There is a sort of continuum to Marine Corps histories. It begins with the first real history of the Marines, written by Captain Richard S. Collum and published in 1875. Collum had come into the Marine Corps in 1861 as a second lieutenant and had a fairly impressive Civil War record that eventually got him a brevet promotion. Chiefly, he had taken part in the two amphibious assaults (the first a failure, the second a success) against Fort Fisher in December 1864 and January 1865. But it was immediately after the war that he was touched by history in a more enduring and personal way.
About the time the Army of Northern Virginia was surrendering at Appomattox, Collum, by then a first lieutenant, arrived from North Carolina for duty at the Washington Navy Yard. On the evening of 14 April 1865, he and a fellow officer went to Ford’s Theater to see the comedy Our American Cousin. They had seats in the third row on the left-hand side of the house, which gave them an unobstructed view of President Abraham Lincoln’s box and the tragedy that took place there.
After a thorough interrogation by the authorities Collum was allowed to return to the Navy Yard. He was made the officer in charge of the alleged conspirators in the assassination, who were being brought in as prisoners and held on board the monitors Saugus and Montauk. When John Wilkes Booth’s bullet-punctured body arrived it was placed on a carpenter’s bench in the Montauk. Souvenirs were much coveted, and Collum was accused (falsely, as he succeeded in demonstrating) of selling a lock of Booth’s hair. These events remained at the forefront of Collum’s mind for the rest of his life.
It is not too much of a stretch to surmise that Collum’s own war record and his involvement in Lincoln’s assassination figured in his subsequent decision to write a history of the Marine Corps. He turned over a rough draft in 1874 to a Boston publisher, Henry L. Shepard, who in turn hired a Boston journalist, M. Almy Aldrich, to smooth Collum’s patchy prose. The title page of the ensuing History of the United States Marine Corps gave top billing to Aldrich, and this has confused librarians and bibliographers ever since.
In 1875, the Marine Corps not only was observing its centennial, it also was involved in one of its periodic fights for survival. As part of its defense, there is a chapter in Collum’s history emphasizing the usefulness of the Marines, written by Navy Captain Stephen B. Luce. A second, expanded edition came out in 1890. Aldrich’s name was dropped from the title page. In commenting on the 1890 edition as a continued defense against Marine Corps detractors, Luce (who by that time had become a rear admiral and founder of the Naval War College) wrote, “These periodical attacks on the Corps must be expected; but they never amount to much.”
Still another edition of the Collum history appeared in 1903, incorporating the events of the Spanish-American War and the Boxer Rebellion. By then Collum was a 65- year-old retired major. The 1903 edition remained the standard published history of the Marine Corps until just before World War II.
The first full-time official historian of the Marine Corps was Major Edwin McClellan, who got the job in August 1919 on his return from Europe—where he had served with the 4th Marine Brigade in the fighting in France and the subsequent occupation of Germany. McClellan’s first task as official historian was to write a pamphlet history of the Marines in World War I. The resulting work, The United States Marine Corps in the World War, remains an excellent source document.
In 1921 McClellan suggested to the Commandant, Major General John A. Lejeune, that 10 November 1775 be observed as the official birthday of the Corps. His Historical Section then consisted of himself and three enlisted clerks. He continued to serve as the Corps’ historian until 1925, and then returned for a second tour from 1930 until his retirement in 1935.
He worked out a grand design for a seven-volume history of the Corps. He actually drafted 31 chapters, writing in so much detail that they took the Corps only to 1860. In mimeographed form McClellan’s draft totals 1,063 pages of text, 836 pages of notes, and 303 pages of index. McClellan failed to complete his history, but his painstaking coverage of the early years formed a stockpile from which Marine Corps historians have been drawing ever
I never met Major McClellan, hut after 1 became Director of Marine Corps History in 1972, I talked to him by telephone at his retirement home in Philadelphia several times. By then he had become an irascible old man, which tends to happen to directors of Marine Corps History when they finally retire.
McClellan’s place was taken at headquarters in 1935 by Lieutenant Colonel Clyde Metcalf, also a veteran of the fighting in France. Metcalf was not satisfied with Collum’s still-extant 1903 history. In Metcalf’s words, “most of the history of the Marine Corps has transpired since Collum wrote his book.”
Metcalf set out to write an up-to-date one-volume history of the Corps, and, with the help of two assistants, he did it. His 584-page History of the United States Marine Corps was published in 1939. When I reported to Quantico as a second lieutenant in June 1942, my first purchase at the Post Exchange was a copy of Metcalf’s history. I still have it. In style it resembles a thick scrapbook of events.
Metcalf’s history remained the standard one-volume Marine Corps history for more than 20 years. Then in 1962 the U.S. Naval Institute published Colonel Robert D. Heinl’s magnificent 692-page Soldiers of the Sea. Both the Collum and Metcalf histories have been criticized for their lack of “documentation”—the footnotes and bibliographies so dear to the serious student. Not so with Colonel Heinl’s history, which came replete with the full academic panoply of appendices, references, and bibliography.
No one, however, ever accused the late Bob Heinl of having a detached or clinical view of Marine Corps history. A veteran of both World War II and the unification battles that both preceded and followed the National Security Act of 1947, he wrote as a partisan and a participant. A large part of his motivation for writing his history was the same reason that had impelled Collum nearly 100 years earlier—defending the Corps against those who would try to pull it down. He wrote with a fine, florid style and his book continues to be good reading. Bob Heinl was a great personal friend and mentor of mine. Indeed, he was partially responsible for my becoming the Director of Marine Corps History. He died in 1979, so Soldiers of the Sea never will be revised or extended (at least not with the full flavor of Bob’s distinctive style), but it remains in print.
The next book to appear in this lineage of Marine Corps histories was the 1,039-page The U.S. Marine Corps Story by J. Robert Moskin, first published by McGraw-Hill in 1977. Since then it has had three revisions, the last in 1992, which takes the Corps’ history through the Persian Gulf War.
Bob Moskin is a journalist, which makes him suspect in some circles as a historian. An Army veteran of World War II and a graduate of Harvard and Columbia, Bob was a senior editor and foreign editor of Look magazine before it expired. He became interested in the Marine Corps when he was asked to explore the Marine Corps as an institution, an assignment that grew out of the Ribbon Creek tragedy in 1956. This was when a well-intentioned, but misguided, drill instructor marched his recruit platoon into a swamp at Parris Island and six of them drowned.
Bob Moskin is less obtrusive as a writer than Heinl; the former’s style is more subdued and his viewpoint less apparent. Moskin’s publishers called his book the first “independent” history of the Marine Corps, meaning that all previous histories were written either by Marines or under the auspices of the Marine Corps. This is not quite true, but the first four milestone histories indeed were written by serving Marine Corps officers.
Moskin’s skills as a writer and editor are such that his book can be begun at any place, read, and enjoyed. For example, if a reader wants to read about World War I, he can turn to Chapter 2 and the story seems complete. The design of the book is rather like a series of expertly constructed magazine articles seemlessly overlapped.
The next major history of the Corps to appear was Semper Fidelis by Allan R. Millett. His history first came out in 1980 as a volume in the prestigious Macmillan Wars of the United States series. Its last revision was in 1991 and takes the Corps through the Persian Gulf War. Allan has led a double life. In one he is thoroughly entrenched in academia, now a long-tenured professor of history at Ohio State University, author of many books and mentor to generations of graduate students. His other life, one I suspect he has enjoyed even more, has been in the Marine Corps as a very active Reserve officer, now a retired colonel.
In his introduction to his book, Millett says that “the history of the United States Marine Corps is essentially a story of institutional survival and adaptation in both peace and war.” His history promises a detached academic examination of how the Marine Corps has survived and adapted, but it becomes increasingly a vehement justification, like those of Collum and Heinl before him, of the Marine Corps. The last three sentences of his book conclude that, “As long as the United States maintains any martial tradition or tests its power on the field of battle, the Marine Corps will more than bear its share of the burden. Marines face the future unafraid. Semper Fidelis.”
My own history of the Corps actually appeared in print before either Moskin’s or Millett’s. The book was begun in 1969 when Leo Cooper of London asked Henry I. Shaw, then the civilian Chief Historian of the Marine Corps, to suggest someone who might write a short history of the U. S. Marines for his Famous Regiments series. Cooper was publishing short, nicely designed histories of the various British regiments. There was one for the Royal Marines. Now he wanted one about their U.S. counterparts.
Neither Leo Cooper nor I stopped to realize the problems we would encounter in trying to fit 200 years of history of the Marine Corps, which had grown larger than the entire British Army, into a format designed for a single British regiment. The United States Marines, as published in Britain in 1974, was about twice the length of the other books in the series. Still, it was shorter than I would have liked it to have been, as was the similar edition serialized, in monthly installments from November 1973 to December 1974, in the Marine Corps Gazette.
The first U.S. edition, published by Viking in 1976, was half again as long as the Leo Cooper and Gazette versions. In this edition I was able to finish out the first two centuries of Marine Corps history, retitling it The United States Marines: The First Two Hundred Years, 1775-1975. The Marine Corps Association kept this edition in print with two successive paperback printings.
A third edition was brought out by the Naval Institute Press in 1998. The years after 1975 were busy ones for the Corps. There also was a great deal of new scholarship in Marine Corps history for me to consider. In the 1998 edition, the first 18 chapters were considerably revised and three new chapters were added. This volume’s title was The United States Marines: A History. A fourth edition now has been published, with considerable further revision and a new closing chapter, which takes the Marine Corps to the end of the 20th century.
A different kind of Marine Corps history, one that HarperCollins brought out in 1997, is entitled A Fellowship of Valor. This book grew out of a four-part television miniseries, The Gallant Breed, produced by Lou Reda. In turn this had its roots in the 1976 edition of my The United States Marines. Don Horan, Lou Reda’s very talented director, became so interested in the Marine Corps that he started to write his own illustrated history of the Corps. Tragically, he died before he could get very far into it. The work was continued by Norman Stahl, a veteran Lou Reda writer, and completed by Colonel Joseph H. Alexander. And then, to complete the cycle, another miniseries came out, this one in three parts, also titled A Fellowship of Valor. This is a catchy title, but not very descriptive, so when the paperback of the book came out it was labeled Battle History of the Marine Corps.
Joe Alexander had nearly 29 years of active duty, coming into the Corps as a midshipman from the Naval ROTC at the University of North Carolina. He has been where the bullets fly, with two combat tours as an amphibian tractor officer in Vietnam. His string of publications is long; he has averaged a book a year since 1994.
And that brings me to a book that is not so much a history as it is a celebration of the Marine Corps. It came out in 1998 and is called The Marines. It is a big coffee-table- style book that has had six printings. The book has been so successful that the publisher, Hugh Lauter Levin, has brought out clones of the book for the Army, Air Force, and several for the Navy.
The idea of having a Marine Corps coffee-table book was Hugh Levin’s, but the concept for how it would be organized and developed was mine. I saw it as a book that would draw on the talents of the best-qualified Marine Corps writers to write on their specialties. And it would be illustrated by the best art and photographs we could find. It gave me a chance to collaborate on a book with Bob Moskin. I was the editor-in- chief and he was the editor. Bob is a consummate copy editor and is a veteran photojoumalist, and we used essentially a photo magazine format.
I am very proud of the writers we corralled to write the essays or chapters. These included the 30th Commandant of the Corps, General Carl H. Mundy Jr.; Colonel Jon T. Hoffman, presently the Deputy Director of Marine Corps History; Lieutenant Colonel Charles H. Cureton, a uniform specialist; Colonel Brooke Nihart, holder of the Navy Cross and known internationally as an arms expert; Colonel Joe Alexander; Lieutenant Colonel Ronald J. Brown, a longtime reservist historian; Colonel John R. Bourgeois, former Marine band director; Captain John C. Chapin, author of a book on the Sergeants Major of the Marine Corps; Dr. Lawrence H. Suid, a well-known war film critic and historian; Colonel John Grider Miller, the well-published former Deputy Director of Marine Corps History; and General Charles C. Krulak, the 31st Commandant.
Even more recent is The U. S. Marine Corps: An Illustrated History by veteran naval and military historians Merrill L. Bartlett and Jack Sweetman. They conceived the book years ago when Sweetman was a tenured professor and Bartlett an instructor in the history department of the Naval Academy. Published in large format by the Naval Institute Press in 2001, the 312-page book combines smoothly written prose with a satisfying number of photos and other images.
Obviously, I have not named all of the one-volume general histories of the Marine Corps. To those authors whose titles I have omitted, I apologize. The total bibliography of the Marine Corps is very large and varied. However I hope that I have given some idea of the trunk, so to speak, of the tree of Marine Corps history. Other books, many in number, are the branches and leaves. The roots of the tree, of course, are formed by the Marine Corps itself, a very American institution.