To the Limit of Endurance: A Battalion of Marines in the Great War

1. The First to Fight

1 The First to Fight When Congress declared war on Germany in April 1917, the Marine Corps was better prepared to fight than the rest of the country, but nonetheless was not ready to take the field immediately. With a strength of 17,400, the commandant, Maj. Gen. George Barnett , could boast a nucleus of disciplined fighting men already in uniform.1 Crisp, efficient, and experienced in small wars throughout Latin America, the marines had little doubt their fighting ability would soon be tested in the world war. Yet experience gained in sea duty, expeditionary service, and occasional combat in Latin America and Asia against poorly organized, trained, and armed irregulars would offer limited benefit to marines thrust into the cauldron of the Western Front. Of course, a number of qualities honed in expeditionary duty would prove indispensable: individual and small-unit discipline, rifle marksmanship, a corps of professional noncommissioned officers, and most of all, an esprit de corps. But the officers’ woeful, albeit understandable, ignorance of progressive innovations in warfare and of tactics above the company level would carry a bloody price. In a pattern that has been often repeated since, a quickening tempo of worldwide expeditions had frustrated the efforts of the Marine Corps to transform itself. In the thirty-six months prior to the American declaration of war, the sea-going companies and garrisons of the corps had been committed to expeditionary forays. Marines had landed in Vera Cruz, Haiti, and Santo Domingo. They had maintained a perpetual commitment to legation guards in Peking and Nicaragua . Finally, they had performed traditional service in marine barracks and aboard U.S. Navy vessels. All of these tasks had further fragmented General Barnett’s unrealized vision of a 5,000-man expeditionary Advance Base Force. The Advance Base Force would have fielded a brigade of infantry, artillery, and support troops perpetually ready to sail with the fleet. Yet due to its worldwide commitments, the Corps entered the First World War with no such force; in fact, 2 To the Limit of Endurance it possessed only a few scattered companies available for immediate service.2 Adamant that the Marine Corps would not sit on the sideline for the duration of the war, Barnett petitioned Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels for a meeting with Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. The general offered Baker a regiment of marines for service with the AEF immediately and promised a second regiment to follow soon after. Accepting Baker’s precondition to conform to army standards of equipage, uniform, drill, and tactical doctrine, Daniels and Barnett left Baker’s office with the promise that the first regiment , the 5th Marines, would accompany the 1st Infantry Division to France. Barnett built the 5th Marines using almost all of his immediately available prewar regulars, scraping together companies from ships and stations along the East Coast and the Caribbean and flushing out their rosters with the few hundred marines then in recruit training. Before the 5th Marines had sailed for France, recruiting began to build a second regiment out of whole cloth: the 6th Marines.3 The Recruits Because the 5th Marines had snatched up most of the marines available , the Corps amassed the majority of the 6th Marine Regiment with men who had enlisted after the declaration of war. As it turned out, this was no handicap. In the spring of 1917, recruiting sergeants found that they could pick and choose from a number of qualified candidates, rejecting all but the most fit. Oddly, in a nation where only one out of thirty men aged eighteen to twenty-four years old were enrolled in college, the Marine Corps found itself deluged with fit, educated collegians.4 Recruiters capitalized on exuberant public support following the declaration of war. When the University of Minnesota held a euphoric patriotic rally, 2nd Lt. Carleton S. Wallace, the former captain of its track team, swaggered among the exultant students in his dress blue uniform. Upward of five hundred undergraduates enlisted en masse, with the blessing and applause of the university faculty.5 It is safe to say that many of these educated recruits could have obtained commissions in the army or the National Guard. Had these men entered the army, few would have wound up in the infantry. Over the protests of commanders overseas, the army’s classification system directed all but unskilled laborers into specialist fields.6 Because marine volunteers were beyond the...