The Tactical Notebook tells stories of ‘armies that are, armies that were, and armies that might have been’. The following post, the last in our series on the short-lived organizational reforms of 1947, fulfills the third of these tasks by describing the structure of a Marine brigade that never saw the light of day.
As described in the tables of organization of the J-Series, the brigade of 1947 looked a lot like one of the two standard task units of the Marine division presumed by that set of establishments. That is, the business end of both organizations consisted of three infantry battalions, three batteries of 105mm howitzers, and a company of tanks. However, rather than depending directly upon the command group of the task unit, the artillery batteries of the brigade were formed into a battalion that, like the infantry battalions of the J-Series, inherited the number, traditions, and battle honors of a regiment that, at the very least, had served in the Second World War.
Moreover, where the J-Series division rated several stand-alone service and support battalions, the designers of the brigade assembled the company-sized counterparts of those units into a special troops battalion. Thus, while the Marine division possessed a tank battalion, amphtrac battalion, engineer battalion, and shore party battalion, the special troops battalion of the brigade housed a tank company, an amphtrac company, an engineer company, and a shore party company.1
Marvelous to say, the special troops battalion also included a company of vehicles of a type that played no role in the J-Series Marine Division, DUKW amphibian trucks. Stranger still, the deactivation of the 6th Amphibian Truck Company, the last DUKW-driving unit of the US Marine Corps, took place on 17 July 1947, a little more than two months after the promulgation of the new establishments. To wrap this riddle inside an enigma, the last survivor of the six amphibian truck companies on active duty at the end of the Second World War - one was then assigned to each Marine division - rolled up its guidon while serving in China, in the shadow of the old German naval base at Tsingtao.
Sources
A Chronology of the US Marine Corps, Volume III (1947-1964) (Washington, DC: US Marine Corps, 1971) page 4 (USMC)
‘The New FMF’ The Marine Corps Gazette (May 1947) pages 10-14 (Internet Archive)
Gordon L. Rottman US Marine Corps World War II Order of Battle (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002) pages 238 and 239
For Further Reading
It took about two decades for the present-day abbreviation for ‘amphibious tractor’ (‘amtrac’) to displace the original contraction (‘amphtrac’). Thus, while the oldest appearance in print of ‘amtrac’ I could find dates from 1946, a keyword search of back issues of the Marine Corps Gazette turned up an examples of Marines using ‘amphtrac’ as late as 1963.
“…the last survivor of the six amphibian truck companies on active duty at the end of the Second World War - one was then assigned to each Marine division - rolled up its guidon while serving in China, in the shadow of the old German naval base at Tsingtao.” One hopes they had enough beer to assuage their sorrow after the ceremony.
The oddments of unit histories and force structures certainly do make for amusing reading.