This entry is a subentry of U.S. Marine Corps.
Immediately after World War II, the U.S. Marine Corps, despite its battlefield successes, found itself fighting for its existence under the pressures of demobilization, the “unification” struggle, and contentions that the atomic bomb had made obsolete the Marine Corps' specialty of amphibious assault.
The Marine Corps reorganized its shrunken operating forces symmetrically into a Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, and Fleet Marine Force, Atlantic, each with a division and an aircraft wing.
Personnel strengths dropped from a World War II peak of 465,053 to 74,279 by the summer of 1950. Peacetime manning of the divisions and wings was at less than 50 percent. To provide a brigade for the critical defense of Korea's Pusan Perimeter in August, virtually all of the 1st Marine Division was required. To flesh out the division for the Inchon landing in September, the Marine Corps Reserve had to be called up and the Second Marine Division stripped of its battalions.
Partial mobilization eased the personnel situation. The Third Marine Division and 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing were reactivated. Legislation in 1952 fixed the minimum force structure of the active duty Marine Corps at three divisions and three wings, with a fourth division and wing in the Organized Reserve. Marine strength climbed to nearly 250,000 in 1953.
In experimenting on how to achieve the dispersion of an amphibious task force in light of possible use of nuclear weapons, the Marine Corps decided that helicopters with specially configured landing ships to act as their carriers offered a solution to the critical ship‐to‐shore movement.
Presaging what would become an increasing involvement in the Middle East, a brigade‐size Marine force was landed in Lebanon in 1958 as a peacekeeping presence.
The civil war, and particularly the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, caused an increasing involvement in Vietnam of Marine forces, initially as advisers and helicopter support. The landing of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade at Danang in March 1965 was the first significant introduction of U.S. ground combat elements into South Vietnam.
The Marine Corps employed the term Marine Air‐Ground Task Force (MAGTF) to designate tactical groupings that, with an occasional exception, came in three sizes: A Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) combined a battalion landing team with a reinforced helicopter squadron. A Marine Expeditionary Brigade (MEB) usually had a regimental landing team and a composite aircraft group. A Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF) was organized around a division and an aircraft wing.
The Dominican intervention of 1965 saw the employment initially of the 6th Marine Expeditionary Unit and a buildup to the 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade.
During the Vietnam War, the 9th MEB grew with successive deployments into the III Marine Expeditionary (alternately called Amphibious) Force. The strength of the III Marine Amphibious Force reached 85,755 in 1968, more Marines than had been ashore at Iwo Jima or Okinawa.
In size the Corps grew from a 1965 strength of 190,213 to a peak of 314,917 in 1969. With the withdrawal from Vietnam, it slipped back quickly to a plateau of just under 200,000.
In August 1982, the 32nd Marine Amphibious Unit (MAU) landed at Beirut, Lebanon, as part of a multinational peacekeeping force. The Marine Corps “presence” in Lebanon continued, one MAU relieving another at roughly four‐month intervals. Early Sunday morning, 23 October, a truck bomb detonated under the building housing the Marine Corps headquarters on the airfield, killing 241 American servicemen, 220 of them Marines.
Almost simultaneously with the Beirut barracks tragedy, the 22nd Marine Amphibious Unit landed on the northeast corner of Grenada in a near‐bloodless operation.
In the absence of sufficient amphibious shipping, a new program called the Maritime Prepositioned Force (MPF) came into being in the 1980s. Three squadrons of cargo ships, each squadron loaded with most of an MEB's combat equipment and about thirty days of supply, were positioned strategically around the globe.
At the outset of Operation Desert Shield, the build‐up for the Persian Gulf War, in August 1990, the airlifted 1st and 7th Marine Expeditionary Brigades were met at Saudi Arabia's ports by MPF squadrons. On 2 September, the I Marine Expeditionary Force was formed by “compositing” the two MEBs. Meanwhile, the 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, fully equipped and embarked in amphibious shipping, was en route. On 13 November, the involuntary call‐up of Selected Marine Corps Reserve units began. The 5th Marine Expeditionary Brigade sailed from San Diego in amphibious ships on 1 December. Most of the East Coast–based II Marine Expeditionary Force—numbering some 30,000 Marines and sailors, and including the Second Marine Division—started its move to the gulf on 9 December.
When actual hostilities began on 16 January 1991, the I Marine Expeditionary Force had two divisions, a very large wing, and a substantial service support command ashore. In addition, there were two Marine expeditionary brigades and a Marine expeditionary unit afloat.
When the shooting stopped on 28 February, I MEF and Marine forces afloat had a strength of 92,990 (of the 540,000 total U.S. force), making Desert Storm by far the largest Marine Corps operation in history.
Subsequent to the Persian Gulf, there was almost continuous employment of Marine air‐ground task forces in peacekeeping and humanitarian missions. The I Marine Expeditionary Force deployed to Somalia in 1992. A MAU‐size Special Purpose MAGTF swiftly occupied Cap Haitien, Haiti, in September 1994.
Downsizing incident to President Bill Clinton's “bottom‐up” review of the armed services took the Corps from an active strength of 193,735 in 1991 to 173,031 in 1998.
[See also Amphibious Warfare; Marine Corps, U.S.: Overview; Marine Corps Combat Branches.]
Bibliography
- Allan R. Millett, Semper Fidelis, 1991.
- J. Robert Moskin, The U.S. Marine Corps Story, 1992.
- Joseph H. Alexander, A Fellowship of Valor, 1997.
- Edwin H. Simmons, The United States Marines: A History, 1998
