"HISTORY ET AL"

I : Introduction                     The fighting in Belleau Wood, France, in  June, 1918 saw the command of the U.S. Marine 6th Machine Gun Battalion change hands four times in 11 days. Such was the nature of the vicious fight between the 4th Marine Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division (U.S. Army) and the Germans pushing towards Paris. By all accounts, this first real test of the U.S Marines in the First World War, was a bloodletting that should have ended in a rout as the experienced and veteran German machine gunners tore into the inexperienced U.S. Marines. Rather than collapse, the 4th Marine Brigade withstood the German assaults and not only held firm, but triumphed. The U.S. Marine Corps 5th and 6th Marine Regiments in 1918 fought against the veteran and very experienced German infantry. This study seeks to identify how ad hoc Marine Corps infantry battalions and the newly formed 4...

INTRODUCTION                  Between 1965 and 1968 the majority of the Infantry Brigade and Battalion commanders fighting in Vietnam were veterans of the Second World War and/or the Korean war. Who were these   WWII veterans who led the U.S. Army in Vietnam and, as a group, how did they interpret their assigned tasks during the first two years of America’s involvement in Vietnam. This study illustrates how the ‘first wave’ of maneuver commanders, of whom a majority were veterans of the Second World War or Korea, adapted to myriad of conditions they faced across the 44 provinces in the Republic of Vietnam.   Within the historiography of the U.S. Army in Vietnam, the secondary literature concentrates on the strategy developed and implemented by the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) and the ‘search and destroy’ operations executed across the country. A small group of scholars have argued that without any clear method th...