Force
US Marine Corps
America's expeditionary force-in-readiness, from the Barbary Coast to Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima, and beyond.
The United States Marine Corps was born in 1775 as shipboard soldiery and reinvented itself more often — and more successfully — than any American service: ships' guards, colonial infantry, and finally the world's foremost amphibious force and the nation's permanent expeditionary standing army in all but name. 'First to fight' has been recruiting fact as often as slogan.
The Corps' identity was forged at named places: the Barbary shore and Chapultepec ('the halls of Montezuma'), Belleau Wood in 1918 — where marksmanship at rifle ranges the Germans thought impossible earned the (probably apocryphal, proudly kept) 'Teufelhunden' — and above all the Pacific: Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa. The flag-raising on Suribachi became the American war photograph. Chosin Reservoir, Hue City, and Fallujah extended the ledger.
Marine culture is its real weapon system: every Marine a rifleman, the Rifleman's Creed, institutional memory that hoards its history. Its equipment story runs through this wiki — the M1 Garand and KA-BAR Knife of the island war, the Thompson Submachine Gun of the banana wars — but the Corps' constant is the infantry standard itself: smallest of the American services, the proudest of its history, and the only one whose name works as an adjective.
-
M1 Garand
The M1 Garand was the first semi-automatic rifle adopted as the standard arm of any major power, giving the American infantryman of the Second World War a decisive firepower edge over every bolt-action rival. Gas-operated, chambered in .30-06, and fed by an eight-round en-bloc clip, it fired as fast as a man could aim. Patton's verdict — 'the greatest battle implement ever devised' — has headed every account of the rifle since he wrote it in 1945.
-
Marine Raider Stiletto
The Marine Raider stiletto is the U.S. Marine Corps' copy of the British Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife: a slim double-edged dagger designed purely for silent killing, issued in 1942 to the new Raider battalions and paramarines. About 14,370 were made by Camillus, carried at Makin, Guadalcanal, and Bougainville, and its silhouette — with the Raider patch it appears on — became one of the Corps' most storied emblems, though as a working knife the delicate blade lost the argument to the KA-BAR within a year.
-
Thompson Submachine Gun
The Thompson was America's first submachine gun: a .45 ACP automatic designed as a trench broom for a war that ended before it shipped. Instead it found infamy in Prohibition Chicago, fame in Marine hands in the banana wars, and vindication by the million in the Second World War, where simplified M1 versions armed sergeants, raiders, and paratroopers of every Allied nation. No firearm carries a bigger spread of reputations — gangster icon and GI workhorse in one.