So far, the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War seems to have slipped under the American public’s radar. That’s sure to change in 2016, when Ken Burns’ television documentary about the conflict is set to broadcast. In the meantime, there’s the classic 1980 Canadian series Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War, and Naval History, which has already begun examining Sea Service roles in the conflict.
First up was Edward Marolda’s overview of Navy operations, “Forged in Battle” (August 2014, pp. 32–37). In this issue, John Prados chronicles the Marine Corps’ war experience in “The Marines’ Vietnam Commitment.” The article begins with elements of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade landing near Da Nang, South Vietnam, on 8 March 1965. The largest milestone on the U.S. march to war in Southeast Asia, that event 50 years ago represented the first trickle of what would be a flood of U.S. ground-combat forces into the expanding conflict.
As Prados points out, Vietnam was a frustrating war for the Marines, and not just because they were fighting an elusive and determined foe. Hopefully, the 50th anniversary will spur more study of the Corps’ role in the conflict, which is overshadowed—at least in most historians’ eyes—by its performance in World War II, and is warranted given the number of Marines whose blood was spilt and/or lives were lost in Southeast Asia. In fact, according to figures from the Marine Corps History Division, total Leatherneck casualties in the Vietnam War (killed and wounded in action) totaled 101,683—15.6 percent more than Marine losses in World War II.
An episode from that conflict’s European theater, one of the Navy’s most unusual operations of the war, is recounted by Vincent O’Hara in this issue. “Landing the Troops . . . Across the Rhine” describes how 70 years ago sailors, along with their landing craft, went beyond the normal call of duty in the name of jointness and victory by donning Army uniforms and operating hundreds of miles inland to ferry soldiers across the Rhine River.
A hundred years ago, jointness (or rather lack thereof) was an important aspect of the Allies’ Gallipoli campaign, which Williamson Murray recounts in “The Gallipoli Gamble.” The epic World War I failure of British, Australian, New Zealand, and French forces to seize Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula, which would have facilitated their battleships’ ability to steam through the Dardanelles and bombard Constantinople, cast a long shadow, particularly over amphibious operations.
Gallipoli “was a campaign in which the Allies violated virtually every known principle of war,” Retired Marine Colonel Joseph H. Alexander pointed out in Storm Landings: Epic Amphibious Battles in the Central Pacific. Nevertheless, the takeaway for military analysts in the 1920s and ’30s was that “large-scale, opposed amphibious landings had been rendered ineffective by the fruits of the industrial age.”
During those interwar years, Sea Service officers at the Marine Corps Schools in Quantico, Virginia, set out to investigate that claim by microexamining the Gallipoli campaign. In 1934, after painstakingly picking apart mistakes made and finding solutions to potential future problems, they came up with a blueprint for how to conduct successful amphibious assaults—the Tentative Manual for Landing Operations. The groundbreaking publication would eventually lead to Marine, as well as Army, success storming enemy shores during World War II.
In closing, I congratulate Charles Brodine for earning Naval History’s 2014 Author of the Year award (see “Naval History News,” p. 13), and Mercy Mei Tangredi on the publication of her article in this issue. Eleven-year-old Mercy, whose story “Ships of Honor” profiles Navy chaplains and the vessels that were named in honor of them, supplants then–12-year-old Hunter Scott, author of “Timeline to Justice” (August 1998, pp. 47–49), as Naval History’s youngest author.
Richard G. Latture
Editor-in-Chief