November 2006

Giants of the Corps
The Early Career of a Marine Legend: General Eddie Craig

MajGen Eddie Craig was the Director, Marine Corps Reserve when he retired in 1951. He earned combat honors in the Banana Wars; WW II, including Iwo Jima; and in Korea at the Pusan Perimeter and Inchon landings. Upon retirement, he was promoted to lieutenant general.

Story by Dick Camp • Photo courtesy of the author

Twenty-year-old St. John’s Military Academy student Edward A. “Eddie” Craig scanned the newspaper’s special edition. “WAR,” the headline proclaimed. He rushed to the recruiting office, like thousands of other patriotic young men.

“I couldn’t get a commission in the Army until I was 21, but I could get one in the Marines.” Craig sent a telegram to his Army doctor father: “I’m entering the U.S. Marine Corps. I have a chance for a commission.” He received an immediate emphatic response: “Do not join the U.S. Marines under any circumstance, a terrible bunch of drunks and bums!”

Craig ignored the guidance and went on to become one of the Corps’ premier combat leaders. Eddie Craig led the 9th Marines during the Bougainville and Guam campaigns and planned the landing on Iwo Jima during World War II. He also commanded the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade in the Pusan Perimeter during the Korean War. He retired as a lieutenant general after serving for almost 34 years. And, yes, his father came to love Marines!

After being commissioned a second lieutenant on 23 Aug. 1917, Craig thought he was headed for the WW I battlefields of France. He was bitterly disappointed when “[they] got clear of land and the ship headed south” to the Dominican Republic. A brigade of Marines was stationed in the country to back up the U.S. military government, which was trying to bring stability to the troubled island republic.

A Parrot, Foul Weather and Field Duty

Craig and six other officers were given passage aboard a converted yacht manned by a Reserve naval officer. Space was at a premium and the passengers had to bed down on the deck of the tiny wardroom.

The captain’s beloved parrot perched in the overhead, showering them with bird droppings. The parrot’s noxious muck and a West Indian hurricane, with its high winds and towering waves, made the trip a voyage from hell. To top it off, the commanding officer chewed them out for cluttering up his wardroom. One of the exasperated lieutenants remarked in a stage whisper, “How about that damn parrot crapping all over our gear!”

Upon arrival in Santo Domingo in April 1919, Craig learned that he was being assigned to the 70th Company, temporarily attached to the 15th Regiment. His company was located in a remote area, accessible only by native boats called “gasolinas.”

Craig recalled, “I was the only American on the trip and practically every available space was occupied by natives. My accommodations consisted of a small space on the forward deck where I was surrounded by a native family, complete with chickens.”

The natives were friendly, even sharing their meager food with him. He debarked at La Romana, a large sugar estate, which became his base of operations.

The company was composed almost entirely of old-timers, pre-war Marines who had served in the Dominican Republic for more than two years. Craig thought they were “a pretty hard-boiled crowd, but I found they were good, efficient Marines.” Their camp consisted of 9-by-9 wall tents for the men and a small wooden building for Craig and his assistant. The building also housed their office, a storeroom and the sickbay. A small store stocked a few treats.

However, “we had little time to enjoy the luxuries,” Craig recalled, “because the bandit situation was critical. Several large groups were operating in my area. I found myself in the field inspecting outposts or leading patrols most of the time.”

The assignment was truly an independent command. “As a company commander,” Craig recalled, “I was allowed much latitude in my decisions. I rarely received patrol instructions and I could find nothing that defined the area I was supposed to patrol. Consequently, I assumed I could go anywhere.”

His patrol area was lush jungle-covered terrain, crisscrossed by numerous rivers and streams. Dense undergrowth forced his patrols to use the trail network, making them vulnerable to ambush.

“Life on patrol was rugged,” he said. “We usually traveled on foot carrying the minimum of gear. Food was prepared over open fires in canteen cups, mess pans, or whatever we could borrow from the natives.”

The company occupied two platoon outposts (24 men), one at Yuma (42 miles) and the other at Higuey (35 miles). The only way for Craig to reach them was by horse or mule, with an escort of six to eight Marines. “I would make a regular monthly inspection of the outposts,” he said. “It would mean an 80-mile hike or ride. We usually carried a couple days’ rations. When the rations ran out, we would forage through the country, obtaining what we could from the natives.”

In one outpost, the entire supply of food consisted of bacon, flour, canned corn, jam and cases of sardines. Craig observed, “Nobody got fat down there!”

Dumdums and Bandits

The largest bandit group in Craig’s area claimed 75 to 100 fighters, but normally operated in smaller bands. Craig recalled, “We hit six or eight at a time that operated against the villages, robbing, burning and what not.” The company had had several bad experiences with the marauders and was itching to get even. During his first morning inspection, Craig “found that, without exception, each man had dumdum bullets in the pockets of his cartridge belt. The tips of the bullets had been cut off.”

Craig discovered it was difficult to tell innocent civilians from bandits. “We would find some that in order to obtain favors would be friendly. Others were caught between the devil and deep sea. If they gave information to the Marines, the bandits would kill them, and if they didn’t give information, the Marines would sometimes be hard on them.”

He often had to follow rules of engagement that were nonsensical. At one time he received orders that his men were not to fire on any armed man unless he fired first. Craig was incensed. “These were the most stringent orders I ever received. If you saw a native with a rifle pointed at you, you had a tendency to shoot first.”

Late one morning, Craig received news from a friendly native that a large bandit force had seized a German storeowner and his wife. The abduction was only six miles away.

He quickly organized a 12-man mounted patrol and galloped to the rescue. As they turned a bend in the trail, two armed bandits took a shot at them. Craig’s assistant attempted to fire back, but his pistol jammed. He was so angry that he heaved it at the bandits, which scared his horse into a gallop. The rest of the patrol thundered along behind. Within minutes they ran headlong into the brigands’ main force.

“Hell of a thing,” Craig recalled. “We came thundering right into the middle of them, yelling and shooting. We picked off four of them before they fled into the jungle.” The Germans were released unharmed; however, Craig’s “mad-man” assistant took quite a bit of ribbing from the men for leading a charge, unarmed.

On one patrol, one of Craig’s men was shot through the groin. The bullet left a gaping wound in his buttocks. A Navy doctor hiked in and started treatment. However, gangrene set in. The wounded man was in terrible pain, but the doctor would not let him be evacuated. Craig agonized over the decision. “From the odor and the condition of the man I knew he would die if we didn’t move him, so I overrode the doctor.”

The dying man was carried on a makeshift stretcher over narrow mountain trails. Craig said, “Halfway down I almost lost my nerve and thought of turning back, but I decided it was the right thing to do.”

Native carrying parties spelled each other every few miles. They finally reached a road where an ambulance picked him up and took him to the hospital. He lived. Craig was elated. “I was never so happy over a decision in my life.”

Close Calls

The detachment sergeant was a former cowhand and had been a member of the Canadian cavalry—and a wizard with horses. Craig described the noncommissioned officer as a “typical Marine of the old Corps, every inch a soldier. He was well over 6 feet tall, powerfully built, straight as a ramrod, and always wore a mustache. He was one of the finest Marines that I have ever served with.”

Like all good sergeants, he took care of his officer. Craig remembered, “I was riding my favorite horse, a big palomino stallion, when he bogged down up to his belly in mud and fell on his side, pinning my right leg. His movements pushed my head and shoulders down and I couldn’t breathe. Suddenly I felt like a tractor was pulling me through the mud.” The sergeant had grabbed Craig’s pistol belt and suspenders and pulled him from under the horse.

On another occasion, Craig’s patrol had surrounded a cluster of jungle shacks. “It was bright moonlight,” he recalled. “I had just stopped a native who had come from one of the houses and was headed for the jungle. As I questioned him, he edged toward me.” Just then the detachment sergeant came around the other side of the shack and butt-stroked the native with his .03 rifle. It happened so fast that Craig could only look on with amazement.

“As the man dropped, the sergeant reached down and grabbed a razor-sharp knife from his hand,” recalled Craig. He had seen the flash of the knife in the moonlight and instinctively reacted.

One afternoon, Craig’s “boy,” a hired man who did housekeeping chores, dashed up screaming hysterically. Blood streamed down his face from a ghastly wound on the side of his head. A piece of mutilated flesh was all that was left of his ear. “My God, man, what happened,” Craig exclaimed. The terrified man pointed to a tough-looking native across the street, and in halting English, explained that the man had cut off his ear because he worked for the Marines.

“I picked up my automatic pistol and slipped the lanyard over my shoulder,” Craig said. As he strode across the street, he yelled for his sergeant to get his gun and follow him. “My intention was to apprehend and arrest the native before he could escape.”

Craig approached the desperado and started to question him. “He suddenly reached forward,” Craig recalled, “and grabbed my pistol, which I was holding cocked in my right hand, pointing at the ground.”

The two struggled but the bandit was too strong and succeeded in turning the pistol toward Craig. At that moment, the sergeant ran up, grabbed the goon in a headlock, forced his own pistol into the miscreant’s face, and pulled the trigger. “As the man fell dead,” Craig explained, “he pulled me over with him, covering me with blood. The sergeant’s quick reaction saved me from being shot by my own gun.”

Craig developed a close relationship with a local one-armed native guide, who was “about 35, wiry, with a drooping mustache. He always carried a .44-caliber revolver, and, with his slouch hat, homemade shirt and blue denim trousers and leather thong sandals, would have passed as a bandit anywhere.”

The guide accompanied Craig on every patrol and proved to be loyal and competent. At times, he left camp to visit his wife, who lived several miles away in another village. Craig worried. “I always hesitated in granting his request, for I knew the danger he faced on the 15-mile ride down the mountainside. One weekend I watched as he mounted his horse and, with his arm flapping, trotted down the trail.”

A few hours later, Craig learned that he had been waylaid and killed. “His head was found impaled on a fence post and his body horribly mutilated by machetes.”

Craig was hardened, mentally and physically, by the constant patrolling and privation in the field. “Everything I owned, I carried on my back. My quarters was a 9-by-9 wall tent without a deck. I slept on a field cot … with a small ration box as a table, the light of one oil lantern when I had kerosene—a candle when I did not. I had no sheets or pillowcase, and my pillow consisted of my musette bag with extra underwear and socks. My blanket was the only covering, except for a poncho—and the nights were cold and damp in the mountains.

“If I wanted to bathe, I had to go some 100 yards into the jungle where there was a cold stream running over rocks into a deep pool. The presence of bandit groups made it desirable to lay a pistol within easy reach. My eating utensils consisted of a GI spoon and knife, a mess tin and tin can to drink from.”

Craig echoed the age-old lament of the field soldier: “It always seemed to me that the troops chasing the bandits and living in the far-flung outposts should have been the ones who received the best, but it was just the opposite. The ones in garrison were the ones where comfort was the rule.”

After two years of field duty, Craig received orders back to the United States. He looked on those days with a sense of accomplishment. It was professionally rewarding, although, “it was rugged duty, and the methods we used were not always those of the book. Most of the men had never been trained in jungle warfare, and it was necessary to train them on the march and bivouac.”

Eddie Craig came home an experienced jungle fighter and small-unit leader. He joined a core group of junior officers—Puller, Edson, Vandegrift—who earned their spurs in the “Banana Wars.” They provided the vital leadership for the Corps in World War II.

Editor’s note: Retired Col Dick Camp is the deputy director of the History Division, Marine Corps University. General Craig’s comments are from his autobiography, and this article is from Camp’s new book, “Legends of the Corps: Conversation With the ‘Old Breed Marines.’ ”

A coauthor with Eric Hammel of “Lima-6,” a book about a Marine company commander in Vietnam, Camp commanded L/3/26 in Vietnam from June 1967 to January 1968, including during the Battle of Khe Sanh. His books are available from the MCA bookstores.