Red Cloud, Part One

More Majorum

George Saqqa1(9389)

Native Americans have served in the armed forces of the United States since the infancy of the Republic and have forged a proud heritage of honor and valor.

Mitchell Red Cloud

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the United States Army resumed the Indian Campaigns. Native Americans like Alchesay, Blanquet, Chiquito, Mad Bear, Elsatsoosu, Jim, Kelsay, Machol, Mannasaddie, Nantaje, and Rowdy, all Indian Scouts, were awarded the Medal of Honor for bravery in action against the Apaches. Their citations are too brief to describe their deeds but their deeds opened the door for succeeding generations of Native Americans to join them on the Medal of Honor roll. These men, now all but forgotten, had written the first chapter in the long account of Native American contributions to the US military.

What follows is the story, in brief, of just one of these latter- day Medal of Honor recipients of Native American descent. His name is Mitchell Red Cloud, Jr. He was born on 2 July 1925 to Mitchell Red Cloud, Sr., called “Mike” and Lillian Winneshiek, called “Nellie”. The elder Red Cloud claimed descent from a French noble named De Carrie and a Ho-Chunk princess named Glory-of-the-Morning. Nellie Winneshiek was the grand-daughter of another great Ho-Chunk chief named Winneshiek. Mitchell, Jr. was the eldest of three sons. As a youth, he hunted and fished on the ancestral lands of his birth, known as Jackson County, Wisconsin. The land was unsuited for anything but hunting. Some hard-scrabble farms survived somehow and the lead mines that had drawn white settlers decades before had petered out. Red Cloud’s education began at the Clay and Komensky Rural School, a few miles from Hatfield, where he was born. He continued at the Winnebago Indian School in Neillsville for a year and at the Black River Falls High School until he dropped out in 1941 and, with his fathers permission, joined the Marines on 11 August 1941.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Red Cloud was a member of the Second Battalion, 9th Marines, Second Marine Division stationed at Camp Elliott in San Diego.

Evans Carlson and the Raiders

Immediately after Pearl Harbor, the Marines were deluged with volunteers and the Corps grew exponentially. With all these new men and with the wildly increased budget it had to lavish on them, the planners began to test new ideas that had lain dormant for years for lack of money and someone to put them into action. Enter two maverick Marines as different in personality and philosophy as any two men can be. Merritt Edson and Evans Carlson would take a concept and turn it into reality. In the process, they covered themselves with glory, introduced an entirely new concept of warfare to a tradition-bound Marine Corps and eventually left their stamp on an organization they loved.

Evans Carson left his home in Vermont at age 14, bummed  around for two years and then talked his way into the US Army. He was disappointed in not getting to Europe in time to see some fighting despite his five years of service. With the Great War over, he left the Army, tried civilian life, found it lacking, and tried the Marines. Now a fresh Second Lieutenant and something of a “comer,” he rose through the ranks and, in 1927, found himself in a war-torn, famine-stricken China as the intelligence officer of the famed 4th Marines, the “China Marines.” Three years later, in Nicaragua, he got his first taste of guerilla warfare, an experience; which stayed with him for years and shaped his thinking about warfare profoundly. His experiences in China and Nicaragua would intersect to create in his mind a new doctrine of warfare. Along the way he managed to form a friendship with President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he served as the Executive Officer of the guard detail at Warm Springs, Georgia. This friendship would pay handsome dividends later, as we shall see.

In July of 1937, Carlson was back in China serving as a special “observer” attached to Mao-tse-tung’s Eighth Route Army. The Communists were fighting the Japanese invaders, local warlords, and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists for the heart and soul of China. It was here, in the barren heartland of China, that Carlson perfected the guerilla tactics he would use so successfully against the Japanese in the Pacific.

Preparing for Pacific Island Hopping

The war the Marines had to fight was to be an amphibious war, and it needed specially trained men to prepare the way for the landing forces. So, the raiders were conceived as these men and their mission was deemed to be threefold: to spearhead amphibious landings by larger forces on beaches thought to he inaccessible; to conduct hit-and-run raids on enemy installations with speed and superior firepower; and to conduct guerilla type operations behind enemy lines for protracted periods of time. Thus, were the raiders born and charged with these tasks.

The First Marine Raider Battalion was officially designated on 16 February 1942 with Merritt Edson as its Commanding Officer (CO). The Second Marine Raider Battalion was officially designated three days later with Evans Carlson as its CO and President Franklin Roosevelt’s oldest son, James as its Executive Officer. The 2nd Battalion consisted of a Headquarters company and four rifle companies: A, B, C, and D. Home base was a place quaintly referred to as Jacques Farm located in the rolling fields of Camp Elliott. Now all Carlson needed was men. He visited the recruit depots and bases of the Corps and simply promised recruits a simple life of “...rice, raisins, wet blankets, and glory.” They were also told they would be the first troops to have a crack at the Japanese. Raised in the Depression still gripping the land and eager to escape it, these kids, fans of Terry and the Pirates, Tom Mix, Francis X. Bushman, and countless heroes of the Saturday afternoon serials, flocked to Carlson They lined up, signed up, and began the most arduous training yet devised for anyone. Sixteen-year old Mitchell Red Cloud, Jr. signed up with hundreds of other Marines. His fellow raiders were raw recruits like him just out of boot camp, others were veteran Marines and some were actual combat veterans of the Spanish Civil War and late of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

On 14 April 1942, Red Cloud was accepted in “F” Company, newly formed with “E” Company and began his training as a raider. Carlson was a stern taskmaster under whose watchful eye the raiders were segregated from all forms of civilian life. They slept in pup tents, ate out of their mess kits, and never saw the inside of a mess hall because there wasn’t one.

Their food, when they were lucky enough to get a hot meal, was cooked in an old chicken coop that served as a field kitchen. They were woken up at 5:30 AM and kept on the go all day and into the night with conditioning marches, weapons training, demolitions training, martial arts, field problems, night marches, small unit training, and any-thing else Carlson thought might be useful for them to know. On 8 May 1942, the entire battalion sailed from San Diego on USS FRANKLIN BELL (APA-l6), arriving at Pearl Harbor on the 17th. They made Camp Catlin their home and continued training. The training was based on the British Commando model and even took a page or two from British guerilla warfare expert, Orde Wingate. Carlson trained his men to travel light. They carried weapons, ammo, clean socks, and little else. Their food consisted of the rice, raisins, and tea, and depended on air drops for ammo resupply and rations. They lost their baby fat, grew hard and tough, and somehow survived the training that often had them going 16 and 18 hours straight. It was to be easier than what lay ahead.

Amphibious training came next and, while they trained and waited, Carlson detached C and D companies and sent them to Midway to bolster the garrison there against an expected Japanese invasion which never transpired. By mid-June, “C” and “D” were back at Camp Catlin. On 9 August 1942, A and B companies embarked on two of the Navy’s largest submarines, USS ARGONAUT (SS-l66) and NAUTILUS (SS- 168), destination Butaritari Island in the Makin Group. This was the Makin Island raid that put the raiders on the map and inspired the Hollywood motion picture “Gung Ho.” Despite the publicity from the movie, Carlson never lost his single mindedness of purpose and drilled his men hard. If he thought their spirits were flagging, he would greet them as they came in from the field, hot, tired, and dirty, with the greeting, “Ahoy, Raiders,” and they would reply with a resounding, “Gung Ho.”

Before Carlson, Marine rifle companies did not include a weapons platoon. He included one in each of his companies and also redesigned the basic 10 man squad so that it now consisted of three 3-man ‘fire teams’ with a Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR), sub- machine gun, and M-l rifle or shotgun in each team. This innovation produced an enormous volume of firepower combined with great mobility. It was an innovation that stuck. So was the inclusion of an organic weapons platoon in each rifle company.

Much has been said here about the concept of Gung Ho. Basically, it means working together and Carlson believed in that concept whole-heartedly. He also believed in egalitarianism among his raiders with both officers and men standing on equal footing and sharing chores. This was heresy to conventional military thinking, but the raiders made it work for them. In the 2nd battalion, Carlson encouraged his men to think for themselves. Also heresy, but he made it work. The chain of command in his battalion was for paperwork shuffling only. Carlson told his men that they could talk to him any time without seeking permission. He unstraped the battalion from routine, red tape, and bureaucracy, and turned every man into a fighting machine. But the one thing that set him apart from the rest of the military establishment was his belief in ethical indoctrination. Officers, he felt should lead by consensus and not by rank or seniority. Motivating men by explaining the reasons behind military decisions was of paramount importance. Carlson’s beliefs ran contrary to established Marine thinking. They were unorthodox, daring, and quite controversial. To instill them in the psyche of commissioned Marine officers and enlisted men who had been indoctrinated in the philosophy of conventional military behavior was a neat hat trick. Carlson pulled it off so successfully that he was to pay for it later.

On 6 September 1942, the entire 2nd Marine Raider Battalion embarked on the venerable USS WHARTON (AP-7), bound for Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides Group. WHARTON had begun life as SS SOUTHERN CROSS of the Munson Line in 1921. The Navy acquired her from the Maritime Administration in 1939 and converted her into a troop transport from her previous configuration as a passenger/cargo liner. Todd Shipyards converted her in their Erie Basin facility in Brooklyn. When they finished, the Navy commissioned her on 7 December1940 as USS WHARTON. She was a grand old lady of the sea and the Marines must have felt as though they had died and gone to heaven. They had hot showers, a roof over their heads, and Navy chow. They were living large. Along the way to Espiritu Santo they made calls at Canton Island, the Phoenix Group, Siva, Fijii, Noumea, and New Caledonia. After their previous accommodations, WHARTON must have felt like the Waldorf-Astoria and her ports of call like Paradise. On 22 September, they arrived at Espiritu Santo and moved into Camp Gung-Ho for the final phase of their training.

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