First at the front: the US Marines

27 Nov, 2001 12:07 PM6 mins to read

In two dozen wars, the Marines have been America's spearhead, says RUPERT CORNWELL.

They are the ones with the buzz cuts and the impossibly shiny boots you see at every United States ceremonial occasion.

They are the ones who protect American embassies, the ones standing to attention with their heads tilted upwards - as if on page one of the training manual there was a specific instruction that their gaze should not fall on other, more ordinary, mortals.

And if you look at it from their point of view, why not? These are the US Marines, the elite corps that every American kid who dreams of the armed forces wants to join, the guys who get the most glamorous assignments, the guys who go in first.

And now, inevitably, it has happened again.

If ever there was a sign that this latest Afghan war is close to the endgame, it was the news that hundreds of Marines had landed at an airstrip near Kandahar to carry the fight against the Taleban, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to their last major redoubt.

The airstrikes will continue, of course, as will the use of Afghan anti-Taleban forces. But the arrival of the Marines signals the final phase - or, at least, what US commanders pray will be the final phase - when American troops will fight on the ground against a visible enemy, perhaps even in the streets of Kandahar, to finish the job.

And, you sense, somehow, that this is how the American people want it.

Since Vietnam, zero-casualty war, or the nearest thing available, has been the Pentagon's creed. Such was the so-called Powell Doctrine, named after the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, now Secretary of State, whereby you went to war only when you had amassed overwhelming force for a clear purpose.

To an extent, that mindset remains. With their attack helicopters, armoured personnel carriers and Harrier jump jets, the Marines will have superior firepower, and a mobility allowing them to bring deadly force in the pursuit of bin Laden and his lieutenants.

But the terrain and the semi-guerrilla nature of this war make it a perilous enterprise.

Equally, however, after September 11, the national aversion to bodybags is weaker.

"Americans must be prepared for loss of life, there will be sacrifice," George W. Bush has warned his people, preparing them for casualties. And, for most Americans, if that is what is needed to avenge the thousands who died at the World Trade Center, then so be it.

So, once again, it falls to the Marines. In two dozen wars and conflicts since the republic's founding, they have been in the front line. Maybe it was the first President, George Washington himself, who first uttered that phrase beloved of schoolboys everywhere, "Send in the Marines", when they entered action against the British in the Revolutionary War.

In that conflict, the Marines suffered the first 49 of the 40,178 casualties that they have incurred in the 226 years since the Second Continental Congress signed the law that set up two battalions of Marines under Captain Samuel Nicolas.

It has been a mostly glittering history since, burnished further by what even critics concede is a supremely polished public relations operation, as well as various lapidary quotes, sometimes in the heat of battle, which have entered military lore.

"Casualties many. Percentage of dead not known. Combat efficiency: we are winning," Colonel David Shoup reported from the bloody landings at Tarawa Atoll in November 1943, a turning point in the Pacific war against the Japanese.

It was one of the first actions at which the media were present in force. The US public was appalled at pictures of bodies of Marines washing ashore, amid reports of 1000 casualties in just three days. But only 17 of 4800 Japanese defenders survived. Thus are legends forged.

Tarawa was, moreover, a perfect illustration of how the Marines epitomise US strategy. At least until September 11, the mainland US had been inviolate for more than 150 years. Washington's wars were abroad. They required not stout defence of the motherland, but landings and invasions abroad, by air but predominantly by sea.

Every country has its Army, Air Force and Navy. Only the US has a specifically amphibious branch of its armed forces, equal in status to (and much envied by) its three less glamorous sisters, developed and equipped for precisely this sort of overseas operation.

The First World War expeditionary force, the invasion of Europe in 1943 and 1944, Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf - all, for better or worse, exemplify the sort of war the Marines and America fight.

There have been failures of course - most obviously Vietnam, in which the Marines suffered 13,000 dead, a quarter of all US fatalities (even though with a total strength of about 170,000, the Corps is barely a third the size of the Army).

Then there was the wretched episode of Somalia 1993, a case-study in the dangers of "mission-creep".

Even more futile was the Beirut bombing of 1983, when a truck packed with explosives drove in to barracks housing 350 Marines on an ill-conceived peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, killing 240 as they slept.

Later, Ronald Reagan would call that Sunday of October 23, 1983, "the saddest day my presidency, perhaps the saddest day of my life". Four months later, the Marines were out of Lebanon.

The only reason the debacle did not damage his presidency more seriously was that within two days he had ordered the invasion of Grenada, in the name of keeping Cuban-style communism out of the rest of the Caribbean.

And who led the operation? The Marines, naturally - 400 of them, ferried in from the helicopter carrier USS Guam.

Today, the lesson of Beirut has been taken to heart. In a more innocent time, a war against Afghanistan might have seen the Marines going in from a borrowed land base, perhaps in Pakistan, maybe complete with a barracks that would have been a perfect target for an Islamic suicide bomber.

Not now. Instead, the Marines have laid on the logistical show of a helicopter-borne full-kit landing from six amphibious assault ships, 650km away in the Arabian Sea, to take control of a desert landing strip deep inside enemy territory.

"The New York school of ballet could not have orchestrated a more intricate move more flawlessly," General James Mattis said rather incongruously of the Marines' seizure of the airstrip.

It is a dramatic new development in a war which has so far been fought mostly by the Americans from the air, not least because after 23 years of war Afghanistan is one of the most heavily mined areas in the world.

But now the men are there. Of such deeds is US Marines history made.

- INDEPENDENT

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