Originally published in August 2003 Marine Corps Gazette
The author provides a review of Marine Corps amphibious operations during the Cold War—with some insightful observations.
Testifying before the Honorable Carl Vinson and the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday afternoon, 19 October 1949, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Omar N. Bradley predicted: “Large-scale amphibious operations such as those in Sicily and Normandy will never occur again.”1 This sounded like an amphibious eulogy to the Marine Corps, the Service charged by law with developing “those phases of amphibious operations which pertain to the tactics, technique, and equipment employed by landing forces.”2
Since the Inchon landing in 1950, critics have quoted Bradley’s prediction to cliché. Marines today still ridicule Bradley. This review of amphibious warfare since 1945 emphasizes four major points:
• First, Omar Bradley was right: There haven’t been any large-scale amphibious assaults—“forcible entries” from the sea—since World War II. Not of the magnitude Bradley meant when he made his prediction.
• Second, amphibious operations themselves had utility in the atomic age. In fact, amphibious warfare emerged as an instrument of diplomacy and a component of American foreign policy.
• Third, post-World War II amphibious warfare studies yielded the concepts of vertical envelopment, air mobility, naval expeditionary forces, and maritime prepositioned supplies and equipment.
• Fourth, and most importantly, the use of amphibious forces during the past five decades demonstrated the importance of combat readiness during peacetime. After World War II the United States could no longer rely on wartime mobilization and expansion for national security. The amphibious operations discussed here were all undertaken overseas, on short notice, by joint forces in response to crises.
Bradley Was Right
Eight divisions of the North Korean Peoples’ Army crashed across the 38th parallel early on Sunday morning, 25 June 1950. A week later, Far East commander Douglas MacArthur visited the front, stood along the banks of the Han River, and conceived an amphibious counterstroke aimed at the recapture of the South Korean capital of Seoul. MacArthur had neither the troops nor the ships to carry out his plan at the time. The forces he did have had their hands full. A succession of losses and retreats during July and August backed the U.S. Eighth Army into the southeastern corner of the Korean peninsula.
It was a desperate situation. By September, Eighth Army had its back to the port of Pusan. MacArthur’s vision became Operation Chromite, a seaborne assault at the port of Inchon, halfway up the peninsula along the west coast, followed by an overland campaign to Seoul. It was a bold strike, this amphibious end run; one few agreed with at the time. Yet it succeeded beyond all expectations—even MacArthur’s. Chromite reversed the course of the Korean War.3
Inchon was (and still is) the largest American amphibious assault actually executed since 1945. The joint task force assembled at sea included 230 ships and some 71,000 Army, Navy, and Marine Corps personnel. Two reinforced infantry regiments from the 1st Marine Division formed the assault element of the landing force. Roughly 25,000 personnel came ashore on D-day. Defending Inchon were just 2 battalions (about 2,200 personnel) of North Korean service troops supported by 8 76mm coastal guns. By nightfall, the landing force had reached its objectives with relatively few casualties.4
“Compared with the Japanese,” said the commander of one of the assault regiments,
these Reds have been very inferior. When I came over the seawall I saw only one dead Communist. If the Japs had been on that side of the wall, there would have been Japs piled up on one side and Marines piled up on the other.5
Another officer in the landing force added:
There was not the kind of stubborn resistance at the water’s edge, or even immediately inland, like you would have expected from the Japanese or the Germans.6
MacArthur knew Inchon was lightly defended; that was one of the reasons he selected it as an objective. In fact, MacArthur conceived Chromite as an amphibious envelopment, not a forcible entry from the sea.7
Inchon thus did not prove false Omar Bradley’s prediction about amphibious operations. It was an operation conceived by an imaginative World War II general, planned using World War II doctrine, and executed by a hastily assembled landing force—without rehearsal, under horrific hydrographic conditions. It was not even remotely similar in scope to the landings at Sicily or Normandy. On 10 July 1943, some 2,500 ships landed 2 field armies at Sicily—about 180,000 men. On 6 June 1944, about 2,700 ships and landing craft ferried some 100,000 Allied troops across the English Channel to Normandy.
The events preceding Inchon underscored the importance of combat readiness. The 3-year-old Air Force was still drafting its baseline doctrine for operations in 1950. During the first 60 days of the war, it dropped 30,000 tons of bombs and hit every target—every bridge, ammunition stockpile, and factory. So desperate was the situation that strategic bombers, typically employed far behind enemy lines on interdiction missions, strafed and bombed tactical targets directly in front of Eighth Army. Airpower alone, though, was not enough to reverse the situation.8
Committed piecemeal to Korea from occupation duty in Japan and emaciated from austere post-war defense cuts, the original divisions that comprised Eighth Army were not ready for combat. The Marines, too, felt the dead hand of starvation. They mobilized their entire organized Reserve and cannibalized their existing units in a scramble to reinforce Eighth Army at Pusan and bring to war strength the 1st Division for Inchon. The Navy fared no better. Though it quickly gained control of the seas, it had to recommission mothballed ships and commit virtually every surface combatant in the Far East to support Operation CHROMITE. Even still, 34 of the 230 ships in the invasion armada came from the Japanese Navy.9
Notwithstanding Inchon and the Korean War, U.S. amphibious forces since 1945 have maintained presence abroad, quelled unrest, evacuated noncombatants, provided disaster relief, and paved the way for additional forces. The United States did not use amphibious forces to conquer territory or win wars. Committing them to humanitarian, disaster relief, and other operations short of war, the United States used amphibious forces more often in support of foreign policy (the State Department) than national security (the Defense Department).
During the Suez Canal crisis in 1956, a Marine battalion landing team afloat in the Mediterranean with the U.S. Sixth Fleet evacuated 1,500 people (mostly Americans) from Alexandria, Egypt. Two years later, three Marine battalions landed at Lebanon from 15 to 16 July 1958, secured Beirut International Airport and the American Embassy, facilitated the fly-in of an Army airborne brigade and another Marine battalion, and helped preserve Lebanese sovereignty.10
About 1,200 Mediterranean-based Marines landed at Beirut between 1982 and 1984. As part of the multinational force, their duties included evacuating Palestinians and Americans, protecting the airport, and the vague mission of reasserting Lebanese sovereignty over Beirut (which eventually cost almost 250 American lives). On 25 October 1983, some 2,200 Army and 500 Marine forces landed on Grenada to seize airports, ensure the safety of American citizens and, as part of a larger invasion force, keep a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary group out of power.11
From 25 May 1990 to 9 January 1991, the 22d and 26th Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs) evacuated from Monrovia, Liberia more than 2,400 people, more than 200 of whom were Americans. During mid-April 1991, then-Col. James L. Jones’s 24th MEU deployed from the Mediterranean, established a forward operating base in Silopi, Turkey, and traversed more than 400 miles overland into northern Iraq. Once there, they supported a coalition in assisting Kurdish tribesmen who sought independence and openly rebelled, and to whom Iraqi President Saddam Hussein responded with mustard and cyanide gas—driving them into the mountains along the Turkish border.12
A cyclone devastated the coastal islands and regions of Bangladesh during the night of 29 April 1991. The 5th Marine Expeditionary Brigade delivered more than 700,000 pounds of supplies in 9 days. In Afghanistan, in an operation resembling the one in northern Iraq, the 15th and 26th MEUs maneuvered deep inland from the Arabian Gulf using helicopters and, along with elements of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, secured forward operating base Camp Rhino and Kandahar International Airport.13
These were all instances where the United States used amphibious forces. Yet, as Omar Bradley predicted, these operations bore little resemblance to the seaborne assaults of World War II.
Amphibious Developments
Threat prediction and defense planning after World War II would have challenged the most prescient clairvoyant. President Harry S Truman’s ambitious goals abroad included—at one time or other—the peaceful reformation of Japan, support of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Government in China, the quashing of the Communist-inspired uprising in Greece, and the reunification of Korea. From these lofty aims came a national security strategy focused on fighting one country (the Soviet Union) in one theater of operations (Europe). Here were the roots of a foreign policy focused on containing Soviet power and influence. Here was the onset of the Cold War.14
The Marine Corps’s concept of vertical envelopment hatched from an ice cream cone-shaped radioactive cloud over Bikini Lagoon in May 1946. Fleet Marine Forces Pacific commander LtGen Roy S. Geiger witnessed the atomic bomb tests and afterward sent a report to Gen Alexander A. Vandegrift, Commandant of the Marine Corps. “Future amphibious operations,” Geiger wrote, would be undertaken “by much smaller expeditionary forces.” He pictured these forces as “highly trained” and lightly equipped”; they would come from the sea “by air . . . with a greater degree of surprise and speed than has ever heretofore [been] visualized.” Geiger concluded, “I cannot visualize another landing such as was executed at Normandy.”15
Gen Vandegrift turned Geiger’s letter over to a board of Marine officers at Quantico, directed them to reevaluate current doctrine and, after “thorough research and deliberation,” develop the “broad concepts and principles” the Marine Corps should follow for it to “wage successful amphibious warfare . . . against an enemy armed with the atomic explosive.”16 From the Quantico think tank came Phib–31, Amphibious Operations—Employment of Helicopters (Tentative). “We had so little to go on,” said one of the authors, then-Col Victor H. Krulak. “No data; just conviction.”17 The Marines did not have any helicopters either, but that had never stopped them before. Fourteen years prior—before it had landing craft—the Corps published The Tentative Manual for Landing Operations (1934).18 The authors of Phib–31 believed they had the answer to the Marine Corps’ amphibious prayer in the helicopter, which they perceived as an airborne landing craft that could make reality the concept of vertical envelopment. While moving from its ships to the shore, an airborne landing force could disperse, then reconstitute on land.19
The U.S. Army also believed in the helicopter. What vertical envelopment was to the Marines and amphibious warfare, air mobility was to the Army and battlefield maneuver. Helicopters, some astute Army officers quickly surmised, were a means of combining aviation, light infantry, and artillery to generate speed, shock, and mobility. In August 1952 the Army moved to form 12 helicopter battalions.20
In December 1955 the Corps published its concept of future amphibious operations, Landing Force Bulletin Number 17.
We must adapt our organization and equipment, and our tactics, techniques and training, so as to place major stress on the helicopter assault,
said the bulletin. The Marines believed future amphibious operations would bear little resemblance to the World War II and Inchon-style surface assaults:
As new amphibious ships join the fleet, and as helicopters with greater load capacity become available in quantity, the beach assault can be reduced further. . . . When the [vertical envelopment] concept is fully realized, the beach assault can be eliminated altogether, leaving only follow-up troops and supplies, exploitation forces, and base-development units and material to be landed over beaches or through ports in the beachhead area.21
Another amphibious warfare study group met in Quantico less than a year later. Chaired by MajGen Robert E. Hogaboom, the Fleet Marine Force Organization and Composition Board convened in June 1956 and adjourned 6 months later. The Hogaboom Board pronounced sound the Marine Corps’ basic precepts of amphibious warfare and endorsed the concept of vertical envelopment. But the officers on the board doubted the Navy and Marine Corps would ever have enough ships and helicopters to land a full division in assault. The obvious solution was airlift. There would never be enough ships to move all of the Corps’ personnel and equipment; future amphibious operations would feature a combination of surface and helo landings by seabased assault battalions with follow-on echelons flown into theater.22
Ships were the final piece to the amphibious puzzle. By June 1958 the Marines had reorganized its combat units. With more than 200 operational helicopters, the Corps was ready to begin moving inland from sea by air. But the Navy had only one converted Casablanca-class escort carrier to support vertical envelopment. Frustrated that technology had outrun equipment, Marine Commandant Randolph McC. Pate wrote to the Chief of Naval Operations: “Only one major component of this weapons system [the helicopter] is missing—the modern amphibious assault ship.” The situation in 1958, said Pate, “is analogous to one which would exist if the Polaris [missile] were in being, but the submarines to carry it were still years in the future.”23
During 1959 the Navy converted three World War II-era Essex-class carriers to helicopter amphibious assault ships (LPHs). In 1961 the Navy commissioned the first ship designed from the keel up to support vertical envelopment, the Iwo Jima-class LPH. The 18,000-ton Iwo Jima led to the 39,300-ton Tarawa class (LHA) (1976). The capital ship of the amphibious fleet today is the 40,500-ton Wasp (LHD) (1989), a troop-transport, aircraft carrier, cargo, and hospital ship rolled into one.
The Cold War ran the gamut from face-off (1945–47) to crescendo (1947–62) to détente (1963–79) to renewal (1980–86). In 1989 the Baltic States broke from the Soviet Union. The military structure of the Warsaw Pact dissolved in March 1991; 4 months later so, too, did the political organization. By the end of the year, the Soviet Union itself had dissolved—along with its 1,700-ship fleet. The Cold War was over.
In 1992 the Navy and Marine Corps published the White Paper, From the Sea: A New Direction for the Naval Services. Therein the Navy and Marine Corps charted their post-Cold War course—“a fundamental shift away from open-ocean warfighting on the sea toward joint operations conducted from the sea.”24 Gone was the Mahanian clash between battle fleets. In was a naval strategy stressing operations in the littorals (coastal regions) and inland power projection. Reflecting the joint operations ashore during 1991 in Northern Iraq and Bangladesh, From the Sea recast amphibious forces as “naval expeditionary forces,” and included Army, Air Force, and Coast Guard forces in the new definition. From the Sea thus emphasized the jointness of amphibious (expeditionary) operations.
Yet the basics remain the same today. Seaborne expeditionary operations require maritime and air superiority. The Navy faces the threat of landbased antiship missiles, precision guided munitions, and mined coastal waters—impediments that helped keep a 31-ship amphibious task force and its 17,000 embarked Marines off shore during the Persian Gulf War. The size of the amphibious fleet today is a shadow of the past. There are fewer than 40 ships in active service. The Air Force and Military Sealift Command carry personnel, supplies, and equipment into theater that, in the past, arrived on amphibious ships.
The five-decade standoff between superpowers had held in check ethnic, cultural, and regional conflicts. Just as the advent of atomic weaponry and the Cold War were antecedent to vertical envelopment and the post-World War II amphibious study boards, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing chaos inspired another round of conceptual studies and self-examinations by the Marine Corps. Out of Quantico came the naval expeditionary concepts of Over the Horizon (1991), Operational Maneuver from the Sea (OMFTS) (1996), and Expeditionary Maneuver Warfare (2001).
“Sea-based logistics, sea-based fire support, and the use of the sea as a medium for tactical and operational movement,” OMFTS said, would permit landing forces to “move directly from their ships to the objectives, whether those objectives are located on the shoreline or far inland.”25 Then-Commandant Charles C. Krulak predicted: “No longer will Marines wade the bloody surf.”26 Of course, the Marines had not—and still have not—waded ashore through bloody surf since 1945. U.S. amphibious forces had, since the end of World War II, entered more than a dozen Third World and strife-ridden countries on short notice while the leadership of the United States fused economic, diplomatic, and military power to further American interests abroad.
Bradley Was Also Wrong . . . And So Were His Critics
History supports the full text of Omar Bradley’s prediction—not the truncated version that, out of context, implied that the United States would never conduct another amphibious operation. Flawed, however, were the broader implications of Bradley’s testimony. “Far too large” and a “wasteful duplication of the Army’s mission” was how he characterized the Marines, whom he believed should have no unit larger than a regiment. “Aircraft carriers could not be justified to support future amphibious operations,” Bradley added, sinking deeper to the depths of “Davy Jones’s Locker.”27
Critics never let Bradley forget his prediction after the Inchon landing. The incessant refrain over the years of, “You were wrong, Gen Bradley,” misrepresented the lessons of Korea and obfuscated the changes in amphibious warfare. It also preserved for ahistorical critics the specter of the bloody World War II beach assault, an image bearing little resemblance to postwar amphibious operations.
Ambitious and obscure foreign policy goals confront defense officials after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, much as they did after World War II. President George W. Bush seeks the end of global terrorism, peace in the Middle East, a stable government in Afghanistan, and weapons of mass destruction programs destroyed in Iraq. None of these goals translates easily to military programs. Amphibious forces proved well-suited for proxy conflicts and operations short of war during the first five decades of the atomic age; all indications are they will continue to have utility in the 21st century.
Notes
1. House Committee on Armed Services, The National Defense Program—Unification and Strategy, Hearings, 81st Congress, 1st session, October 1949, Government Printing Office (GPO), Washington, DC, 1949. The complete transcript of the hearings on Wednesday, 19 October: pp. 451–541; Bradley’s complete testimony: pp. 515-40; his prediction about “large-scale” amphibious operations: p. 521. Also see: Omar Bradley and Clay Blair, A General’s Life: An Autobiography, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1983, pp. 510–3, 715 n. 6.
2. House Committee on Armed Services, National Security Act of 1947 (P.L. 253, 80th Congress, 1st session, 1947).
3. Unless noted otherwise, all operational details about the Inchon operation are taken from “1st Marine Division Special Action Report, Inchon-Seoul Operation,” 20 April 1951, Marine Corps Historical Center (MCHC); Lynn Montross and Capt Nicholas Canzona, The Inchon-Seoul Operation, vol. 2, U.S. Marine Operations in Korea, Historical Division, Headquarters Marine Corps (HQMC), Washington, DC, 1955; Col Robert Debs Heinl, Jr., Victory at High Tide: The Inchon-Seoul Campaign, Nautical & Aviation Publishing, Baltimore, MD, 1979; Roy E. Appleman, The United States Army in the Korean War: South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu, Center of Military History, Washington, DC, 1986, pp. 488–514.
4. The Inchon-Seoul Operation, pp. 321–2; MajGen Edward A. Craig interview, 8 May 1951, pp. 45–46, MCHC, Washington, DC.
5. Col Lewis B. Puller, commander of the 1st Marine Regiment at Inchon, quoted in LtCol Jon T. Hoffman, USMCR, CHESTY: The Story of Lieutenant General Lewis B. Puller, USMC, Random House, New York, 2001, p. 341.
6. BGen Edwin H. Simmons interview, 9 July 1985, MCHC, pp. 7–8. Then-Maj Simmons landed at Inchon with 3d Battalion, 1st Marines.
7. Headquarters, X Corps, “Operation Chromite,” 15 August–30 September 1950, pp. 5–6, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, PA; Craig interview, pp. 45–46; memoirs of Gen Lemuel C. Shepherd, Jr. (1967), pp. 169–70, Marine Corps Research Center (MCRC), Quantico. MacArthur tells of how he conceived the landing at Inchon in his memoirs, Reminiscences, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1964, pp. 349–50.
8. Crane, Conrad C., American Airpower Strategy in Korea, 1950–1953, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2000, pp. 23–39; Robert F. Futrell, The United States Air Force in Korea, rev. ed., Office of Air Force History, Washington, DC, 1983, pp. 1–146.
9. Schnabel, James F., The United States Army in the Korean War: Policy and Direction: The First Year, Center of Military History, Washington, DC, 1992, pp. 61–138; Craig interview, pp. 4–10; Lynn Montross and Capt Nicholas A. Canzona, The Pusan Perimeter, GPO, Washington, DC, 1954, pp. 49–54.
10. Wade, BGen Sidney S., “Operation BLUEBAT,” Marine Corps Gazette, July 1959, pp. 10–23; Harry A. Hadd, “Orders Firm But Flexible,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 88, October 1962, pp. 81–89; Robert McClintock, “The American Landing in Lebanon,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 88, October 1962, pp. 65–79; Jack Shulimson, Marines in Lebanon 1958, History and Museums Division, Washington, DC, 1983; Margaret M. Bodron, “U.S. Intervention in Lebanon—1958,” Military Review 56, February 1976, pp. 66–76.
11. Frank, Benis M., U.S. Marines in Lebanon, 1982–1984, History and Museums Division, HQMC, 1987; LtCol Ronald H. Spector, U.S. Marines in Grenada, 1983, History and Museums Division, HQMC, 1987; Allan R. Millett, Semper Fidelis: The History of the United States Marine Corps, 2d ed., Free Press, New York, 1991, pp. 625–29.
12. Sachtleben, LtCol Glen R., “Operation SHARP EDGE: The Corps’ MEU(SOC) Program in Action,” Marine Corps Gazette, November 1991, pp. 77–86; Col James L. Jones, “Operation PROVIDE COMFORT: Humanitarian and Security Assistance in Northern Iraq,” Marine Corps Gazette, November 1991, pp. 99–107; LTC Gordon W. Rudd, USA, “The 24th MEU(SOC) and Operation PROVIDE COMFORT: A Second Look,” Marine Corps Gazette, February 1993, pp. 20–22.
13. Selvage, Col Donald R., “Operation Sea Angel: Bangladesh Disaster Relief,” Marine Corps Gazette, November 1991, pp. 89–97.
14. Weigley, Russell F., The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Foreign Policy, Macmillan, New York, 1973, pp. 363–81; Allan R. Millett and Peter S. Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America, 2d ed., Free Press, New York, 1993, pp. 494–98; Semper Fidelis, pp. 445–52, 464–74, 518–43.
15. Geiger, LtGen Roy S. to Gen Alexander A. Vandegrift, 21 August 1946, Folder 2, Box 18, O.P. Smith Papers (OPSP), MCRC.
16. Commandant of the Marine Corps to Chairman, Special Board, 16 September 1946, Folder 2, Box 18, OPSP, MCRC.
17. Krulak, LtGen Victor H. to Director, Marine Corps History, 3 August 1970, quoted in LtCol Kenneth J. Clifford, USMCR, Progress and Purpose: A Developmental History of the United States Marine Corps, 1900–1970, History and Museums Division, HQMC, 1973, p. 76.
18. Krulak, LtGen Victor H., First to Fight: An Inside View of the U.S. Marine Corps, Naval Institute, Annapolis, MD, 1984, pp. 88–99; Clifford, Progress and Purpose, pp. 46–57.
19. Memoirs of BGen Edward C. Dyer (1970), pp. 195–236, MCRC; memoirs of LtGen Victor H. Krulak (1973), pp. 114–18, MCRC. Dyer coauthored Phib–31 and commanded the Marine Corps’s first helicopter squadron, HMX–1.
20. Tolson, LtGen John J., Airmobility, 1961–1971, Department of the Army, Washington, DC, 1989, pp. 3–24.
21. Landing Force Bulletin Number 17, Concept of Future of Amphibious Operations, 13 December 1955, Historical Amphibious Files (HAF) 453, MCRC; LtCol Eugene W. Rawlings, The Marines and Helicopters, 1946–1962, History and Museums Division, HQMC, 1976, pp. 65–66.
22. The full text of the Hogaboom Report appears as Headquarters Marine Corps, “Report of the Fleet Marine Force Organization and Composition Board,” 7 January 1957, HAF, MCRC. A series of articles summarizing the board’s findings appeared from April to July 1957 in the Marine Corps Gazette. Also see LtGen William K. Jones, “The Hogaboom Board,” Marine Corps Gazette, August 2000, pp. 51–53. For a summary of all the amphibious study boards convened by the Marine Corps during the 1950s, see Clifford, Progress and Purpose, pp. 84–88.
23. Commandant of the Marine Corps to Chief of Naval Operations, 16 June 1958, “Use of CVE Aircraft Carriers as interim LPHs to support the Vertical Amphibious Assault,” quoted in Rawlings, Marines and Helicopters, p. 22.
24. O’Keefe, Hon Sean C., ADM Frank B. Kelso II, Gen Carl E. Mundy, Jr., “. . . From the Sea: A New Direction for the Naval Services,” Marine Corps Gazette, November 1992, p. 19. The Navy and Marine Corps updated and expanded From the Sea in 1994 with Forward . . . From the Sea that included naval expeditionary operations in Somalia (December 1992 and October 1993), Kenya (April 1994), and Uganda (August 1994). See Honorable John H. Dalton, ADM Jeremy M. Boorda, Gen Carl E. Mundy, Jr., “Forward . . . From the Sea,” Marine Corps Gazette, October 1994, pp. 32–35.
25. U.S. Marine Corps, OPerational Maneuver From the Sea, HQMC, 1996, pp. 2, 12–13.
26. Quoted in BGen Edwin H. Simmons, The United States Marines: A History, 3d ed., Naval Institute, Annapolis, MD, 1998, p. 329.
27. Bradley, Omar Nelson and Clay Blair, A General’s Life: An Autobiography, Simon and Schuster, NY, 1983, pp. 499, 510–3; Allan R. Millett, In Many a Strife: General Gerald C. Thomas and the U.S. Marine Corps 1917–1956, Naval Institute, Annapolis, MD, 1993, pp. 280, 419 nn. 8, 9; House Committee on Armed Services, Hearings, 81st Congress, 1st session, October 1949, pp. 451–541.
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