YEARS OF PEACE
Puller became restless after a few days in Saluda and proposed a trip to New York. Virginia was astonished:
“Don’t you realize how things are there? You couldn’t buy a hotel room with the crown jewels. We’d never get into a show. How would we even get there?”
“Don’t you trust me any more?”
He carried off the holiday as if there were no war and no ration cards, shortages or queues of waiting civilians. They went to New York by train and when they reached the city were picked up by an escort who had been alerted by Marine Corps Headquarters. He was Diggory Venn, now a lieutenant, a young Englishman Puller had known on Guadalcanal and New Guinea as a combat correspondent.
Venn had made a futile effort to find a room for the Colonel and his wife—but when he squired the Pullers into the Hotel Commodore, and the room clerk saw the spread of ribbons on the Colonel’s chest and the grim, atabrine-yellowed face, he quickly held out a registration card: “Yes, sir, Colonel! We’ll always find a place for you. The law says three days, but we’ll see what we can do, if you want to stay longer.”
Somehow, Venn found tickets for shows for four or five days. The Pullers crowded into Oklahoma! and at Mrs. Puller’s insistence saw The Voice of the Turtle, which starred her childhood friend Margaret Sulla van. She sent a note backstage and they obeyed the summons to the star’s dressing room for an intimate talk, but declined an invitation to dinner, to be alone on the town.
There were interviews with several magazines and newspapers, with Venn as escort, and after a whirl of a few days the Pullers returned home.
In January, 1945, Puller was sent back to the Marine base in North Carolina at New River, now known as Camp Lejeune, where he commanded the Infantry Training Regiment, with 12,000 men to prepare for battle.
Mrs. Puller and Virginia Mac were with him again, he had a free hand with training and he was as content as he could be in wartime when he was denied a place in combat with his troops. His training methods were almost exactly those he had dinned into the First Battalion, Seventh Marines in the months when he was preparing them for Guadalcanal.
His commander, Brigadier General Alfred H. Noble, gave Puller good fitness reports: “One of our outstanding combat officers. A thoroughgoing Marine who can be relied upon to use good judgment.… Brought training to maximum efficiency. Highly regarded as a troop leader.”
This was the result of Puller’s abilities, for Noble opposed the Colonel’s training program at many turns.
Puller’s table of organization gave him plenty of officers and noncoms, but General Noble seldom allowed him more than half of these. Puller never forgot it: “Noble had them in school all the time. He thought that was more important than duty in the field. So, just two or three days before the battalions were about to ship out for the Pacific, Noble had them filled up with officers and noncoms who had been in school, but not in the field. Most of them lacked combat experience. They hit Okinawa without field training, too.
“One of these green officers, a second lieutenant, landed on the beach at Iwo Jima and was ordered to take his platoon to the front line. He ran them through a gap, or marched them crooked, the result of inexperience, and ran them into the Japs. The whole outfit was killed.
“The sad part was that all the officers and noncoms he took for his schools had just finished schools at Quantico, and they got the same thing again at Lejeune.”
Still, there were signs that Puller was making himself felt. More than one front-line officer in the Pacific said: “I can always tell when we get a Puller-trained Marine. He’s ready to go.”
Near the end of his duty at Lejeune, just as the war in the Pacific was coming to an end, Puller became a father once, more—this time of twins, a boy and a girl. For several days the base was covered with a smoke screen in the wake of his distribution of cigars.
There were signs that the outside world had not forgotten Puller. In December, 1945, there was a letter from Marine gunner Charles R. Jackson, who had served under him in the old Second Battalion, Fourth Marines, in Shanghai and had been captured by the Japanese in the Philippines:
I am back from the living dead, being released on the 13th of September.…
I have heard of your distinguished war record with great pleasure. When we were prisoners in those dark and dreary days we used to speculate: “If Chesty Puller doesn’t get killed, he will surely make Major General.”
To the sorrow of your old men of Shanghai the prediction did not come true, and we are all terribly disappointed that you are only a colonel. I can truthfully speak for all of your old men—that we never, never forgot the best Marine officer we ever had the privilege of serving under.
When the men were released, their first question was: “How is Chesty Puller?” Your well-nigh incredible career is the admiration of us all.
If Puller suspected that he had not been promoted as rapidly as his record warranted, or that he had enemies around Headquarters, he gave no sign. He still expressed himself vigorously on every issue of importance to the Corps, and did not hesitate to write to the commandant, now General Vandegrift, when the Corps cut adrift hundreds of its best combat officers.
With the war’s end, the Corps began to require college degrees for its officers and thus cut off many fine commanders of platoons and companies who had distinguished themselves in action. Puller wrote to Vandegrift:
“The former enlisted men who became officers and proved their worth in combat should be sent to college to get degrees. If we don’t do this, thousands of your new officers will be in without combat experience—and you’ll never know, until war actually comes, whether or not they are fit for combat.”
He got no satisfaction and no copy of the letter found its way into Puller’s file at Headquarters; he followed up the argument with Vandegrift in person, but had no effect upon the policy.
It was not the only time Puller found Headquarters deaf to his voice of experience. With the defeat of Japan, the Marine Corps sent all its war dogs to Camp Lejeune and Puller was ordered to have them “detrained” for return to their owners—but only those thought to be safe for use in civilian life; others were to be destroyed. Puller had his men demobilize the hundreds of dogs gathered there; Marines discouraged them in their attacks on strangers and beat them when they persisted. The men made pets of the animals with such success that only twenty had to be destroyed.
General Vandegrift notified Puller that the Corps would maintain no War Dog corps in peacetime and asked him for a recommendation on the training and use of the dogs in the next war. Puller complied.
The best breed for war, he wrote, was the American version of the German Shepherd, intelligent, courageous, stable and easily trained. Boxers were also good. The Doberman Pinscher was to be avoided:
“On Peleliu, more than half of the dogs assigned to my regiment were Dobermans. They proved too highly bred to stand artillery fire and turned against their handlers at crucial moments. Some men were badly torn by these dogs and we were forced to destroy all of them. They are grand dogs, intelligent and efficient under most conditions, but they cannot bear artillery and mortar fire. I recommend that this breed be dropped from the war dog program for the future.”
Within a week or so Puller had a telephone call from Chicago, a woman obviously excited, who announced herself as president of a national Doberman society:
“Colonel, I have seen your outrageous report—an insult to all Dobermans and those who love and know them. No true American could write such a thing! I demand that you retract every word, this very night.”
“Madam, I was under orders from the Commandant to outline a program for the wars of the future—something which might endanger the safety of our country if it weren’t accurate. This is an important matter, and there is nothing personal about any breed of dog, so far as I’m concerned. I like Dobermans; they simply won’t do for the job they’ve been assigned to.”
“How far is it from Chicago to that Camp—Lejeune or whatever you call it?”
“We’re in North Carolina. A long way. But I can save you the trip, if you’re thinking of that. I’ll never retract that report, because it’s based on the best information from competent men and officers.”
“I’ll be there within twenty-four hours.”
On schedule, a long black limousine with a chauffeur and footman and the leader of American Dobermans drew up before Puller’s office and for some time they warmly debated the matter of the Dobermans as war dogs. When Puller continued adamant the woman left him with a final word ringing in his ears: “I’ll see that you do retract that report! I’m going to Washington this instant.”
Within a few days, to Puller’s surprise, someone at Headquarters returned his report on the war dogs, asking that he make changes in his recommendations. He scratched on the back of the document his refusal to do so, saying that he had made the report at the request of the Commandant and that it had been made to the best of his ability. He heard no more of the matter.
Puller told his aides: “I knew we had many minorities in our country, and that some were powerful indeed—but not until now did I realize that the damned Doberman Pinschers had organized, and were ready to take over at any moment.”
In June, 1946, Puller was called to Washington for three days. He expected orders to a new post, but the personnel office could tell him nothing of his future. When he went to the office of General Vandegrift, an aide gave him ominous news:
“Colonel, you’ve been ordered to Reserve duty. In New Orleans. It’s a big district, you know, and very important to the Corps.”
Puller was not misled. He realized what it meant to be shunted to Reserve duty, into a side pocket; many a Marine career had ended in that way. He went in to General Vandegrift when he was called; the Commandant was the officer who had first recommended Puller for a Marine commission in the Haiti days of 1921. Vangegrift greeted him warmly:
“I imagine you don’t like your next assignment.”
“No, sir. I do not.”
“I suppose you’d like to be given a regiment.”
“I would.”
“Why should you be?”
“I think I’ve demonstrated that I’m fully qualified.”
The Commandant reddened; Puller never forgot his reply: “Puller, the war’s over, and I’m trying to get two permanent divisions in the Corps, and three hundred colonels. It’s up to me to qualify these three hundred colonels as regimental commanders.”
Puller laughed, and Vandegrift’s mouth grew firm, but he asked the Colonel to speak up:
“Sir, if you can keep two divisions, you’ll have eight regiments. You’ll never be able to train three hundred colonels with that setup. They’d never really qualify in peacetime, anyway. No one will ever know their abilities until they’ve been under fire.”
Puller left Washington with his friendship with his old friend Vandegrift unstrained, but he realized that somewhere in the vast and growing retinue at Headquarters were officers who did not wish him well. He heard these men spoken of in these days as the Young Turks now rising in the Corps, and Puller sometimes expressed himself to Mrs. Puller or officers with whom he was intimate:
“One of the inevitable problems with the Marine Corps or any other military service is that staff officers take over the minute a war is ended. The combat people run things when the chips are down and the country’s life is at stake—but when the guns stop, nobody’s got a use for a combat man.
“The staff officers are like rats; they stream out of hiding and take over. It’s true. Just watch what happens to paperwork. God, in peacetime they put out enough to sink a small-size nation into the sea—and when war breaks, most of it just naturally stops. That’s the way they do everything. There must always be staff people, of course, or we’d never get anything done—but if we don’t stop this empire-building of the staff, somebody’s going to come along and lick us one of these days. We’ll be so knotted in red tape that we can’t move.”
Puller and his family went off to New Orleans in July, 1946, and though the Colonel was sometimes pessimistic, and once or twice spoke to his wife about “turning in my suit,” he threw himself into the new job and managed to find consolations.
Vandegrift was soon smiling over reports from New Orleans. Puller built his district until he had doubled the number of reservists, wangled barracks and training areas for them—and in his two-year tour reached a peak of six battalions and in addition some 8000 unattached men, a record for the country. He soon commanded a quarter of the organized Marine Reserves in the nation.
The building of this new morale in the district began with his arrival. The newspapers spotted him instantly and the local Times-Picayune displayed him in color on its Sunday magazine cover, with a striking quotation:
“These days it looks like time for America to get realistic instead of starry-eyed. Whoever they are, whether they have atomic bombs and rockets or not, we can lick ’em if America gets hard, and American fighting men are trained to march 30 miles a day with a pack, and hit whatever they shoot at with any weapon they’re trained to use. Just as long as Americans have the will to fight, we’ll be all right.”
That helped to draw a tide of recruits which never dwindled so long as Puller was in command.
In January, 1947, in his request for future duty assignments, he asked for a post with the Second Division in the Mediterranean, and reminded Headquarters: “I served in the Gendarmerie d’Haiti during 1919–23 and the Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua in 1928–33. I believe that I am well qualified for guerrilla warfare or any other type of warfare that might develop in that area.”
The family life of the Pullers was quiet, as usual. Virginia Mac, the oldest child, went to dancing school and the Colonel went to her recital, where he drew attention by climbing over the knees of other spectators when his daughter had left the stage. He went out to puff at his pipe and returned only for her finale.
Once there was a call from Virginia Mac’s swimming teacher, to say that the child had injured her head in a fall at the pool. Puller paced the floor as they waited for her arrival, but told his mournful wife: “Don’t worry, dear. Puller heads are mighty tough.” He accurately forecast a minor injury.
There was an occasional laugh for the Colonel. Once Marine Headquarters sent a team of three colonels who had been transferred from aviation to infantry, to inspect Puller’s district. One of the officers confessed that they were green and hardly knew how to begin. The Colonel smiled disarmingly. “I imagine you have some kind of forms to fill out, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’ll make it easy for you. Don’t worry.”
He summoned his sergeant major and muttered: “Fill out these damned things and make ’em look good—but not too good. I’ll take these birds over to the bar, and they’ll pick ’em up about five o’clock.”
The inspection went as Puller had planned; the officers left happily, work done, and Puller’s district was rendered a model of perfection, in reports which would go into his record.
In July, 1948, Puller was moved once more—and this time he felt certain that he was nearing the end of his Corps career, for he was sent to command Marine barracks in Pearl Harbor. Barracks duty was even more deadly than Reserve duty and to be sentenced to it after performing so well in New Orleans was a clear signal that all was not well. Puller did not need to be reminded that he had the most distinguished record of any living Marine colonel, and the wound rankled.
His chief concern was for the Corps itself. He told his wife: “It’s the Young Turks again. They’re making room for young officers who’ve never served as platoon, company or battalion commanders by pushing out all the older and experienced officers. The law said that we could serve to age sixty-four, and they had that reduced to sixty-two. Even that wasn’t enough and they put across Selection Boards to rule that, in peacetime, one officer may be rated as better than another in his grade. They’ve even violated all Navy tradition by having the Secretary of the Navy declare that nobody can be selected for promotion unless he’s had staff duty. One of these days we’ll pay for this; I hope it won’t be disastrous. If war comes, we’ll have officers leading troops who’ve never commanded so much as a platoon in combat.”
He packed his family and they sailed on July 29, on the General J. C. Breckinridge from San Francisco.
The Pullers were settled in the finest of their service homes, a large, well-staffed house behind a hibiscus hedge, complete with a post swimming pool. While Mrs. Puller settled happily to the raising of her children, the Colonel gave the outpost a shakedown.
The machine guns, he noted, were only a bit more ready than they had been when he had first served at Pearl Harbor, twenty-three years before. This time they had plentiful equipment, but no one was training gunners; he put men to work immediately and soon the weapons were hammering away on the firing ranges.
His command consisted of 620 Marines and 250 Civil Service policemen, but he inspected the islands as if he had been sent to attend to national security. He saw that there were no fortifications except for the gunsites of the Coast Artillery—and this time the guns were out of place, dismounted and rolled aside to rust.
He found morale among his enlisted men low, and soon detected one reason. There were clubs for officers and for staff and top noncommissioned officers but the lower ranks of sergeants, corporals and privates had no place to go in leisure hours. They were finding recreation by going into Honolulu, often getting into trouble and overstaying their leave. Puller enlisted the help of wives and men, set up three new clubs, and cut absenteeism by 50 per cent.
In March of 1949 the Pearl Harbor commander, Rear Admiral S. S. Murray, gave Puller a rank of “Outstanding” in his fitness report, adding: “An outstanding, capable Marine officer, of high personal military character. Strongly recommended for promotion. Annual inspection found marked improvement in the past year under his command.”
Late in the year the threat of war in Korea rose; this was nowhere clearer than in the pages of the Korean press in Hawaii, which served many thousands of readers. Puller found a good source of information in one Wong, who had the shoe shop concession in the Marine barracks, an intelligent man of means and education.
“Wong, things seem to be in a mess in Korea.”
“Colonel, it can be no other way, since your people have divided Korea so. We are like the North and South in your own Civil War. Instead of cutting our country in two in that way, if you had cut us into East and West, so that each half could have some industries to keep the people alive, maybe we would have no trouble. As it is now, they will fight.”
“Wong, if I had my way, you’d be the chief advisor on Asiatic affairs for our State Department, instead of a barracks shoemaker.”
Other experts on Korea were less convincing to Puller. A U. S. Army general who had armed and trained the South Korean armies stopped in Hawaii on his way back home, and in a newspaper interview declared: “The army of South Korea is the finest in the history of Asia. It can move anywhere in the region, virtually unopposed. No previous Asiatic army can be compared with it, even that of Genghis Khan.”
Reports of border incidents in Korea continued, however, and some two months after the visiting general had made his reassuring statement, a North Korean force drove a South Korean battalion many miles into its own country in utter defeat. An enterprising American reporter hired a small plane and flew up to interview the defeated commander, whose words struck home with Puller:
“My men are brave enough, and know their job. What else can you expect of us but retreat? We have carbines from America—that is all. Will these light guns stand up against good Russian rifles, and mortars and machine guns and even tanks? We were not made ready.”
Puller was sickened by the familiar sign of the unpreparedness of America and her allies, but was not surprised.
Rear Admiral C. H. McMorris, the new commander at Pearl Harbor, made a fitness report on Puller in June, 1950, even more resounding than the one filed a year earlier: “An outstanding Marine officer in every respect who can be relied upon to do a fine job in any circumstances. I never knew a finer or more able officer and I know many. Immediate promotion is urged.”
Puller’s private reaction: “Unless we have a war right away, I’ll never make general.” He had requested, for his next duty, service with the Second Division in the U.S., or at the Corps Schools or Parris Island.
On June 25, 1950, North Korean troops poured across the 38th Parallel in strength and war had returned. President Truman announced that the nation was not at war, but ships, planes and men were in motion, and in the gathering of “a fire brigade,” a token force of Marines was sent to the front to aid American Army forces. The United Nations buzzed briefly before taking action; Puller recognized all the signs. He immediately asked for a modification of his orders and said urgently to Headquarters:
“Attention is invited to the fact that I served as an officer in Haiti and Nicaragua, and in the Pacific Theater for eight years prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This experience will prove of value in an assignment to combat duty in Korea.”
This was not enough, and he went to the cable office and at his own expense sent appeals to the Commandant, the Assistant Commandant, and the commander of the First Marine Division, begging for assignment to Korea. The cables cost him nineteen dollars.
In the days of waiting he saw that the South Korean battalion commander who was an early victim of the Communist attack had been tragically prophetic; the North Koreans were still cutting their way at will through large forces of South Koreans and brushing aside with almost the same ease the first American forces to be thrown against them. It appeared that the Communists were rolling toward complete victory.
In July, at last, Puller’s orders came; he called Virginia from his office. It was late Saturday afternoon:
“Can we leave for home tomorrow?”
“Have you gone mad?”
“No, I’m sending a driver for you and the children now, to get your shots.”
“Lewis, you know we can’t possibly get this house cleared, the furniture ready, and the children off in such time.”
“My orders are for Camp Pendleton, California, dear, and the matter is fairly urgent. A small war.”
“Well, we’ll try. I’ll call the McMorrises and tell them we can’t come to the party tonight.”
“No. We’ll go anyway. It may be a long time before we’re out on another one together.”
Mrs. Puller retained a memory of that night: “We had a wonderful time, a big crowd of Navy and Marine people, and Lewis was the life of the party. Did the hula, even, and brought down the house. No one would ever have guessed that he had orders to go immediately—and that he knew the kind of thing that was waiting for him in Korea.”
Admiral McMorris asked Mrs. Puller privately if she wanted the orders held up for a few days until the family was ready—but they went off by plane on Monday morning.
The Corps would allow him transportation for the family only to Camp Pendleton, his new post, and he would have to pay their fare cross-country to Virginia himself. He told a friend: “This damned war has already cost me $1019, and I’m not even in an outfit—much less on the scene.”