THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 10, 1994 TAG: 9407070449
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY WENDELL N. VEST
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
AMERICAN SAMURAI
Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941-1951
CRAIG M. CAMERON
Cambridge University Press. 297 pp. $24.95.
MANY AMERICANS THINK of the U.S. Marine Corps as an elite military organization that has ``fought in every clime and place'' and covered itself with glory in the nearly 219 years of its existence. In the words of former Commandant John A. Lejeune: ``The term Marine has come to signify all that is highest in military efficiency and soldierly virtue.''
Craig M. Cameron, a professor of history at Old Dominion University and a Marine from 1980-84, says that image of the Marine Corps is a myth, and has written American Samurai: Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941-1951, to make his point.
Cameron claims that the ``warrior image'' fostered by the Marine Corps over the years is really not a true picture. A more accurate portrait of the Corps, he maintains, is one of a group of ordinary guys, indoctrinated by brutal drill instructors into an ``esprit'' that has a lot in common with the German SS and Fascist elite units.
According to Cameron, the Marines' attitudes toward their enemy, the Japanese, in World War II, and the Chinese and north Koreans post-war, ranged from belittling and racist to awestruck and fearful. He also tells us that U.S. Marines of 40-50 years ago took few prisoners and might even have killed a few noncombatants. Not only that, they thought the Army to be inferior to them in battle.
Cameron uses the 1st Marine Division between 1941 and 1951 for his case study. During those years the division was an organization of between 15,000 and 20,000 men, split into infantry, artillery and various other combat services. It fought the Japanese at the battles of Guadalcanal, New Britain, Pelelui and Okinawa in World War II, and the north Koreans and Chinese in the early stages of the Korean War.
Cameron spent nearly two years researching this book. He reviewed the official record as well as the numerous personal accounts of the division's battles. He read the many books written about the division, the battles it fought and the wars that caused these battles, and books about war in general. Cameron uses this vast array of resources effectively to make his point, but he also dismisses anything in the record that would support the idea that these young men who fought some very tough battles might have been ``heroic.'' There are no ``warriors'' here.
In referring to memoirs by actual battle participants, Cameron insists that the men ``. . . returned to the traditions of a romantic age and remade their wartime experiences into something unified. . . and purposeful. . . sanitizing and reinterpreting their experiences.'' The author seems to have been influenced more by the writings of Paul Fussell, whose books on war carry the same theme, than by the record of the Marines in the 1st Marine Division.
By slanting his research in such an obvious manner, and by ``intellectual gerrymandering'' (his phrase), he loses some of the value of what he has done. He may be able to place before the public an alternative to the ``warrior image'' and show that the mystique surrounding the U.S. Marine Corps is a trifle overblown. In fact, Marines, past and present, would probably agree with much of what Cameron says, but not with the way he says it. He simply goes too far in his demystification, discrediting rather than clarifying.
There is an old saying in the Corps that reflects the theme of American Samurai: ``The Old Corps ain't what it used to be, and never was.'' MEMO: Wendell N. Vest is a retired Marine colonel who lives in Norfolk. by CNB