Marine legend Lt. Gen. Victor Krulak dies

[marine0351]

semper fi gen. at attention and with bowed head, send another to guard the gates of marine barracks heaven.

[DocGreek]

DRIFTER.....General Charles Krulak, was my Company Commander, Lima, 3/3/3, in 1969. At the time, he was a Captain. Only met him once, just before our Company took part in Operation Idaho Canyon (?), I think. My best regards, to the General, and his family.....SEMPER FIDELIS.....Doc Greek

[ggyoung]

The Brute was the last of Chestys Favorite officers.

[thedrifter]

January 5, 2009
Victor H. Krulak, Marine Behind U.S. Landing Craft, Dies at 95
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN

Lt. Gen. Victor H. Krulak, a highly decorated Marine commander who championed innovative tactics in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, died Dec. 29 in San Diego. He was 95.

His death was announced by his son Gen. Charles C. Krulak, the Marine commandant from 1995 to 1999.

When he attended the Naval Academy, he was nicknamed Brute by his fellow midshipmen, a wry reference to the fact that he was only 5 feet 4 and weighed 120 pounds or so.

But General Krulak became a renowned figure in the Marines. He helped develop the landing craft that carried troops, vehicles and supplies onto the invasion beaches of World War II. He received the Navy Cross, the Marines’ highest award for valor after the Medal of Honor, for his exploits against the Japanese. He told of the corps’ history and ethos in his book “First to Fight” (1984).

Victor Harold Krulak, a native of Denver, joined the Marines after graduating from Annapolis in 1934.

In 1937, while a lieutenant in an intelligence outfit in Shanghai, when the Japanese were trying to conquer China, he used a telephoto lens to take pictures of Japanese landing craft with a square bow that became a retractable ramp, enabling troops and equipment to be dispatched quickly onto an enemy beach.

Envisioning those ramps as answering the Marines’ needs in a looming world war, Lieutenant Krulak showed the photographs to his superiors, who passed on his report to Washington. But two years later, he found that the Navy had simply filed it away with a notation saying it was the work of “some nut out in China.”

He persevered, building a balsa wood model of the Japanese boat design and discussing the retractable ramp concept with the New Orleans boat builder Andrew Higgins. That bow design became the basis for the thousands of Higgins landing craft of World War II.

“There would not have been a Normandy or an Okinawa or an Iwo Jima without that boat,” his son Charles said in an interview on Sunday.

In the fall of 1943, General Krulak, a lieutenant colonel at the time, commanded a battalion in a diversionary raid on Choiseul Island in the Solomons that enabled a larger Marine contingent to capture the more important island of Bougainville. Although wounded, he continued to lead his marines in battle, bringing him the Navy Cross. Some of his wounded men were evacuated by a Navy torpedo boat skippered by Lt. John F. Kennedy.

In the late 1940s, General Krulak helped pioneer the use of helicopters to carry marines and supplies into battle, a maneuver employed in the Korean War, when he was chief of staff of the First Marine Division.

When Kennedy became president, General Krulak reminded him of their meeting on Choiseul. He presented Kennedy with a bottle of whiskey, something he had promised him for his rescue work back in 1943 but never had a chance to deliver. In 1962, Kennedy named General Krulak the counterinsurgency adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

During the Vietnam War’s early stages, General Krulak expressed optimism over the prospects for American and South Vietnamese success. But in the mid-1960s, when he commanded all marines in the Pacific, he opposed the strategy pursued by Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the overall American commander in Vietnam.

General Westmoreland proposed the use of marines in large-scale battles. General Krulak wanted to emphasize pacification, the effort to win over the South Vietnamese villagers by assisting in economic projects and protecting them from the enemy. He also advocated the bombing and mining of Haiphong’s harbor to cut off supplies to North Vietnam. He met with President Lyndon B. Johnson in mid-1966 to press those ideas, but, as General Krulak later put it, “as soon as he heard me speak of mining and unrestrained bombing of the ports, Mr. Johnson got to his feet, put his arm around my shoulder, and propelled me firmly toward the door.”

General Krulak retired from the Marines in 1968. He settled in the San Diego area and became an executive and writer for the Copley Newspapers.

In addition to his son Charles, he is survived by his sons Victor Jr. and William; four grandchildren, and 10 great-grandchildren. His wife, Amy, died in 2001.

In a speech to the Marine Corps Association in 2007, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told of the young marine lieutenant of the late 1930s who pursued his ideas for an innovative landing craft after being written off as a “nut.” Mr. Gates said that “Victor Krulak’s story and accomplishments” provided lessons in “overcoming conventional wisdom and bureaucratic obstacles.”

In his history of the Marines, General Krulak expressed concern over an “all-encompassing military bureaucracy” that “represents a more formidable battlefield than many the corps has known.”

“The marines,” he wrote, “are an assemblage of warriors, nothing more.”

Ellie

[thedrifter]

10News.comRelated To Story



Funeral Services Held For Retired Marine

POSTED: 8:30 am PST January 8, 2009
UPDATED: 8:53 am PST January 8, 2009

SAN DIEGO -- Funeral services will be held Thursday for retired Marine Lt. Gen. Victor H. "Brute" Krulak.

The decorated veteran of World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam War died of natural causes in San Diego late last month at the age of 95.

Krulak, who once commanded all Marines in the Pacific, helped develop a boat crucial to amphibious landings during World War II and spoke his mind in disagreeing with President Lyndon B. Johnson over strategy in the Vietnam War.

Funeral services are scheduled for 2 p.m. at the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar Chapel.

Krulak's classmates at the U.S. Naval Academy jokingly nicknamed the 5 foot 5 inch Marine "Brute" and the moniker stuck.

Mike Neil, a San Diego lawyer and retired reserve Marine brigadier general, told The San Diego Union-Tribune that Krulak was known as a master strategist.

Gary Solis, a former Marine historian and a law professor at Georgetown University, added, also in an interview with the Union-Tribune: "You'd be hard-pressed to name another Marine in modern times who has had as great an impact on the direction of the Marine Corps or, for that matter, the country."

Krulak is survived by three sons, four grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

January 09, 2009, 2:30 p.m.

Brute Force
Krulak was a visionary Marines Corps leader.

By Mackubin Thomas Owens


The country lost a storied Marine when retired Lt. Gen. Victor “Brute” Krulak died in his sleep on December 29 at the age of 95. Krulak was a thinker as well as a fighter, and in both capacities, he left his imprint on the Corps.

Krulak was not universally loved throughout the service. Asked to describe his leadership style, he replied that cultivating a reputation for being “a son of a *****” has its advantages. Even so, many Marines were surprised when Lyndon Johnson did not select Krulak to be commandant in 1968. Perhaps it had to do with his persistent criticism of the strategy the U.S. was pursuing in Vietnam. (Krulak was, of course, immensely pleased when his son, Charles Krulak, became the 31st commandant of the Marine Corps in July of 1995.)

Krulak’s cadet nickname, “Brute,” was given to him in mockery of his diminutive stature: At 5’4” he had to petition for special dispensation to receive a commission. After graduating from the Naval Academy in 1934, he served aboard the battleship Arizona, and then with the 4th Marine Regiment in China from 1937 to 1939. During the latter assignment, Krulak — at the time a first lieutenant and an intelligence officer — made one of his first and most important contributions to the Marine Corps: observing and clandestinely photographing a Japanese amphibious operation against Chinese positions.

Based on his observations, Krulak prepared a report with photographs of shallow-draft Japanese landing craft capable of transporting men and heavy equipment directly onto the beach. He forwarded a copy of his report to the Navy Department in Washington, where it was at first dismissed as the “work of some nut in China.” With the help of another legendary Marine, Gen. Holland M. “Howlin’ Mad” Smith, Krulak got a model of what he had seen in China in front of the commandant. The result was that the Department of the Navy eventually deployed a landing craft similar to that observed by Krulak, the venerable “Higgins Boat” that delivered troops to beaches across the globe during World War II.

During the years before World War II, Krulak suffered two embarrassing setbacks that could have been career-enders. The first one occurred on the Arizona when the anchor chain came loose and the anchor itself was lost. The second happened in 1940 when Krulak, who had by then risen to the rank of captain, persuaded an admiral in dress uniform to inspect one of his projects — only to end up stranded on a coral reef some distance from shore, in three and a half feet of water. The two had to wade ashore, and the admiral was livid, asking Krulak, "Captain, have you ever considered a career as a civilian?"

Fortunately, Krulak’s career survived both incidents.

During the Second World War, Krulak commanded the 2nd Marine Parachute Battalion and in November 1943 led a diversionary action on the island of Choiseul. Krulak was wounded but refused to relinquish command of his battalion and be evacuated. After the diversion had achieved its intended effect, Krulak was transported away on a PT boat skippered by a young lieutenant named John F. Kennedy, whose path he would cross again years later. Krulak was awarded a Navy Cross for his actions on Choiseul. He also served on the staff of the Sixth Marine Division during the battle of Okinawa.

After the war, Krulak played a major role in the inter-service battles that characterized the period. Although the services still frequently disagree about roles, missions, and budgets, people today may not appreciate how vicious those earlier fights were. The Marine Corps was especially vulnerable: Despite its performance during the war, many players — including Harry Truman — wanted to abolish the service. Because many Marines naively believed that their war record would ensure the survival of the Corps, the day-to-day struggle for its future was waged by a small group that came to be known as the Little Men’s Chowder and Marching Society. Krulak was an integral part of that effort.

Having helped secure the survival of the Marine Corps, Krulak served in Korea as chief of staff of the 1st Marine Division. During the 1950s, he played a role in the development of the use of helicopters to transport Marines from ship to shore as part of amphibious operations. During this period he also contributed to the Marine Corps’s reinvention of itself as a “force in readiness.”

In 1962, former PT boat skipper President Kennedy directed the services to emphasize counterinsurgency training, and Krulak played a central role in implementing the president’s directive. During this period, Krulak met several times with Sir Robert Thompson, the architect of the British victory over the guerrillas in Malaya. From Thompson he absorbed a set of basic counterinsurgency principles that the Marines subsequently sought to apply in Vietnam. As Krulak observed, “The more [aware I became] of the situation facing the Vietnamese government and the Vietnamese Army, the more convinced I became . . . that our success in the counterinsurgency conflict would depend on a complete and intimate understanding by all ranks from top to bottom of the principles Thompson had articulated.”


In 1963, Krulak became involved in a controversy that persists to the present day. In the late summer of that year, President Kennedy dispatched Krulak and the State Department’s Joseph Mendenhall to Vietnam. Their mission was to assess the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of the Republic of Vietnam. Both Krulak and Mendenhall briefed President Kennedy on September 10. Krulak concluded that the war was going well, while Mendenhall predicted that the Diem government would either fall to the Viet Cong or that the country would descend into a religious civil war. So opposed were their conclusions that the president quipped, “The two of you did visit the same country, didn’t you?”

But the two had taken very different itineraries in Vietnam. Krulak visited some ten locations across the country and extensively interviewed U.S. advisers to the Vietnamese army. Mendenhall, who had been recommended to the president by Averill Harriman and Roger Hillsman, longtime advocates of replacing Diem, visited three South Vietnamese cities where he spoke primarily to opponents of the South Vietnamese president.

On March 1, 1964, Krulak became commanding general of the Pacific Fleet Marine Force. By this time, the State Department view had prevailed and the United States had acquiesced in a coup against Diem. The deteriorating situation in the country led the United States to commit ground troops.

The Marines’ approach in Vietnam included three elements, according to Krulak: emphasis on pacification of the coastal areas in which 80 percent of the people lived; degradation of the ability of the North Vietnamese to fight by cutting off supplies before they left northern ports of entry; and engaging the Peoples Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and Viet Cong (VC) on terms favorable to American forces.

Krulak was responsible for the readiness, training, equipping, and supplying of all the Marines in the Pacific, but he had no authority over their operational employment in Vietnam. That was the purview of the Army’s William Westmoreland. Gen. Westmoreland’s approach to the war differed considerably from the counterinsurgency approach favored by the Marines and, as a result, the Marines soon came into conflict with him over how to fight the war.

Westmoreland believed that the Marines “should have been trying to find the enemy’s main forces and bring them to battle, thereby putting them on the run and reducing the threat they posed to the population.” Westmoreland’s view was informed by the battle of Ia Drang in November 1965, when an outnumbered U.S. force had spoiled an enemy operation and sent a major PAVN force reeling back in defeat. But Krulak believed that Ia Drang was a case of fighting the enemy’s war, one that North Vietnamese Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap predicted would be “a protracted war of attrition.” As Krulak observed, Giap was right: a “war of attrition it turned out to be . . . [by] 1972, we had managed to reduce the enemy’s manpower pool by perhaps 25 percent at a cost of over 220,000 U.S. and South Vietnamese dead. Of these, 59,000 were Americans.”

Interestingly, Westmoreland’s successor, Gen. Creighton Abrams, abandoned the former’s operational strategy, which emphasized the attrition of PAVN forces in a “war of the big battalions,” and instead adopted an approach akin to the one that Krulak preferred. This approach emphasized the protection of the South Vietnamese population by controlling key areas rather than the destruction of enemy forces per se. In addition, rather than ignoring the insurgency and pushing the South Vietnamese aside as Westmoreland had done, Abrams followed a “one war” policy, integrating all aspects of the struggle against the Communists. This achieved the military and political conditions necessary for South Vietnam’s survival as a viable political entity.

The Marines’ expeditionary mindset and adaptability — and Krulak’s willingness to roll the dice — is illustrated by an event that occurred in April of 1966. At a meeting in Honolulu attended by the secretaries of defense and state, the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, and the principal U.S. military commanders, the group discussed how long it would take to build an airfield at Chu La, to supplement the overworked field at Da Nang. The conservative estimate was eleven months. But the Marines had developed the ability to deploy an expeditionary airfield consisting of aluminum planking along with mobile bulk-fuel systems and arresting gear. Krulak told the skeptical attendees at the Honolulu meeting that the Marines could have a runway in operation within 25 days. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara gave the go-ahead but was not convinced that it could be done. The overall commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, Adm. U.S. Sharp, told Krulak, “You know your neck is out a mile.”

By the 25th day, planes were flying sorties from a 4,000-foot field.

When he was not selected as commandant, Krulak retired but continued to devote himself to the nation’s defense as a journalist. In this capacity, he served as a vice president of the Copley Newspaper Corporation and president of its news service while writing a regular column for many years.

“Brute” Krulak was a true visionary. He will be missed but, fortunately, he has inspired many who follow him.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Marine Corps legend ‘Brute’ Krulak passes away at age 95

1/8/2009 By Lance Cpl. Ryan Rholes , Marine Corps Air Station Miramar

MARINE CORPS AIR STATION MIRAMAR, Calif. —Service members from across the country gathered Jan. 8 to say goodbye to a legend who helped set the standard of the Corps today and remember the life of Lt. Gen. Victor H. Krulak, a Marine who established himself as an integral part of Marine Corps history.

More than 400 people paid their respects to the legendary Marine. The funeral service was conducted by Krulak's son, the Rev. Victor Krulak Jr., a former Navy chaplain.

Robert Coram, a military historian and long-time friend of the Krulak family, gave the eulogy. He spoke of Krulak's integrity and dedication to the Corps. He told the assembled mourners that Krulak was a giant in the Marines, and that through the Corps, his legacy would never fade away.

"The Marines who guard heaven's streets had best be squared away," said Coram.

Krulak was born Jan. 7, 1913, in Denver, and was commissioned a second lieutenant upon graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy May 31, 1934. During his early years, he served aboard the USS Arizona, with the 4th Marines in China, the 1st Marine Brigade, and at the U.S. Naval Academy.

At the beginning of World War II, while serving as aide to Gen. Holland A. Smith, Krulak volunteered for parachute training. After becoming a paramarine, Krulak was ordered to the Pacific where he served as commander of 2nd Parachute Battalion, 1st Marine Amphibious Corps.

In the fall of 1943, while serving as a lieutenant colonel, Krulak earned both a Navy Cross and a Purple Heart for actions while serving with the paramarines on Choiseul Island, where his battalion conducted a week-long diversionary raid as cover for the Bougainville invasion. Krulak also served in the Okinawa campaign where he earned a Legion of Merit with valor device and a Bronze Star.

Once the war ended, Krulak returned to the U.S. where he eventually served as the regimental commander of the 5th Marines until the Korean conflict erupted where he served as chief of staff for the 1st Marine Division. Krulak again earned a Legion of Merit with valor device and an Air Medal.

After the war, Krulak served as the assistant commander of the 3rd Marine Division. Later, he was promoted to major general and assumed command of Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego.

When the United States began combat operations in Vietnam, Krulak was appointed responsible for all Fleet Marine Force units in the Pacific, which included more than 50 trips into the Vietnam theater.

Having proven himself competent as a leader while in combat and during peace time, Krulak ended his long and prestigious career by retiring June 1, 1968.

Krulak’s medals and decorations include: the Navy Cross, the Navy Distinguished Service Medal, the Legion of Merit with Combat V and two Gold Stars in lieu of second and third awards, the Bronze Star, the Air Medal, the Purple Heart, and a plethora of campaign medals, victory medals, occupation medals and unit citations. Krulak’s legacy continued when his son, Charles C. Krulak, became the 31st Marine commandant.



HAWAII-Lt. Gen. Victor Krulak inspects Marines from First Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company in Hawaii, April 1965. Krulak, a legend in the Marine Corps, passed away Dec. 29 at the age of 95. , Courtesy of LIFE Magazine/Bill Ray, 3/31/1965 7:00 PM

Ellie