Two of the hardest landings the Marine Corps ever made fell on the same calendar day, six years apart, and the same colonel led the same regiment ashore both times. September 15, 1944: the 1st Marines onto the White Beaches at Peleliu. September 15, 1950: the 1st Marines onto Blue Beach at Inchon. The colonel was Lewis Burwell Puller, and this Tuesday is the anniversary of both. For this installment of our Veteran Spotlight series, the man every Marine recruit still says goodnight to.
Lewis Puller’s Early Life
Puller was born June 26, 1898, in West Point, Virginia, a small town on the York River. His father, Matthew, sold groceries and died when Lewis was ten. His mother raised the family on not much. The boy grew up on Civil War stories from men who had fought in it, and he wanted to go to Mexico with the Army in 1916 to chase Pancho Villa. His mother said no. He was underage and she would not sign.
He entered Virginia Military Institute in 1917 instead. He lasted a year. With the war in France going full tilt, he left VMI in August 1918 and enlisted in the Marine Corps as a private, figuring the Corps would get him to the front fastest. It did not. He went through boot camp at Parris Island, then to NCO school and officer training at Quantico, and the armistice came before he ever saw a transport. He was commissioned a Reserve second lieutenant on June 16, 1919, and placed on inactive duty ten days later when the Corps shrank back to peacetime strength.
Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Horse Marines
Puller’s answer was to re-enlist in the ranks and take an officer’s billet in the Gendarmerie d’Haiti, the treaty constabulary that Marines ran for the Haitian government. He spent almost five years there fighting Caco rebels in the hills. In March 1924 he came home and finally got his regular commission as a Marine second lieutenant.
The next decade was the one that built the legend. In December 1928 he joined the Nicaraguan National Guard detachment and spent most of the next four years leading Guardia patrols against Sandino’s forces in the mountains. His first Navy Cross covered five engagements between February and August 1930, at La Virgen, Los Cedros, Moncotal, Guapinol, and Malacate. The second came for a patrol in September and October 1932. Forty Guardia and one Marine gunnery sergeant, William “Ironman” Lee, went eighty to a hundred miles north of Jinotega into country with no supply line and no supporting force. They were ambushed on September 26 by about 150 men with at least seven automatic weapons. Lee went down early and was reported dead. The Guardia directly behind Puller was killed in the first burst. Puller took the high ground on the right, flanked the left, and broke the ambush. Bringing his wounded back to Jinotega, the patrol was ambushed twice more on September 30 and scattered both attacks. The Nicaraguans called him El Tigre.
Then came China. From 1933 he served with the Marine Detachment at the American Legation in Peiping, where he commanded the mounted “Horse Marines,” followed by two tours in charge of the Marine detachment aboard the cruiser USS Augusta and duty with the 4th Marines at Shanghai in 1940. He came home in August 1941, four months before Pearl Harbor, and took command of the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines.
Lewis Puller’s War in the Pacific
On the night of October 24, 1942, Puller’s 1/7 held a mile of jungle line south of Henderson Field on Guadalcanal. In pouring rain a Japanese regiment came at it. For three hours his one battalion was all that stood between the airfield and the attack. Puller walked the line the whole time. Reinforcements from the Army’s 164th Infantry arrived and he commanded the combined force until the next afternoon. His Marines took fewer than 70 casualties; the Japanese left about 1,400 dead in front of the wire. That was Navy Cross number three, and he picked up a Purple Heart on Guadalcanal as well.
Cape Gloucester, New Britain, brought the fourth. As executive officer of the 7th Marines in January 1944, Puller took over the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines when its commander went down, then the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines when its commanding officer and executive officer were both wounded, and led both across a ridge under rifle, machine gun, and mortar fire. A month later he was given the 1st Marines.
Peleliu is the chapter Puller’s admirers skip and his critics start with. The 1st Marines landed on September 15, 1944, with 3,251 men, wheeled left into the coral ridges of the Umurbrogol, and kept attacking into them for six days. When the Army’s 321st Regimental Combat Team relieved the regiment, it had taken 1,749 casualties, more than half its strength. Puller received the Legion of Merit for the campaign. The men who survived it have argued about him ever since, and that argument is part of the record.
Inchon and the Chosin Reservoir
In August 1950 the Corps sent Puller to Camp Pendleton to rebuild the 1st Marines from scratch. Weeks later, at 5:30 in the evening on September 15, he led Regimental Combat Team 1 ashore in armored LVTs at Inchon’s Blue Beach, through rain squalls and smoke, on the day’s last high tide. The Army awarded him the Silver Star for it. Two days later MacArthur was standing at his command post.
The 1st Marines fought through Yongdungpo and into Seoul, then went north to the Chosin Reservoir. When the Chinese cut the road in late November, Puller’s regiment held Koto-ri, the hinge of the whole withdrawal. From December 5 to 10, in weather that stayed below zero, he beat back repeated attacks on his perimeter and supply points, kept the main supply route open for the division, and then took the 1st Marines out as the rear guard from Koto-ri to Hungnam, repelling two assaults on the way and personally seeing to it that every casualty came out. He was quoted at the time saying the enemy had them surrounded, which simplified the problem. The Navy gave him his fifth Navy Cross for those six days. The Army gave him the Distinguished Service Cross for the six days before them. No other Marine has five Navy Crosses.
Lewis Puller’s Legacy
He was promoted to brigadier general in January 1951, to major general in September 1953, and took command of the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune in July 1954. He became seriously ill that August, retired on November 1, 1955, as a lieutenant general, and died in Hampton, Virginia, on October 11, 1971. He is buried at Christ Church in Middlesex County, not far from where he was born. Of his 37 years in the Corps, all but ten were spent at sea or overseas, and he came home with 14 personal combat decorations.
The Navy has named two ships for him. The frigate USS Lewis B. Puller (FFG-23) served from April 1982 until September 1998. The expeditionary sea base USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB-3) was commissioned on August 17, 2017, at Al Hidd, Bahrain, the first U.S. Navy ship ever commissioned outside the United States, and she has been with Fifth Fleet ever since. His son, Lewis B. Puller Jr., led a Marine platoon in Vietnam, lost both legs to a booby trap in 1968, and won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for his memoir Fortunate Son.
And at Parris Island and San Diego, on more nights than anyone has counted, drill instructors have put recruits to bed with the same line: “Goodnight, Chesty Puller, wherever you are.”
Chesty Puller Patches
If you or a loved one served with the 1st Marine Division, aboard one of the ships that carry his name, or in Korea, Popular Patch has hundreds of patches to commemorate that service. Check out patches like our 1st Marine Division Guadalcanal US Marine Corps Patch, the USS Lewis B. Puller ESB-3 Patch, and the Korea Veterans Association 1950-1953 Patch, and much more by browsing our inventory.
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