaps we can persuade the Secretary of the Navy to change the regulations, or Someone Else to change the weather.”
Half a dozen Marine officers took part in the ceremony and formed an arch of swords as the couple left the church.
Virginia told the groom afterward that he was a source of embarrassment to her through the entire ceremony. Before the soloist began to sing “O Perfect Love,” Puller marched from the side room where he was told to remain until the Rector appeared. Spectators heard his hoarse whispered order: “Come on, Doctor!” as he prodded the minister, Rev. William D. Smith.
Virginia went down the aisle on the arm of her brother, Bill Evans, and when they came to his side. Puller said in a voice audible to the back rows, “Thanks, Bill!” There was a subdued tittering; Mr. Smith later proposed that he make this line a part of the marriage service.
When the couple walked from the church Lewis brought grins to faces of friends with his growls of affection: “You’re so lovely, dear!” He did not cease despite her desperate whispers of protest.
They spent a brief honeymoon in Atlantic City and Lewis was soon back at the school. They were installed in a two-bedroom apartment overlooking the parade ground, their happiness increased by Patsy, a maid Virginia brought from home.
The newlyweds drew much attention from the student Marines. One young lieutenant never tired of braying at cocktail parties: “When I got Puller’s wedding announcement I thought it must be a mistake. Hell, I thought he was hunting birds, all those trips he made down to Virginia. It beats me. I can’t conceive of Lewis Puller making love to any woman on earth.”
The students noted changes in Puller’s nature and those who had marched in the cold rain under his relentless eye so recently now detected a softening. One of them, Lieutenant Parker Colmer, saw that they were dismissed if the days were even slightly cool or rain threatened. The officers surmised that the pretty bride peeping from the curtained windows across the parade ground had wrought a permanent change.
But Lieutenant Colmer decided not: “It must have been the first blush of wedded bliss that changed the Old Man. In later years I saw a decided return to the original Puller.”
Virginia Evans managed to housebreak the field soldier, however, and the Navy Yard discovered that he was a genial, hospitable host in his apartment, where Patsy soon learned to serve small dinners with grace and skill.
Puller’s social achievements were never greater than on the night the Pullers arrived at the home of the new commanding officer, Colonel Gilder Jackson, to hear the mournful plaint of Mrs. Jackson: “Here I am, with a dozen people due here any minute. I’ve nothing on earth for dinner except crabs, and they haven’t even been cleaned—neither maid will touch them.”
Puller busied himself in the kitchen and in less than half an hour the chore was done. Mrs. Jackson regarded it as sorcery. “Any kid brought up on the York River could do it with one hand,” Puller said. “All you needed was a water rat.”
The Pullers once went to a Navy dance in Washington, where Virginia met Lewis’s old friend Chester Nimitz for the first time. He reminisced about the old days on the Augusta as they danced, and told her of her husband’s rescue of the two women in the Australian river.
She was astonished: “I never heard a word about that! Isn’t it just like him, not to mention it to me?”
“He’s a fine officer and a fine man. You’re a lucky girl.”
“Don’t I know it? But, Admiral, I’ve made lots of changes in Lewis since we’ve been married.”
Nimitiz smiled, but his frosty eyes did not: “Perhaps if you change him too much it won’t be for the better.”
She laughed: “You know that nobody on earth could change Lewis Puller as much as all that.”
“I hope not. He’s the kind we’re going to need, one of these days.”
Mrs. Puller knew that her husband was a warrior first of all; one of her gifts to him this year was Stonewall Jackson, by Colonel G. F. R. Henderson.
The Pullers left the pleasant life of the Philadelphia Navy Yard in the spring of 1939, bound for the Orient. Puller had asked for duty with the 4th Regiment in Shanghai, but had been reassigned to the Augusta instead. The voyage out was like a second honeymoon.
Several friends were aboard their ship, including the promising Basic School graduate, Lieutenant Lew Walt, with his bride. Puller played acey-deucey with some cronies during the days, and as they reached the islands enjoyed pointing out familiar scenes from his former tours. They had a few days in Hawaii, and went to Waikiki one morning to ride surfboards with another young friend, Lieutenant Gordon Warner, a champion swimmer who had studied under Lewis at Basic School.
The two men went out to sea in a canoe, and to Virginia’s astonishment Lewis rode in with Warner, balancing with skill as rollers hurled them to the shore. Lewis then returned and rode in on a surfboard alone and turned to Virginia: “Come on, you’re going to try it, too. You never had so much fun.”
Mrs. Puller went out with some trepidation and when the canoe halted she hung back, until Lewis snapped: “You aren’t yellow, are you?” She jumped to the board just as a wave approached, and rode in, seated, with Warner standing above.
When she reached shore she laughed to Lewis: “You hound! That was the only thing you could have said that would have made me ride that thing. You’re terrible—you always know what to say.”
They had a lunch of hot dogs and poi on the beach, and swam and sunned in the afternoon with a party from the ship; both were badly sunburned.
Lewis rose at dawn when the ship reached Manila and climbed down the gangway among the bumboats, where he bought an armload of orchids, paying about ten cents apiece for them. When he took them to the stateroom and spread them over Virginia, she was radiant with happiness.
“You’ve kept your promise,” she said. “Even more than three dozen orchids.”
“One more promise, dear.”
“What’s that?”
“The beat of the drum. You remember that.”
“Oh, Lewis, there’s not going to be another war.”
“Virginia, there will always be a war, and when it comes, I’ll be there.”
She found him unfailingly attentive, and on the thirteenth of every month after their marriage—their “anniversary”—he sent her a dozen red roses.
The Pullers sailed to China, and after he had settled his wife in a hotel in Tsingtao, where there were many American Navy families, Lewis boarded the Augusta. He found the ship little changed, beyond the addition of some new antiaircraft guns; her commander was now Captain John Magruder. Puller was aboard the flagship from July, 1939, to May, 1940, a time when she avoided Japanese-held islands in her cruising.
In May, 1940, Lewis was promoted to Major and abruptly ordered to Shanghai, and the 4th Marines. Virginia met him there—and he was none too soon, for their first child, Virginia McCandlish Puller, was born a few days later. Lewis soon had them housed in relative luxury in a three-bedroom home in Shanghai, attended by five servants.
In the city outside were distressing contrasts. Each morning about a hundred bodies were found in the streets, victims of starvation. In one quarter of the city, behind barricades, were the troops of the conquering Japanese; tension was greater here than in the days in Peking. The threat of war was in the air.
Lewis worked, hard as executive officer of the 2nd Battalion of the regiment, serving on the administrative and exchange councils and audit boards in addition to training infantrymen. His superiors, who changed rapidly, gave him invariably high rating on his fitness reports: “An outstanding officer of his rank … exceptionally keen, interested in his profession … a most excellent officer in all respects. I would like to have him serve with me in any capacity at any time.”
Virginia Mac was not christened until late fall, after many postponements to enable her godmother, Isabella Hart, to attend. At last Miss Hart, daughter of Admiral Thomas C. Hart, sent her gift in emergency haste: a hand-made christening robe which was delivered in the nick of time only by being sent on the flagship, Augusta.
Admiral Hart sent for the Major, who entered the office a bit nervously on the unusual call. Hart’s seamed face wrinkled into a smile: “Puller, take this damned dress. First time I ever heard of one being delivered by an Admiral’s barge.”
The child was christened by the Rev. Francis Cox at St. John’s University in Shanghai.
The first official sign of growing concern in Washington was a questionnaire which passed among military men in Shanghai, asking whether they wished to evacuate their families. Puller applied to send his wife and child home; they sailed on the President Coolidge in November, 1940.
Puller joined a Navy captain for dinner one evening, their companions two Japanese Navy officers. One of the Japanese, in his cups, soon dropped his polite, formal air and snapped at Puller’s friend:
“Soon, American, we will be at war. I will meet you—you in a cruiser, me in a destroyer. We will sink you, and as I steam by, you will shout from the water, ‘Help me, friend!’ Then I will stop my ship and kick you down with my foot in your face and say, ‘Die, you American son of a bitch!’”
The Japanese left them with the soberer officer spluttering apologies.
Puller needed no such warning. He kept a Mongol pony on the outskirts of the city in a stable, saddled and ready under the eye of a friendly Chinese hostler. In case of surrender, Puller planned to run for the stable, put on Chinese clothing and make his way through bandit country until he could join the Chinese armies.
When he entered the Noncommissioned Officers’ Club one day a sergeant of the regiment hailed him: “What’re you going to do if the shooting starts, Major?”
“I don’t know what the Government will do, or Headquarters, either. But with no orders to the contrary, I’ll take my battalion and fight my way the hell back to Frisco.”
Puller did not conceal his restlessness from fellow officers: “Here I am, five months overdue in this station already, and things are going to pop just any day. When they do, we’ll be caught out here where we can do nothing.”
“Why don’t you remind them you’re overdue?”
“Hell, I can’t do that. They’ll think I’m yellow.” This fetched gales of laughter in the Officers’ Club, and was recalled a few nights later, when Puller met the Japanese Army in its first recorded clash with the Marines.
After dark a party of eighty Japanese troops violated the neutrality of the International Zone and marched through the American sector, where they rounded up two hundred Chinese, intending to take them back for trial on nameless charges.
Puller was detailed to get the Japs out of the settlement without creating an incident, if possible. He led twenty-two Marines to the compound where the Chinese were being illegally held. Lewis drew his pistol on the Japanese officer he found at the gate: “I’ll give you five minutes to free those men and get your troops back across Soochow Creek where you belong.”
The Japanese did not seem to understand English, but he could not mistake the meaning of Puller’s tone of voice nor his expression—and over the Major’s shoulder he saw Marines setting up two heavy machine guns. He barked his orders to retire, and Puller sent the Chinese back to freedom.
Puller said afterward: “I wish now I had killed him. It would have started the war, perhaps, but we’d have lost only one regiment, instead of all those men and ships at Pearl Harbor.”
Lewis drove his men harder in these days, but spent some time at the clubs, and an occasional dance for members of the American colony; he was also an honorary member of a club of ex-Czarist officers. He was lonely, and his letters to Virginia did not conceal it. He wrote her of dining with some lieutenants one Saturday evening and of playing poker: “I lost eight Mex. Lucky in love, unlucky in cards. You must have been loving me a lot this evening, as I could draw absolutely nothing.”
He wrote her daily, in a way that made the spirit of the city unmistakable:
… The Battalion had its weekly hike this morning, almost three hours with full field equipment, and maintained a four-mile-an-hour pace. I can walk fast! Do you remember when we used to walk together and you thought I was too slow?…
I had a good ride this afternoon. I believe my pony could gallop from here to Burma.… Yesterday the exchange rate in shops was about eighteen to one. Prices are still going up, food and coal particularly.… Tomorrow we will have been married three years and two months and the time only seems a day, and then again it seems as if I have always had you.…
The situation here has eased a bit. After the war is over in Europe, I certainly hope we put the Japs back to where Perry found them … I do not understand why we have taken all the guff from the Japanese these past few years. England backed the Japanese up before the Russo-Japanese War, and the British have certainly gotten what they deserved. Of the two evils, England or Germany, I prefer the former, but they have never been the first line of defense of the United States, and they never will be, even after we save them now, from the Germans. Our leaders do not know history or else are blind to it.…
I check the days off on a calendar. I will come to you safe and sound. Do not worry.… How I would love to have you and Virginia Makkee with me, but China is no place for an American woman now. Sooner or later we will be involved with the Axis powers. I thank God every day for your being safely home.…
In August, 1941, he was ordered back to the States, to report to Quantico; he sailed on the President Coolidge, and soon had a happy reunion with his wife and daughter.
Puller spent a day or two in Washington prodding friends at Corps Headquarters: “Why don’t they get the regiment out of Shanghai, and the detachment out of Peking? The Japs will jump any day now. The British have moved their people—and we can ill afford to lose the few trained men we have.” He got no satisfaction, and when he persisted by going to the Navy Department, got the same reply: “Mind your own business, Major. We are aware of the situation up to the last minute.”
With little further delay, Lewis got what he sought for himself: He would report to the new Marine base in the North Carolina swamplands, at New River, where he would command the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, to prepare them for war. He arrived in October.