United States Marine Corps Archives

United States Marine Corps

Heroic Fight for Wake Island

By Joshua Donohue

“All hands have behaved splendidly and held up in a manner in which the Marine Corps may well tell.” Read more

United States Marine Corps

The U.S. 3rd, 5th, and 4th Marine Divisions: Uncommon Valor at Iwo Jima

By Nathan N. Prefer

“You know,” said Marine Maj. Gen. Clifton B. Cates to a war correspondent on the eve of Operation Detachment, the invasion of Iwo Jima, “if I knew the name of the man on the extreme right of the right-hand squad of the right-hand company of the right-hand battalion, I’d recommend him for a medal before we go in.” Read more

United States Marine Corps

Battle of Tarawa: Don Crain and the First Marine LVT Assault

By Durk Steed

He wore the clothes of one of Tarawa’s most well-known and decorated heroes, but his name will not be found in any history book. Read more

United States Marine Corps

Four Marines on the “Green Hell” of Guadalcanal

By Adam Makos & Marcus Brotherton

On August 6, 1942, the men of Maj. Gen. Alexander Vandegrift’s U.S. 1st Marine Division watched from the railings as their troopship, the USS George F. Read more

In this James Dietz painting, Foss’s Bluff Saves Guadalcanal, ground troops at Henderson Field thank squadron leader Joe Foss for his aerial heroics that saved the island airstrip. In October 1942, flying Wildcats, Foss, the leading Marine Corp fighter ace, and his men fought off a Japanese attack of 100 bombers by bluffing them into thinking there were more American planes than there actually were.

United States Marine Corps

Marines in the Air: The Story of Joe’s Jokers

By Allyn Vannoy

“As a returning flight of Marine SBDs, dive bombers, were setting down on the airstrip, one of the planes lost a bomb which had failed to release during the mission. Read more

Smoke from his cigar curls upward as an SS officer and his detachment pause at a road sign directing traffic toward the village of Malmedy, Belgium, during the opening hours of the German Ardennes offensive that came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge. In a field near Malmedy, troops under the command of SS Colonel Jochen Peiper committed one of the most infamous battlefield atrocities of World War II.

United States Marine Corps

Adolf Hitler Sends Joachim Peiper to the Bulge

By Josh Quackenbush

During the Battle of the Bulge, the largest battle America has ever fought, Hitler chose the Sixth Panzer Army for the German juggernaut’s most important role. Read more

United States Marine Corps

Incident on the Yangtze

By Michael D. Hull

While America and Europe struggled through economic depression and nervously watched the spread of fascism in the second half of the 1930s, the situation was far more ominous in the Far East. Read more

United States Marine Corps

Duel to the Death on Saipan

By David Alan Johnson

On board one of the transports headed for the island of Saipan in early June 1944, a battalion surgeon gave a group of Marines a lecture on what they could expect when they reached their destination. Read more

United States Marine Corps

Hellish Battle in a Tropical Paradise

By Nathan N. Prefer

“But here are men who fought in gallant actions, as gallant AS ever hero’s fought,” wrote the poet Lord Byron (1788-1824). Read more

United States Marine Corps

Army Infantry at Chosin: The Fate of Task Force MacLean/Faith

By Kevin M. Hymel

The U.S. Marine Corps was not the only group of Americans facing off against the Chinese at the Chosin Reservoir. Read more

United States Marine Corps

Iwo Jima: Primary Objective of the South Pacific

By Mike Haskew

In early 1945, the island of Iwo Jima in the Volcanoes Group, only 660 miles from the Japanese capital of Tokyo, became the focus of the American drive across the Pacific Ocean during World War II. Read more

United States Marine Corps

A Company K in the Pacific: From Guadalcanal to Peleliu

By Jason Abady

In April 1942, a group of young Marines, having recently graduated from Officers Candidate School, arrived at New River, North Carolina, a sprawling tent city that stretched over a vast area and would eventually become known as Camp Lejeune. Read more

In October 1859, Robert E. Lee and J.E.B. Stuart of the U.S. Army helped take back the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry from notorious terrorist John Brown.

United States Marine Corps

Harpers Ferry: The Rise of Robert E. Lee and J.E.B. Stuart

By Melanie Savage

On the morning of October 17, 1859, an aide to Secretary of War John B. Floyd hurried off with an urgent message for Colonel Robert E. Read more

United States Marine Corps

Marine Air Power in the Philippines

By Eric Hammel

After the Japanese stopped resisting in the skies over Rabaul and pulled their aircraft out of the Solomons and Bismarcks battle area in mid-February 1944, it began to appear that U.S. Read more

United States Marine Corps

The Airborne Defenders of Midway

By Colonel Dick Camp (ret.)

Prologue: At the start of World War II, Midway Atoll was a key U.S. base in the central Pacific. Read more

United States Marine Corps

Deaths in WWII: Casualties, and the Graves Registration Units

By Mason B. Webb

The very nature of war means that some participants will be killed and others will be wounded, and some estimate the deaths in WWII to be around 85 million. Read more

United States Marine Corps

Storming the Point at Peleliu

By Dick Camp

By the summer of 1944, the United States was advancing on Japan’s Home Islands in a two-pronged attack through the Central and Southwest Pacific theaters. Read more

United States Marine Corps

National Museum of the Pacific War

By Mason B. Webb

The small (population 12,000), central-Texas town of Fredericksburg, about an hour’s drive west of Austin and a little more than that northwest of San Antonio, may seem an odd location for the National Museum of the Pacific War until one realizes that Fredericksburg is the hometown of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz––the Eisenhower of the Pacific Theater. Read more

Troops of the U.S. Army’s 306th Regimental Combat Team, 77th Infantry Division, come ashore at tiny Geruma Shima, one of the Kerama Retto group of islands near Okinawa, during Operation Iceberg, March 26, 1945.

United States Marine Corps

Kerama Retto: Key to Victory at Okinawa

By Pierre V. Comtois

Close to the northern end of the island of Tokashiki, the largest member of a tiny group of islands called Kerama Retto, located 15 miles west of Okinawa and hardly 400 miles from the Japanese home islands, Corporal Alexander Roberts and the rest of the 306th Regimental Combat Team rested for the night beneath the starry skies of the northern Pacific. Read more