When General of the Army Douglas MacArthur famously declared, “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away,” he was not laying out a course of action for one particular Marine. Earlier this year, retired Colonel Gerald E Russell turned 90, and clearly he doesn’t intend to fade away. He travels extensively, volunteers to supervise Special Olympics track meets, and makes talks to midshipmen in the NROTC unit at Pennsylvania State University.
The Pritzker Military Library in Chicago is about to release an oral history transcript detailing the life and career of this man who has seen a lot of history and made it himself. He entered the Marine Corps Reserve in 1938 because the international situation boded war in the not-too-distant future. Two years later, he was in one of the first officer candidate classes at Quantico, Virginia. Training included maneuvers at the site of the Civil War battles of Manassas, 25 miles southwest of Washington, D.C. Though he probably didn’t think of it as oral history at the time, Russell was involved in a conversation with an old man who had been a boy of 10 or 12 during the war. The man told him of being near a Confederate field hospital set up in a house. He heard screams as amputations were performed and saw a pile of sawed-off limbs, some of them still twitching, that had been tossed out a window.
The young officer candidate encountered history in another way during that training. The instructors were veteran Marine enlisted men who had fought in World War I or the Caribbean skirmishes of the 1920s and 1930s. They made the training demanding and realistic, because they were determined to pound into the future officers the ethos of the Marine Corps. It was a generational relay race, passing the baton to those who would fight in the next war—the one that was coming soon. One of their main lessons was this: Leaders don’t just give orders; leaders lead.
Russell all too soon was involved in that war. Initially he was in an artillery battery that landed on Guadalcanal on 7 August 1942, the first U.S. offensive operation of the South Pacific campaign. The Marines learned firsthand the differences between stateside maneuvers and combat itself. Russell saw some men learn well, and he saw others undone by the stress. One young Marine shot himself in the foot—literally—as a way of escaping the island.
When Russell got back to the States, he brought with him a case of malaria that alternately overcame him with chills and fever. His nurse was his bride, Eileen, a young woman who had grown up at Quantico and declared her intention to marry a career Marine. The attraction was mutual, and all of Russell’s previous thoughts of a civilian occupation fell by the wayside. Once he recovered, Russell took further artillery training, and subsequently was part of the newly formed 5th Marine Division, which trained in California and Hawaii for the invasion of a Japanese island outpost that most Americans had not yet heard of— Iwo Jima. Fortuitously, Russell found a mentor in the person of Colonel Thomas Wornham, commanding officer of an infantry regiment. At that point Russell became an infantry officer, another fork in the career path.
Iwo Jima in February and March 1945 was an intense, hellish, day-and-night operation against an enemy determined to fight to the death. In recent months Americans have been reminded of that battle by the passing of photographer Joe Rosenthal, who took the famous photo of men raising a U.S. flag on Mount Suribachi on 23 February 1945. (A Clint Eastwood movie due this fall, Flags of Our Fathers, will revive the image still further.) The flag-raising was a symbolic moment in the progress of the war and created an image that has been part of the Marine Corps identity ever since. Russell was on the island when the flag went up. With him was an old gunnery sergeant, whom the colonel remembered in his oral history as “a man who had the most picturesquely profane vocabulary that you could imagine.” Someone pointed to the mountain, and others looked up to see the flag and the gaggle of men around it. The face of Russell’s sergeant was coated with the black volcanic dust of the island. The enlisted man had seemed till then a person without emotion. But as Russell looked at him, he saw the grimy face streaked by the rivulets of involuntary tears and heard the gunny say with great reverence, “God, that’s the most beautiful sight I have ever seen.”
Before the island was captured, Russell was wounded but was patched up and went back into action. His battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel John Antonelli, was wounded and evacuated. Russell, who had been the exec, moved up to be battalion commander. Sixty years later, in March 2005, he returned to the beach where he had landed 60 years earlier, Red One. When he arrived, the commandant of the Marine Corps, General Mike Hagee, greeted him. Russell told him, “General, this is my beach.”
And so the legacy passes to succeeding generations. The young midshipmen who hear Russell at Penn State get more than words from a history book. They are picking up tradition from someone who talked to a witness to the Civil War, learned the ways of the Corps from the veterans of World War I, and himself fought in World War II and Korea. They, in their own time, will add still more links to the chain.