Victory Point by Ed Darack Read Free Book Online Page B

war fighters in history: the United States Marine Corps.
    Captain Nicholas, the Marine Corps’ first Commandant, who would designate the Tun Tavern as the Continental Marines’ headquarters and recruitment center (Nicholas appointed the Tavern’s owner, Robert Mullan, to undertake the recruiting operation), quickly stood up two battalions of Marines, who quenched their thirsts with the Tavern’s beer and feasted at the adjacent eatery, Peggy Mullan’s Red Hot Beef Steak Club at Tun Tavern. Not four months after their fateful birth, the Continental Marines entered battle for the first time, immediately establishing what would become an enduring tradition of fortitude and decisive victory at the Battle of Nassau, where Captain Nicholas and 230 of his Marines (accompanied by twenty Continental Navy sailors) stormed onto the shores of the Island of Nassau and captured the British stronghold of Fort Montague. Then, on 3 March 1776, these “soldiers of the sea” took all of the island, seizing a large cache of British cannons, mortars, and rifles—later to be used against their onetime owners.
    In the centuries that would follow that christening expedition to the Bahamas, the U.S. Marine Corps would indelibly burn into historical records as well as the psyches of millions—if not billions —chronicles of virtually unimaginable travails pitting spirit, skill, courage, and camaraderie against malevolent adversity and often overwhelming odds throughout the globe, in all climes, from scorched desert, to dripping jungle, to piercingly cold alpine heights. Throughout their history—a history that began almost eight months before the very birth of the nation their ranks would shed so much blood to foster and pledge to defend to the last—the United States Marine Corps has produced victories not just exemplary, but iconic of the wars in which they fought.
    In the First Barbary War of the early 1800s, the Marines would prove that they could succeed in combat for their country not only on the home front, but as a world-class expeditionary force capable of defending American interests anywhere on the planet. Ultimately arising out of a failed diplomatic attempt to maintain security of American merchant shipping through payoffs to pirates of the “Barbary States” (the modern African nations of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco), the then-fledgling U.S. government dispatched a small group of Navy frigates—crewed by sailors and defended onboard by U.S. Marines—to the Mediterranean to protect American vessels from the marauders. Over the course of the following years, the U.S. Navy would fight a series of engagements in the region that resulted in mixed outcomes. The relative stalemate would end, however, in the spring of 1805 at the Battle of Derne, when U.S. Marine First Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon led five hundred of his men, accompanied by local mercenaries (whom he and his Marines helped train), six hundred miles from Alexandria, Egypt, across the scorching Sahara Desert over the course of forty-five days, to storm the heavily defended Derne outpost—Tripoli’s primary defensive rampart—as U.S. Navy ships supported their ground efforts by pounding the fortress with heavy gunfire. Once captured, O’Bannon personally raised the American flag above Derne, marking the first time in U.S. history that the American flag flew above foreign soil.
    The Battle of Derne would become one of the most popularly enduring in all of the Marine Corps’ history, being referenced in the second line of the famous “U.S. Marines’ Hymn,” reading “To the shores of Tripoli.” The well-known Marine Corps officer sword, which would become the weapon issued for more years than any other in the U.S. military, also hails from this battle.
    O’Bannon and his Marines’ training of and fighting alongside local forces marked the beginning of what would become a long-standing Marine Corps approach to waging war against America’s