Ask a military history buff to match 6 June with a historic event and the answer you’ll probably get is D-Day, the 1944 Allied invasion of Normandy. But ask a Marine the same question and you’re likely to receive a different response. That’s because 6 June was the first day of the Corps’ trial by fire at a patch of French forest known as Belleau Wood.
The battle there a century ago was pivotal. In early June 1918, the German war machine was rolling toward Paris, with the French line crumbling before it, when U.S. Marines were rushed into the breach. After halting the enemy juggernaut only 30-odd miles from the City of Lights, the Leathernecks grabbed the offensive on 6 June and in a brutal three-week battle wrested control of Belleau Wood from the “Boche.”
For the Marine Corps, however, the first day of the battle has added significance. “On June 6, 1918, the moment they launched their first assault on the dark woodland, the Marines abruptly left behind fourteen decades of small-scale skirmishes with insurgents, pirates, and light infantry regiments and entered the industrialized world of massive firepower and wholesale slaughter,” retired Marine Brigadier General Edwin Simmons wrote in Through the Wheat: The U.S. Marines in World War I (Naval Institute Press, 2008).
Retired Marine Colonel Richard Camp’s article, “The Corps’ Day of Destiny,” recaps the fighting on 6 June—when the Marines suffered more casualties than in all of their previous fights combined—with an emphasis on the individual Leatherneck’s experiences. After the early morning capture of Hill 142, there was a lull in the fighting until 1700, when the storied, sanguinary assaults through wheat fields toward Belleau Wood were launched.
“‘Lion Courage in the Face of Any Danger,’” James Nelson’s profile of Second Lieutenant Clifton Cates at Belleau Wood, picks up the action on the Marines’ right flank, where Cates led an assault on the town of Bouresches. “We charge[d] across an open field for eight hundred yards and there were eleven machine guns playing on us,” the lieutenant wrote his mother. “[H]onest, the bullets hitting the ground were as thick as raindrops.”
Cates survived the charge, barely, and with a couple dozen of his men captured and held Bouresches. Nelson describes how later during the long battle, the lieutenant endured a devastating mustard-gas attack and then battled in forbidding Belleau Wood. Cates’ June 1918 heroics set his career on a trajectory that ended with him at the top—as Marine Corps Commandant.
Elsewhere in this issue, David Sears recounts Lieutenant Commander William Galbraith’s Pacific war service through the officer’s writings in “A POW’s Secret Diary of Captivity.” Two oddities set Galbraith’s journal apart from most other such prisoner diaries: He wrote it in shorthand and framed his entries as “Dear Billy” letters to his young son. After Galbraith’s death in 1994, the latter fact resulted in some confusion, and the diary was donated to the Naval Historical Center (the present-day Naval History and Heritage Command) as letters that Galbraith wrote to his son.
To Sears, that story rang hollow, and he discovered a 1965 newspaper article about Galbraith’s recollections of his POW days that referred to his writings as a diary. Another clue is that most of the contents of the Dear Billy “letters” are not suitable for a youngster. Galbraith details the brutal treatment and near-constant hunger he and other Allied prisoners suffered at the hands of the Japanese. But the diary is punctuated with fleeting joys, such as receiving a Red Cross package, and with hopes for the future.
Richard G. Latture
Editor-in-Chief