The F􏰀ire Brigade (Korea, Summer 1950)

Five years of demobilization, disengagement, and an overdependence on the promise of technology had left America woefully unprepared to fight a limited, unconventional war – the kind that would set the deadly tone and pattern for the rest of the century.

This was also the dawn of the Nuclear Age. In its early blush the U.S. Marines seemed abruptly antiquated, irrelevant, maybe even quaint. And ripe for massive “downsizing” or worse.

While the manpower levels of all armed forces shrank sharply from wartime peaks, the Marines were going down the tubes. Less than 75,000 Marines remained on active duty in mid-1950.

Secretary of Defense Louis Denfield made no bones of his dislike for the Corps (he abruptly banned the traditional celebration of the Corps’ November 10 birthday), and he vowed to cut another 10,000 Leathernecks by year’s end. Secretary Denfield wasn’t alone in his hostility to the Corps. President Truman, the former Army artillery officer, professed no love for his Marines.

Popular Army wartime commanders like Omar Bradley and Dwight Eisenhower led the charge to downsize the Corps to a ceremonial naval guard force. Bradley announced the atomic bomb had rendered amphibious landings obsolete. Eisenhower admitted to Commandant Vandegrift he had resented the Marines ever since their publicity coup at Belleau Wood in far-off 1918.

There were other motives at work. The Army wanted the Marines’ weapons and manpower billets; the new Air Force wanted Marine aircraft. Number-crunching Washington bureaucrats eyed the Corps as a fire sale.

The Marines also took a hard look for themselves at the effect of atomic weapons on the future of amphibious assault.

Vandegrift convened the best and brightest combat commanders in the Corps, including Generals Lemuel Shepherd and Oliver Smith, and Colonels Victor “Brute” Krulak and Merrill Twining.

Dispersion of the assault force was the obvious solution, and the critical limiting factor was the short-range, slow-moving, surface ship-to-shore movement. Transport helicopters, ferrying troops ashore from distant small-deck carriers, were the answer.

“Vertical assault” had become a reality in two years. Could the Marines hold on long enough to prove it out?

Before the end of 1948 the Marines acquired their first true transport helicopters, the Piaseki “Flying Bananas.” The Corps’ detractors remained underwhelmed. Nobody wanted a war. But the one thing that was coming would arrive as timely as the old U.S. Cavalry for the Marines.

In the predawn darkness of Sunday, June 25, 1950, armored units of the North Korean People’s Army (NKPA) breached the 38th Parallel and roared into South Korea. Followed closely by 90,000 infantry troops, veterans of the Chinese civil war, the Communist tank forces raced for the capital of Seoul.

Officials in Washington were in an uproar throughout the first week of the North Korean invasion. One who kept a cool head was General Clifton Cates, USMC, of Tiptonville, Tennessee, now the nineteenth commandant.

The NKPA overran Seoul in three days, then crossed the Han River and swarmed south toward Taejon, the fallback center for the disorganized Republic of Korea (ROK) forces. General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Allied Commander in the Far East, left Tokyo for Taejon to see the situation firsthand. He came back greatly alarmed.

MacArthur sought Truman’s permission for immediate deployment of American ground troops to help stem the tide. The president readily agreed. But the first U.S. Army troops to arrive were occupation troops, stale and softened by years of garrison duty in Japan, fed piecemeal into chaos.

The NKPA columns collided with the U.S. 24th Division at Taejon, shattered the green forces like an overripe melon, captured the division commander and the key city, and swept on toward Pusan, the last major port available for reinforcing U.S. and Allied forces. As American as apple pie was the old tradition of unreadiness at the beginning of a war. And here Marine Commandant Cates held an ace.

A well-trained, provisional air-ground brigade, the core of the 1st Marine Division, was fully armed and ready at Pendleton.

First he quietly alerted the 1st Marine Division to make all preparations for going to war. Then he got the message to MacArthur that a Marine brigade was ready to go – his for the asking. MacArthur responded immediately, requesting the Joint Chiefs of Staff to assign the Marine brigade to his beleaguered forces in Korea.

Three days after the JCS approved MacArthur’s request for the Marines, Brigadier General Edward Craig assumed command of the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade, an expeditionary force made up of whole cloth from 1st Division/1st Marine Aircraft Wing assets.

The brigade sailed on July 12, only five days after being organized.

The Marines debarked at Pusan on August 2, a month to the day after MacArthur’s initial request to the Joint Chiefs.

Army Lieutenant General Walton Walker commanded the Eighth Army, a thankless job. His force was in dire straits, having been hammered by the NKPA back into a 100-mile semicircle around the port of Pusan.

By the end of July, Walker had suffered 6,000 U.S. casualties; the ROK Army had lost 70,000. His only hope was to hold the perimeter to permit reinforcements to land at Pusan.

As the Marines debarked at the bustling Pusan docks, stiff-jointed and rubber-legged from their three-week sea cruise, word quickly spread that the enemy advance, now less than fifty miles away near Masan, was about to renew in greater strength. Walker told Craig his Marines would be going into the line immediately and could expect nigh-continuous commitment as the Eighth Army’s “fire brigade.”

The brigade’s aviators drew first blood. Corsair pilots of VMF-214, the fabled Black Sheep Squadron of Pappy Boyington fame, fired the first Marine rounds of the new war in anger, launching strikes from the carrier Sicily.

More Corsairs, these of VMF-323 flying off the Badoeng Strait, joined the fray. The third squadron, the night-fighters of VMF(N)-513, set up shop in Japan and commenced nightly raids across the Korean Strait, finding plentiful targets among the nocturnal resupply efforts of the NKPA.

Symbolically, the ground war for the Marines kicked off on August 7, eight years to the day since the 5th Marines’ historic landing at Guadalcanal. Now the 5th Marines and North Korean soldiers began to take each other’s measure for the first time.

The Marines prevailed in these initial battles along the Chinju-Masan corridor, blunting the NKPA attacks, driving them back a good distance, but it wasn’t pretty.

That the Marines fought consistently as a combinedarms team made the difference between victory and defeat.

Their small tank and artillery components surpassed themselves in supporting the infantry. But what really saved the Marine Brigade’s bacon at Pusan was the bravura performance of their Corsair pilots.

After driving the North Koreans back almost twentytwo miles in the first significant UN offensive action of the war, the Marine Brigade’s advance on Sachon was interrupted by word of an emergency in another sector of the perimeter. Twenty-five miles away, in the area of Chindong-ni, two Army artillery battalions had been overrun by NKPA forces. A major breakthrough seemed imminent.

General Walker called for his “fire brigade,” ordering General Craig to assist the beleaguered Army units. The promising Chinju-Masan counteroffensive had to be abandoned.

Craig rushed Lieutenant Colonel Robert Taplett’s battalion of the 5th Marines to Chindong-ni. Taplett arrived in good order, stanched the rupture, restored the lines. Craig, now operating on two fronts, shuttled back and forth effectively by helicopter.

But Walker now faced a far greater emergency. Near Miryang, seventy-five miles farther north, the NKPA 4th Division had forced a crossing of the Naktong River at several points, its troops now consolidating their strength among a nest of steep ridges before snaking eastward toward Miryang.

If Miryang fell, the provisional ROK capital of Taegu would almost certainly follow. Loss of Taegu would prompt the loss of Pusan and cause the withdrawal of UN forces from Korea altogether.