United States Marine Corps Archives

United States Marine Corps

Unnecessary Hell: The Battle of Peleliu

By Eric Niderost

In the predawn hours of September 15, 1944, the official start of the two-month Battle of Peleliu, a powerful fleet of U.S. Read more

United States Marine Corps

Night Battle: The Barroom Brawl Off Guadalcanal

By David Alan Johnson

November 13, 1942, was a Friday, which sailors aboard the cruiser USS San Francisco noted with anxiety. Read more

Dressed in traditional garb, a lone Chinese man seeks the protection of a sandbag barricade in the International Settlement of Shanghai on August 12, 1937. Adjacent to the civilian are a British soldier and two American Marines who have donned their helmets. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)

United States Marine Corps

A Memorable Marine Mascot

By Eric Niderost

Soochow was a mongrel dog with a remarkable gift for self-preservation. A homeless stray, he attached himself to some U.S. Read more

This painting by Marine Corps artist Col. Charles H. Waterhouse depicts Marines and Cuban insurgent allies fighting Spanish troops during the Battle of Cuzco Well on June 14, 1898.

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Marines at the Battle of Guantanamo Bay

By A.B. Feuer

The capture of Guantànamo Bay, Cuba, by U.S. Marines in 1898 was a brief but violent phase of the Spanish-American War. Read more

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Hellfire on the Hornet’s Nest: Flamethrower Tanks at Bougainville

By Steve Zaloga

U.S. portable flamethrowers were first used in combat during the Guadalcanal campaign in January 1943. It quickly became apparent that the exposed flamethrower operator was vulnerable to Japanese small arms fire. Read more

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The 93rd Infantry Division: The African-American Soldiers in the Pacific

By Stephen D. Lutz

On August 2, 1945, two weeks prior to Japan’s surrender, the highest ranking Japanese officer captured during the war in the Pacific was taken on the island of Morotai, Dutch New Guinea. Read more

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Evans Carlson & America’s First Special Operations Team

By Duane Schultz

Major Evans Carlson stood on a rickety platform built from wooden crates, the kind their rations came in. Read more

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World War 2 Casualties & Caring for the Wounded

By Jon Diamond

The U.S. military employed an organized system for the treatment of soldiers severely wounded while fighting in the Pacific, including their evacuation stateside if needed. Read more

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Qing Dynasty And British Empire Clash In The Second Opium War

By Eric Niderost

On June 26, 1858, crowds packed the narrow streets of Tianjin to witness an awesome spectacle: A British diplomat was about to sign a treaty between his country and China. Read more

Weary of fighting, a Japanese soldier raises his hands in surrender at Roi-Namur as a companion begins climbing out of a hole near the center of this photograph. These are two of only a handful of Japanese troops that survived the fighting on Roi-Namur, choosing surrender rather than suicide. A wary Marine covers the prisoner with his rifle, taking no chances.

United States Marine Corps

4th Marine Division in the Marshall Islands: First Time Under Fire

By Cleve C. Barkley

As 1943 drew to a close, Admiral Chester Nimitz’s Central Pacific campaign was gaining momentum. His forces had taken the Gilbert Islands that November and now targeted the Marshall Islands as the next step on the long road to Tokyo. Read more

A Chinese soldier sheds some light on the German transmitter Farrell accidentally discovered in Canton. The discovery led him on a two-year investigation and the arrest of 21 German spies.

United States Marine Corps

OSS Captain Frank Farrell Prosecuted Nazi Spy Ring In Postwar China

By Colonel Richard D. Camp, Jr. USMC (Ret) and Ms. Suzanne Pool

Marine Captain Frank Farrell stood in the open door of the Army Air Corps C-47 waiting for the “green light,” the signal to leap into space, on a mission that could mean life or death for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people. Read more

American Marines armed with a Browning .30-caliber water-cooled machine gun and other light weapons pose during efforts to evacuate former Japanese Army personnel after their surrender in China following World War II.

United States Marine Corps

Caught in the Chinese Conflict

By Eric Niderost

On September 2, 1945, Japanese representatives boarded the battleship USS Missouri, riding at anchor in Tokyo Bay, to sign an instrument of unconditional surrender. Read more

For landings to be successful, the attackers had to know a great deal. Only men on the spot could stealthily observe conditions, and they had to be highly trained.

United States Marine Corps

SEALs: the Birth of the Navy’s ‘Special Warfare’ Force

By Bud Hyland

Today’s Navy SEALs (for Sea, Air, and Land special warfare experts) have a history shrouded in secrecy. Commissioned in 1962, they are the most elite shore-area Special Forces in the world, concentrating on very select and often-clandestine intelligence gathering and precision strike missions. Read more

Indians make their way through the woods. Familiar with the forest, they stealthily tracked U.S. Army movements and staged devastating ambushes.

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Northwest Indian War: Marching Against Little Turtle

By Robert A. Lynn

In the 1780s the Founding Fathers of the United States didn’t so much revise the old Articles of Confederation as devise an entirely new government as set forth in the Constitution. Read more

Native Americans demostrated extraordinary service, honor, and heroism during World War I. Anglo officers revered them for their abilities, but no one early on thought their language would help confound the Germans.

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Choctaw Code Talkers in World War I

By Richard L. Hayes

The affection that Europeans have for the Great American West is well known, so it shouldn’t be surprising that several traveling Wild West Shows happened to be in enemy territory when World War I broke out. Read more

U.S. Marines put up a tenacious defense against a large Japanese force invading Wake Island in December 1941.

United States Marine Corps

WWII’s Battle of Wake Island: An Unsteady Victory

By John Wukovits

In mid-December 1941, during the thick of the Battle of Wake Island, the 400 U.S. Marines who called the island outpost home stood a lonely sentinel in the watery Central Pacific wilderness, like a cavalry fort in an oceanic version of the Western frontier. Read more

Orlando Norie captured a grisly moment following the Indian rebellion of 1857-1858. Some mutineers were executed by being tied to cannon and then blown in half.

United States Marine Corps

POW: Art and the Image of The Prisoner

By Peter Harrington

War produces casualties … and captives. Much “war art” concerns itself with the heroics and clash of battle, the sway of forces, and the turns of history. Read more

A contingent of U.S. Marine Corps intelligence personnel and native scouts shove their canoes off from the coast watchers’ station at Segi, New Guinea, on a routine patrol.

United States Marine Corps

Coast Watchers in the Solomons

by John Brown

Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, coast watcher Cornelius Page, a plantation manager on Tabar Island 20 miles north of New Ireland in the South Pacific, reported by teleradio that Japanese planes were making reconnaissance flights over New Ireland and New Britain. Read more

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Marine Lieutenant Jack Power: WWII Medal of Honor Recipient

By Michael D. Hull

Outside City Hall in Worcester, Mass., stands a soldier who has been on guard duty since 1947. Read more

United States Marine Corps

V-E Day: Victory at Last for World War II’s Allies

By Flint Whitlock

Within his reinforced concrete bunker, 50 feet below the garden of the New Reichs Chancellery on Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse, German dictator Adolf Hitler, his soon-to-be bride Eva Braun, and several hundred friends, SS guards, and staff members could feel the concussion and hear the unending drumroll of thousands of Soviet artillery shells reducing the already-battered capital city of the Third Reich to unrecognizable rubble. Read more

From Around the Network

Experience modern warfare on the ground and in the air in three new games.

Coming of Age at Tarawa

Drusus the Elder: Hero of Rome

Liberating Cherbourg, Normandy’s Great Port