WAR ON A SHOESTRING
Puller arrived in Southern California in the heat of late July and found the San Diego area a bedlam. Marine Reservists thronged in from every corner of the nation; thousands of vehicles stored since World War II were being overhauled and driven to port; trains bore regulars from the East Coast. Unattached officers came from everywhere, without a call, volunteers for war. The First Marine Division was being created almost from scratch.
Puller went to the office of his division commander, the white-haired, soft-voiced Oliver P. Smith, with whom his friendship went back to student days at Fort Benning. He found even the calm Smith a bit unstrung:
“Lewie, you’ve got what you want. The old First Marines again. But I don’t know if you can do it. You’ve got to activate your regiment and begin loading in about ten days, by our orders. What do you think?”
“Has your staff made plans for me?”
“Only to put you in Area 17, and we can move you to Tent Camp 2 later.”
“It would take two days for the shift. If you’ll approve it I’ll meet the Quartermaster at the tent camp in half an hour.”
“Go to it.”
It was not hard to see, from Smith’s reports and the wall maps, the urgency of affairs in the bustling camp. The struggle for Korea seemed almost over. The Eighth Army had reeled back to the south and east and now defended itself against rising North Korean pressure from a perimeter around the port of Pusan. Marines already sent there seemed unlikely to change the course of the war.
General Smith knew only that General MacArthur desperately wanted the First Marine Division; he did not yet know where it was headed.
Puller soon walked the familiar old tenting area with a Quartermaster colonel; the place was a shambles. Nothing had been kept up since the end of the war, all was weed-grown; even the stoves had been cannibalized to keep other areas. Puller asked the supply officer to send him all possible equipment and before nightfall things began to move.
When Puller went back to headquarters Smith hailed him happily: “Good news, Lewie. They’re sending you three battalions of the Second Marines from Lejeune, already up to peacetime strength. You’ll need only forty or fifty per cent reserves to fill up.”
By the next morning, when the tent camp area had become a sea of newly risen canvas, the news was even better. Smith told Puller: “The Commandant is hand-picking your team, Lewie. He’s sending you two thousand post and station men. There’ll be almost no Reservists in the First Marines.”
As they streamed in, Puller found that more than 90 per cent of the officers and about 80 per cent of the enlisted men from the posts and stations were veterans of World War II. When the trainloads of regulars from Lejeune came in they had the look of well-drilled youngsters in fighting trim, though most were postwar recruits. Puller and a small staff fed the new arrivals into tents and made up outfits with a mixture of regulars and those from scattered posts.
There was little chance to improve the raw material he was given and Puller fought a losing battle for equipment. Strangely, dogtags were the hardest item to find in the rush to prepare for shipping to Korea and the men wore no identification until they reached Japan. Most training was limited to the rifle range.
The three battalion commanders who had come from Camp Lejeune reported their weapons were fair—but no new ones had been issued as they left camp. “We’ll see,” Puller said. “I’ll meet you on the range in the morning at daybreak.”
The rifles and automatic weapons were in poor condition and marksmanship with them was impossible. With the aid of an expert gunner, Puller checked every weapon in the regiment and discarded 67 per cent of all rifles as unfit for use. New ones hurried down from the supply base at Barstow, in allegedly perfect condition, were also poor and Puller ordered 37 per. cent of these surveyed out.
Puller wasted little time cursing the civilians who had stored these weapons at the end of World War II, supposedly in condition for use in the next emergency: “Hell, they didn’t even take the trouble to separate the broken ones from the good ones, and jammed ’em all into cosmoline without looking at them. What a way to run a country!”
Somehow, almost every man was supplied with a good weapon and fired twenty-five rounds with it under Puller’s eye. The commander spent most of his waking hours on the range, driving to see that firepower was provided, and that it would be accurate.
He was not long in making himself known to the rank and file, though he moved unobtrusively. Lieutenant George Chambers, a veteran platoon leader in B. Company of the First Battalion, noted that Puller habitually Wore old utilities as he worked and that passing privates thought he was only a gunnery sergeant: “Hi, Gunny!” Puller only grinned and waved; other colonels might have put men under arrest for less.
Lieutenant Lew Devine, a rifle platoon commander in Fox Company, was just out of Annapolis when he reported to Pendleton, nattily uniformed and sternly military. Devine reported in an old Quonset hut shed. As he talked with the captain on duty he noticed a man seated on the floor, chewing on a pipe. The collar of his utilities was turned up and the lieutenant could see no insignia.
“I tried to brush him off when he spoke to me,” Devine said. “I thought maybe he was some old character hanging on, the way he was telling the Captain how we’d kick hell out of the North Koreans when we got there. I thought maybe he was even someone they had to sweep up. I gave him a sharp reply about something, but he took no offense. Fortunately, he turned his head and I saw the eagles on his collar and I knew who he was in a flash. I had heard hundreds of tales about Puller, and he was a legend to me long before, in World War II.
“His greatest touch was his earthiness, his ability to make the men feel he was one of them. They’d literally have gone off to Moscow with him.”
The same appeal to the troops brought Puller one of the most faithful and capable companions of his career—Sergeant Orville Jones.
Jones was an Okinawa veteran of World War II, a big, slow-moving blond from Bremen, Indiana, who had been an unlicensed driver of steel trucks in the Midwest throughout his teens; he had torn down and reassembled his first old Ford at fifteen. He was a nine-year man in the Corps when he met Puller.
A Quartermaster man searched the camp for a man of combat experience as Puller’s driver—but he must be man who could read and make maps, and could judge distances. Jones resisted: “Tell him you couldn’t find a soul in this regiment. I know that old man from what they said in the war. You go with him and you’ll get killed off. He likes to go right on up there.”
That night Jones went to the improvised beer hall in his area and stood in the long line waiting to be served. He also caught his first glimpse of Puller in the flesh. The Colonel entered and sat at the bar. “Who’s in charge here?” he asked. A corporal indicated a lieutenant, who thrust his head through a door:
“Last night you ran out of beer, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, sir. I’m afraid we did.”
“And what you served was warm?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It won’t happen again, Lieutenant. You understand me?”
“I sure do, sir.”
“Maybe you don’t. These boys are going to war, and some of them won’t be coming back. They’re working like hell all day and half the night to get ready, most of ’em at least sixteen hours straight. What they do with their off hours is their own business, and if they want a couple of beers, Lieutenant, they’re going to get ’em.”
Jones made an instant decision to sign up as the Old Man’s driver, and the next day, after he had been accepted, went back to the beer hall: “I mean they laid in the suds. That next night you could hardly walk for the cans tossed in the gutters of company streets, and men sat around on the hills, drinking their beers after chow. Work never stopped, and morale was humming.”
Puller enlisted the help of Jones in finding another important recruit—a “shotgun,” or bodyguard, to ride in the jeep with them in Korea. Jones found him quickly: Jan Bodey, a San Francisco iceman in civilian life who had spent years in the Corps, and had gone out after World War II, the result of a San Diego street fight in which he had allegedly tied two sailors together by their arms. He was now back as a Frisco Reservist, and was reputed to be the strongest man in the Marines, as well as an expert with small arms.
The Colonel found an old friend, Major W. C. Reeves, whom he had known in Nicaragua; this old-timer came in with the regulars from Lejeune, and was soon Puller’s adjutant. Most of the officers around Puller were new to him: Lieutenant Colonels Robert Rickert, his executive officer, and the battalion commanders, Thomas L. Ridge, Allan Sutter, and Jack Hawkins.
Old and new, they seemed to blend into one happy team, as Puller saw them, from the moment the First Marines were told that they were shipping out for Korea: “I never saw a more contented bunch of men when they got the word, and knew this was it. All friction faded overnight, and with a real objective all were happy. There were no absences—and, as usual when war comes, some of the best fighting people came out of the brig. For the last few days we were organizing, the only missing people I had were those who had been hurt in traffic accidents.”
There was no time for combat loading; the ammunition, supplies, vehicles and weapons went on the ships at San Diego piecemeal as they arrived. There was a shortage of stevedores, as well. The Division did not go out in convoy, but had been moving a ship or two at a time until August 8, when loading began on the fleet of nineteen vessels which was to bear Puller’s First Regiment and others. Loading was complete by August 22, but a blown boiler delayed them further and they finally cleared the States on September 1. Puller still did not know their destination.
The ships were so jammed with equipment that there was limited room for training or exercises, but some officers gathered their companies on deck hatches for lectures in night patrol, guerrilla fighting, and weapons drill. Lieutenant Joe Fisher of I Company, a Massachusetts boy who had been seasoned at Iwo Jima, specialized in map reading and bayonet fighting practice with his men. Fisher was an impressive figure, six feet two inches tall and a muscular 235 pounds.
There was an effort at an exercise program and Puller did some stationary running with the men to keep in trim. He once saw half a dozen Marines chipping paint off a deck, assigned to the task by some Navy officer. He dismissed them: “Throw those chippers over the side and go about your business. Let the Navy paint the damned ship. You’re going to fight this war.”
Almost as soon as they left port Puller and other officers were bending over maps of Korea, speculating as to their landing place. Several fingers jabbed at the port of Inchon on the west coast as the obvious target for an amphibious strike. “It’ll be there,” Puller said, “providing the Eighth Army can hold on until we get in.”
There was no “official” news of their goal until they had docked in Japan, at Kobe, and Puller’s sergeants returned from the bordellos to report that the news was all over town: Inchon.
On some ships staff officers were locked up with the plans in the hectic process of untangling the details involved in history’s greatest amphibious operation. General MacArthur’s staff in Tokyo had begun the work on Operation Chromite, as the expedition was known, but the work went on almost around the world.
Behind Puller’s First Marines the Seventh Marines of Colonel Homer Litzenberg were on the way; some units were being taken from the Atlantic Fleet through the Panama Canal and even from the Mediterranean. General Smith and Division officers were flying to Japan. A third regiment, the Fifth, under Lieutenant Colonel Ray Murray, was to be pulled from the Pusan perimeter and fed into the convoy as it moved toward Inchon.
The target itself was fantastic, once planners got down to the facts behind the charts. MacArthur, known for much of his career as an “enemy” of the Marine Corps, had insisted, against all opposition, that the Division could end the war in Korea with this one blow and that it would be relatively inexpensive. He planned to remove the pressure from Pusan, cut off the North Korean armies, destroy them, and restore peace. The troops would be home by Christmas.
MacArthur clung to the plan but Marines were not optimistic. Inchon was a city of 250,000 population. Its “beaches” were in truth sea walls and jetties which screened factories, warehouses, salt evaporation pans, and marshy lowlands. Its harbor was one of the world’s most treacherous and at low tide was a series of mud flats and reefs. No other port in the East had such tidal conditions, for the average rise and fall of the tide was twenty-nine feet.
Within the next few months there were three possible landing dates with tide high enough to float the larger landing ships: September 15, October 11, November 3. The first date was chosen and the hour must be at peak tide, at 5:30 P.M. Within six hours the water would fall to only six feet. The channels into the port were so narrow and devious that the standby ships of the fleet must be thirty miles away when the landing craft hit the beaches.
Some of Puller’s officers were so deep in these plans when they docked at Kobe that they were not aware of a typhoon which swept over, damaging several ships, snapping a dozen hawsers and ruining much equipment. During and after this storm the ships had to be unloaded and reloaded, ready for combat. This required more ships; several rusty landing craft which the Japanese had used for fishing and coastal traffic were called into service.
Puller hailed a passing medical corpsman and went to a nearby Army hospital. “I want to talk with some of the casualties. I’ve got to find out what’s happening in Korea.”
He went up in an elevator with an Army doctor who seemed on the point of tears. “Go into the wards and see those kids and you’ll soon know more than you want about Korea. Take a look at all the self-inflicted wounds we’ve got—and those kids are so green they don’t even realize how obvious it was, just from the powder burns.”
Puller walked down many rows of beds, talking with men, many of them frightened and broken, and heard their tales of Korea. Puller was sobered, but did not despair. He told some younger officers that night: “There’s nothing wrong with American kids. Their leadership has just gone all to hell. There’s a whole hospital full of babies, you might say. They were never given a chance to grow into men. It won’t be that way with our Marines, I’ll tell you that.”
One day Puller talked with an Army corporal on the docks, a youngster just back from Korea who had a word of advice: “Colonel, keep them Marine leggings on your boys. The North Koreans call Marines the Crazy Yellowlegs, and they never attack ’em except by accident or ignorance.”
Puller inspected the troops in a nearby training camp and gave only one order: “Put the leggings back on the men. We wouldn’t want to disappoint anybody over there. Maybe we can throw some business to the Army.”
They left Kobe on September 12, heading across the Yellow Sea. Four of their old landing craft broke down and they waited, wallowing, as weather reports warned of another approaching typhoon. By the following night the Navy had the engines going again and the convoy moved on; the typhoon did not strike but there was much seasickness aboard the small craft.
The convoy grew larger as it approached Inchon—four carriers, two of them large, two cruisers, twenty-five destroyers and many smaller craft. For two days in advance the Navy pasted the key to Inchon defenses, the fortified island of Wolmi-do, and to confuse the enemy, planes and ships also struck nearby ports. Thus, on September 14, the armada neared its goal, the Marine and Navy command still dubious of a landing in the heart of an industrial city where the defense had every advantage—including that of the “best-known secret in the Orient,” the destination of the assault. Yet more and more officers were won by the commander’s assurance, which rang in a much-quoted MacArthurism from a strategy conference: “We shall land at Inchon and I shall crush them.”
In Puller’s ship, as in others, there was hurried preparation to the last moment. Briefing sessions were endless, as teams of officers came in to get the latest word. Puller’s reaction was unique. When the briefing officers were through—having shown a number of aerial photographs of Inchon harbor and its defenses and spoken ominously of casualties to come—the Colonel himself ended each session: “Don’t pay any attention to that kind of stuff. They might have guns in any of those spots he pointed out, but you can’t see ’em on the pictures, and I’ll bet they don’t have ’em. I think the ships and planes will clear ’em up pretty well. You can prepare for a successful landing, and tell that to your troops.”
Privately, Puller had reservations: “Here we are, about to try the biggest stunt of its kind, with a total of three hundred colonels in the Marine Corps to draw from—and two of our four assault regiments are commanded by lieutenant colonels; and seven of our twelve battalions are led by majors; good men, but we need experience here, if ever we did. The trouble is, we have so many officers on staff duty, there are not enough to go around for the fighting units.”
He said nothing of the sort to young officers who kept crowding in for his final briefing on D-day, until late on September 15, near the time for landing. While the fleet and its planes poured last barrages of shells and rockets into the city Puller spoke to a final group. Among the officers was Second Lieutenant Lyle Worster, of Gardiner, Maine, the assistant intelligence officer of the regiment, who never forgot the forthright little speech from the Colonel, unlike any that was heard in the fleet that day:
“We’re the most fortunate of men. Most times, professional soldiers have to wait twenty-five years or more for a war, but here we are, with only five years’ wait for this one.
“During that time we’ve sat on our fat duffs, drawing our pay. Now we’re getting a chance to earn it, to show the taxpayers we’re worth it. We’re going to work at our trade for a little while. We live by the sword, and if necessary we’ll be ready to die by the sword. Good luck. I’ll see you ashore.”
When the company officers had gone Puller explained: “Old man, when you have something to say to officers or men, make it snappy. The fewer words, the better. They won’t believe you if you shoot bull. When you face ranks of men and try that, you can hear ’em sigh in despair when you open your mouth, if they sense you’re a phony. They can usually look at you and tell. Maybe it doesn’t sound like it, but that’s an important thing in a Marine’s career.”
Somehow he found a moment alone to scratch a few lines in pencil to his wife, writing as if it might well be his last letter:
Sweet:
I will be unable to write you again for a few days but you, Virginia, Virginia Mac, Martha Leigh and Lewis, will be constantly in my thoughts. May God bless you always and provide for you, giving you much happiness and useful lives. You, my children, must, take advantage of all opportunities and develop into good Christians. Much love to all of you.
I love you, Virginia, I always have and I always will.
Lewis Puller was a little more than fifty-two years old. He was thirty-one years from his baptism of fire in the jungles of Haiti.