Military Special Operations
MARINE RAIDERS: THE CORPS’ ONLY SPECIAL OPERATIONS UNIT
November 30, 2022 ·Mac Caltrider
Marine Raiders are among the most elite troops in America’s special operations arsenal. Photo by Senior Airman Joseph Pick. Composite by Coffee or Die Magazine.
It was the evening of Aug. 17, 1942.
In addition to the enemy, the Marine Raiders were fighting exhaustion too. The men of 2nd Raider Battalion had just killed more than half of the Japanese soldiers on Makin Island. Now they had to get off the beach and into open waters, where a pair of US Navy submarines waited to extract them.
The Raiders paddled their inflatable boats through the crashing surf, but only about half of them managed to reach the vessels. The others reluctantly returned to the beach, many without their weapons. Though the Japanese had sustained heavy casualties, it was only a matter of time before the survivors rallied and overpowered the relatively defenseless Raiders.
US Marine Raiders dash at full speed along narrow poles in the early 1940s, part of their training at Camp Pendleton, California, to make them the finest combat organization in the world. US Marine Corps photo via Wikimedia Commons.
A rescue watercraft was dispatched to retrieve the stranded Raiders, but it was immediately sunk by a Japanese plane. At that point, the Raiders ditched their heavy equipment. They signaled to the submarines to move to the calmer waters of a nearby lagoon. Then, with the remaining rubber boats and several abandoned canoes, they built a large raft.
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