First to Fight: An Inside View of the U.S. Marine Corps by Victor H. Krulak

Author:Victor H. Krulak [Krulak, Victor H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Military, United States
ISBN: 9781612511610
Google: vUHfDIcSNw8C
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Published: 2013-05-03T23:40:30.833531+00:00

The tide at Inchon varied as much as twenty-six feet. Here a tank carrier and a landing ship are high and dry. (Courtesy of Defense Audio-Visual Agency)

A final prebattle incident occurred early on the morning of D-day. Mt. McKinley had anchored near the transport area where an LSD of the attack force was to launch assault forces of the 3d Battalion, 5th Marines in amphibian tractors (LVTs) for their attack on the offshore island of Wolmi-do. Along with others, I was on the boat deck as the dawn broke, watching the air and naval gunfire preparation by planes of the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing and ships of the task force. As the first LVTs began to emerge from the mother ship, I commented to Lieutenant General Almond, who was standing nearby, “That LVT is certainly a versatile machine.”

Apparently not aware that I was referring to the ship-to-shore conveyance we were watching, he responded, “Yes. Tell me, can it float?” I was nonplussed. Here was the leader, bearing the immediate responsibility for the entire landing force in a critical amphibious operation, and he wanted to know if an LVT would float! The Marines had been concerned about Almond during the planning phase when he seemed to have his mind only on the big picture—the capture of Seoul or “making an anvil for the Eighth Army’s hammer.” Yet the landing force—his landing force—was confronted with immense and immediate problems. A race with darkness, getting over mud flats, across sea walls, through a big Oriental city, seizing an airfield, initiating a major logistic system, establishing a beachhead—these were the essential precursors of any hammer and anvil, and they were Almond’s direct responsibility. It seemed, from the first, that he did not understand these things. That apprehension was now heightened in my mind as we stood there watching LVTs bearing the 3d Battalion, 5th Marines plough through the waves toward Wolmi-do.

The preliminaries to Inchon were unusual in many ways, and there will be many judgments as to the identity of the catalyst or catalysts that brought it all together. A fair case can be made that Inchon would never have happened were it not for three things.

First, it would never have happened had General MacArthur, with a keen strategic sense, not expressed his desire on 10 July for the 1st Marine Division to make an amphibious envelopment and had not Lieutenant General Shepherd volunteered, then and there, to help him procure the division and the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing.

Second, it would never have happened had Commandant Cates not thrown his total support behind the project and urged mobilization of the Marine Corps Reserve, and had President Truman, in the face of strong political opposition, not approved the Reserve mobilization.

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