thedrifter
11-13-04, 06:41 AM
November 15, 2004
Leatherneck legends
Swapping some sea stories at the birthday ball? Here are 8 of the Corps’ best
By Bryant Jordan
Times staff writer
“There was once this Marine, see, and …”
Pretty much anything can follow that opening line. It could be a story of heroism or a joke — Marines, being Marines, can be as much a source of humor as battlefield valor. And for 229 years, Marines have given the nation a great deal of both. In war, peace and all points in between, the stories of some leathernecks have become legend.
Here then, as Marines gather across the Corps to swap sea stories and raise a glass in honor of the Corps’ 229th birthday, are eight tales — some true, some myth, but all uniquely Marine. Happy birthday, leathernecks!
1. Toast the Corps — or eat lead
A man drinking in a pub in German-occupied Lyon, France, didn’t like what he heard coming from the German soldiers partying nearby. Whatever else they might be going on about — boasting, criticizing or whatever — one had just crossed a line.
For some reason, one of the soldiers “damned” the United States Marine Corps.
The man was not going to have it. Hell, this was World War II and Marines fighting in Europe were few and far between. When would these Germans have even met a Marine?
The man left the pub. He stepped out into the pouring rain to return to his room, where he quickly changed clothes, donned his raincoat once more and headed back, where he ordered a round of drinks for the Germans.
Then, Maj. Peter Ortiz — an agent sent by the Office of Strategic Services to aid the French Resistance — threw off his coat to reveal his Marine Corps uniform.
“A toast to the President of the United States!” he declared, and forced the Germans to drink at gunpoint. He ordered a second round and a second toast, this one “to the United States Marine Corps!”
The Germans again emptied their glasses.
And Ortiz, his spontaneous mission completed, backed out the door with gun in hand, and vanished.
Sea story, or one of the boldest, brashest acts of World War II?
“I can’t guarantee you either way,” said his son, retired Marine Lt. Col. Peter Ortiz Jr., of Stafford, Va. “The only thing I can tell you is that when I talked to him about it … he said it was true. The reason for it was, the French were kind of down, and he wanted to get them up, to create a legend. So he used to do some crazy things.”
By any way you measure legendary, Ortiz was it. Born in the United States, raised in France, he spoke English, French, German and Arabic. He first fought the Germans while a member of the French Foreign Legion, was captured, escaped and then joined the Corps.
After the war, he flirted with Hollywood. Two films, “13 Rue Madeleine,” starring James Cagney, and “Operation Secret,” with Karl Malden and Cornel Wilde, were loosely based on his exploits, and he had parts in a handful of other films during the late 1940s and early ’50s.
Ortiz is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
2. Right down the smokestack
If the Corps ever had a Paul Bunyan, it was Master Gunnery Sgt. Leland “Lou” Diamond.
Think mortar instead of an axe and you’ve got the picture.
Diamond was not good at firing mortars. He was great. The best.
In fact, during the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942, the big, loud bear of a Marine sunk a Japanese destroyer by lobbing a mortar round right down its smokestack.
It was a terrific shot — amazing.
It also never happened.
But the story perfectly suits Diamond, who was a larger-than-life leatherneck. He didn’t always look Marine. He didn’t always wear a cover with his uniform, and he eschewed uniform trousers for dungarees. And then there was the goatee.
But the longtime Marine, who fought in the bloodiest battles of World War I, then returned to combat in the Pacific in World War II, is remembered as “Mr. Marine” and “Mr. Leatherneck.”
Many Lou Diamond stories may be found on the Internet — that virtual Valhalla where legends may live forever. Former Marines may recall the hard-nosed, crude and violent drill instructor they met at Parris Island, S.C., where he may or may not have run a recruit’s head into a nail protruding from a nearby wall, may or may not have saluted officers or called them “son” instead of “sir.”
What is for certain, however, is that Diamond has come down through the years as the Marine’s Marine.
3. Before they were famous
Lee Marvin was a problem kid who had been kicked out of a number of schools before finally joining the Marine Corps when the U.S. entered World War II.
Only weeks after his 20th birthday, Marvin — who would go on to become a Hollywood star — was belly-down on a stretcher, being born toward a ship off Iwo Jima’s black shore, with a Japanese bullet in his butt.
When he told the story to Johnny Carson many years later, he recalled how his stretcher paused near another Marine, a “dumb bastard” sergeant who actually stood up under intense enemy fire and led his men off the bloody beach.
“Where’d they get you, Lee?” the sergeant asked as he lit a cigarette and passed it to Marvin.
“Well, Bob, if you make it home before me, tell Mom to sell the outhouse,” Marvin quipped. Then he dropped the bombshell on Carson and America.
“Johnny, I’m not lying,” he said. “Sergeant Keeshan was the bravest man I ever knew — Bob Keeshan. You and the world know him as Captain Kangaroo.”
There you have it — a future Hollywood legend and future TV legend meeting as young men in the heat of combat, with tough-guy Marvin calling the gentlest of children’s TV hosts the bravest man he knew.
Quite a tale. Quite a tall tale.
The story still gets told, notwithstanding legend-busting Web sites such as www.snopes.com have shown it to be false. Marvin was wounded on Saipan and never fought on Iwo. Keeshan joined the Corps in 1945, too late to see action in the war.
Marvin died in 1987 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Keeshan died in January.
Keeshan knew the story, said longtime friend and colleague Ruth Manecke of White Plains, N.Y., though she does not know what he made of it.
“He just removed himself from it. It was so ridiculous,” she said.
Still, Manecke knows the story of the future leader of “The Dirty Dozen” meeting the future “Captain Kangaroo” on the bloody sands of Iwo Jima will not go away anytime soon.
4. A canal, a canoe and 2 Marines
It was a historic day.
The Panama Canal, the highway between the seas that U.S. ingenuity, industry and money carved in the first decade and a half of the 20th century, was to be dedicated. It was late 1913, with the official opening still nearly a year away, but it was a day to mark, and a number of civilian and military officials would be aboard the tug that would make the crossing.
Somehow, though, no Marines were invited for the slow but historic cruise.
That didn’t sit well with the leathernecks, who had already spent lots of Marine energy and blood in Panama. Fact is, when the young Panamanian nation first declared itself independent of Colombia in 1903, it was the presence of U.S. Marines that made the break successful. And it was Marines who stayed on to defend the embryonic Canal Zone through much of its first decade while workers, engineers and machines executed their man-made miracle.
So when the 1913 dedication ceremony was held, some leathernecks, perhaps determined to add “through the Panama Canal” to the Corps’ list of been-there locations such as the halls of Montezuma and the shores of Tripoli, took matters into their own hands.
According to Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler, who was there, “a group of important and pompous Army officials boarded a tug to make the first trip. None of the Marines had been invited to join them. I walked down to the Canal to watch the festivities. By golly! A dugout shot around the bank. It was proudly flying a little Marine flag, and two Marines were paddling like the devil. They went through first, cheered and applauded by the crowd.”
To Anne Cipriano Venzon, author of “General Smedley Darlington Butler: The Letters of a Leatherneck, 1898-1931,” the story “does sound like his writing style, but …”
Venzon said the anecdote appears in an earlier biography of Butler, “Old Gimlet Eye: The Adventures of General Smedley D. Butler,” by Lowell Thomas. Venzon has never seen any other reference to the story.
So, did Marines steal a lead in “crossing” the Panama Canal?
Maybe it comes down to whether you believe Butler.
Or if you just know Marines.
5. Be careful what you wish for
The Great War was over. The 1920s came in with the roar of jazz and the raucous din of illegal saloons and speak-easies. In Philadelphia, the mayor thought he had a solution — send in the Marines.
Or one Marine, anyway: Smedley Butler.
Philly Mayor W. Freeland Kendrick requested Marine Corps and presidential permission to bring the Corps’ “Fighting Quaker” in to serve as a kind of law enforcement czar.
Butler, after all, was a Pennsylvania boy. He also had two Medals of Honor and a reputation for toughness that Philly needed in the age of Prohibition and organized crime.
However, the city came to regret making Butler its director of public safety.
According to the Committee of Seventy, a political watchdog group that has been promoting good government in Philly since 1904, Butler came into his new job in January 1924 like the gangbusters he was sent to smash.
Within days he ordered raids on more than 900 speakeasies, but also went after bootleggers, hookers, gamblers and corrupt police officers. He had roofs removed from police cars so that cops couldn’t sleep during their shifts.
But Butler was an equal opportunity law enforcer. In addition to going after gangsters and the working-class joints, Butler set his sights on the city’s more powerful and respectable lawbreakers, finally raiding the social elites’ favorite watering holes, the Ritz-Carlton and the Union League.
A week later, Kendrick sacked Butler, who would later say “cleaning up Philadelphia was worse than any battle I was ever in.”
continued.........
Leatherneck legends
Swapping some sea stories at the birthday ball? Here are 8 of the Corps’ best
By Bryant Jordan
Times staff writer
“There was once this Marine, see, and …”
Pretty much anything can follow that opening line. It could be a story of heroism or a joke — Marines, being Marines, can be as much a source of humor as battlefield valor. And for 229 years, Marines have given the nation a great deal of both. In war, peace and all points in between, the stories of some leathernecks have become legend.
Here then, as Marines gather across the Corps to swap sea stories and raise a glass in honor of the Corps’ 229th birthday, are eight tales — some true, some myth, but all uniquely Marine. Happy birthday, leathernecks!
1. Toast the Corps — or eat lead
A man drinking in a pub in German-occupied Lyon, France, didn’t like what he heard coming from the German soldiers partying nearby. Whatever else they might be going on about — boasting, criticizing or whatever — one had just crossed a line.
For some reason, one of the soldiers “damned” the United States Marine Corps.
The man was not going to have it. Hell, this was World War II and Marines fighting in Europe were few and far between. When would these Germans have even met a Marine?
The man left the pub. He stepped out into the pouring rain to return to his room, where he quickly changed clothes, donned his raincoat once more and headed back, where he ordered a round of drinks for the Germans.
Then, Maj. Peter Ortiz — an agent sent by the Office of Strategic Services to aid the French Resistance — threw off his coat to reveal his Marine Corps uniform.
“A toast to the President of the United States!” he declared, and forced the Germans to drink at gunpoint. He ordered a second round and a second toast, this one “to the United States Marine Corps!”
The Germans again emptied their glasses.
And Ortiz, his spontaneous mission completed, backed out the door with gun in hand, and vanished.
Sea story, or one of the boldest, brashest acts of World War II?
“I can’t guarantee you either way,” said his son, retired Marine Lt. Col. Peter Ortiz Jr., of Stafford, Va. “The only thing I can tell you is that when I talked to him about it … he said it was true. The reason for it was, the French were kind of down, and he wanted to get them up, to create a legend. So he used to do some crazy things.”
By any way you measure legendary, Ortiz was it. Born in the United States, raised in France, he spoke English, French, German and Arabic. He first fought the Germans while a member of the French Foreign Legion, was captured, escaped and then joined the Corps.
After the war, he flirted with Hollywood. Two films, “13 Rue Madeleine,” starring James Cagney, and “Operation Secret,” with Karl Malden and Cornel Wilde, were loosely based on his exploits, and he had parts in a handful of other films during the late 1940s and early ’50s.
Ortiz is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
2. Right down the smokestack
If the Corps ever had a Paul Bunyan, it was Master Gunnery Sgt. Leland “Lou” Diamond.
Think mortar instead of an axe and you’ve got the picture.
Diamond was not good at firing mortars. He was great. The best.
In fact, during the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942, the big, loud bear of a Marine sunk a Japanese destroyer by lobbing a mortar round right down its smokestack.
It was a terrific shot — amazing.
It also never happened.
But the story perfectly suits Diamond, who was a larger-than-life leatherneck. He didn’t always look Marine. He didn’t always wear a cover with his uniform, and he eschewed uniform trousers for dungarees. And then there was the goatee.
But the longtime Marine, who fought in the bloodiest battles of World War I, then returned to combat in the Pacific in World War II, is remembered as “Mr. Marine” and “Mr. Leatherneck.”
Many Lou Diamond stories may be found on the Internet — that virtual Valhalla where legends may live forever. Former Marines may recall the hard-nosed, crude and violent drill instructor they met at Parris Island, S.C., where he may or may not have run a recruit’s head into a nail protruding from a nearby wall, may or may not have saluted officers or called them “son” instead of “sir.”
What is for certain, however, is that Diamond has come down through the years as the Marine’s Marine.
3. Before they were famous
Lee Marvin was a problem kid who had been kicked out of a number of schools before finally joining the Marine Corps when the U.S. entered World War II.
Only weeks after his 20th birthday, Marvin — who would go on to become a Hollywood star — was belly-down on a stretcher, being born toward a ship off Iwo Jima’s black shore, with a Japanese bullet in his butt.
When he told the story to Johnny Carson many years later, he recalled how his stretcher paused near another Marine, a “dumb bastard” sergeant who actually stood up under intense enemy fire and led his men off the bloody beach.
“Where’d they get you, Lee?” the sergeant asked as he lit a cigarette and passed it to Marvin.
“Well, Bob, if you make it home before me, tell Mom to sell the outhouse,” Marvin quipped. Then he dropped the bombshell on Carson and America.
“Johnny, I’m not lying,” he said. “Sergeant Keeshan was the bravest man I ever knew — Bob Keeshan. You and the world know him as Captain Kangaroo.”
There you have it — a future Hollywood legend and future TV legend meeting as young men in the heat of combat, with tough-guy Marvin calling the gentlest of children’s TV hosts the bravest man he knew.
Quite a tale. Quite a tall tale.
The story still gets told, notwithstanding legend-busting Web sites such as www.snopes.com have shown it to be false. Marvin was wounded on Saipan and never fought on Iwo. Keeshan joined the Corps in 1945, too late to see action in the war.
Marvin died in 1987 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Keeshan died in January.
Keeshan knew the story, said longtime friend and colleague Ruth Manecke of White Plains, N.Y., though she does not know what he made of it.
“He just removed himself from it. It was so ridiculous,” she said.
Still, Manecke knows the story of the future leader of “The Dirty Dozen” meeting the future “Captain Kangaroo” on the bloody sands of Iwo Jima will not go away anytime soon.
4. A canal, a canoe and 2 Marines
It was a historic day.
The Panama Canal, the highway between the seas that U.S. ingenuity, industry and money carved in the first decade and a half of the 20th century, was to be dedicated. It was late 1913, with the official opening still nearly a year away, but it was a day to mark, and a number of civilian and military officials would be aboard the tug that would make the crossing.
Somehow, though, no Marines were invited for the slow but historic cruise.
That didn’t sit well with the leathernecks, who had already spent lots of Marine energy and blood in Panama. Fact is, when the young Panamanian nation first declared itself independent of Colombia in 1903, it was the presence of U.S. Marines that made the break successful. And it was Marines who stayed on to defend the embryonic Canal Zone through much of its first decade while workers, engineers and machines executed their man-made miracle.
So when the 1913 dedication ceremony was held, some leathernecks, perhaps determined to add “through the Panama Canal” to the Corps’ list of been-there locations such as the halls of Montezuma and the shores of Tripoli, took matters into their own hands.
According to Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler, who was there, “a group of important and pompous Army officials boarded a tug to make the first trip. None of the Marines had been invited to join them. I walked down to the Canal to watch the festivities. By golly! A dugout shot around the bank. It was proudly flying a little Marine flag, and two Marines were paddling like the devil. They went through first, cheered and applauded by the crowd.”
To Anne Cipriano Venzon, author of “General Smedley Darlington Butler: The Letters of a Leatherneck, 1898-1931,” the story “does sound like his writing style, but …”
Venzon said the anecdote appears in an earlier biography of Butler, “Old Gimlet Eye: The Adventures of General Smedley D. Butler,” by Lowell Thomas. Venzon has never seen any other reference to the story.
So, did Marines steal a lead in “crossing” the Panama Canal?
Maybe it comes down to whether you believe Butler.
Or if you just know Marines.
5. Be careful what you wish for
The Great War was over. The 1920s came in with the roar of jazz and the raucous din of illegal saloons and speak-easies. In Philadelphia, the mayor thought he had a solution — send in the Marines.
Or one Marine, anyway: Smedley Butler.
Philly Mayor W. Freeland Kendrick requested Marine Corps and presidential permission to bring the Corps’ “Fighting Quaker” in to serve as a kind of law enforcement czar.
Butler, after all, was a Pennsylvania boy. He also had two Medals of Honor and a reputation for toughness that Philly needed in the age of Prohibition and organized crime.
However, the city came to regret making Butler its director of public safety.
According to the Committee of Seventy, a political watchdog group that has been promoting good government in Philly since 1904, Butler came into his new job in January 1924 like the gangbusters he was sent to smash.
Within days he ordered raids on more than 900 speakeasies, but also went after bootleggers, hookers, gamblers and corrupt police officers. He had roofs removed from police cars so that cops couldn’t sleep during their shifts.
But Butler was an equal opportunity law enforcer. In addition to going after gangsters and the working-class joints, Butler set his sights on the city’s more powerful and respectable lawbreakers, finally raiding the social elites’ favorite watering holes, the Ritz-Carlton and the Union League.
A week later, Kendrick sacked Butler, who would later say “cleaning up Philadelphia was worse than any battle I was ever in.”
continued.........