’Flying Leathernecks’: The Public Debate over Close Air Support and the Future of the U.S. Marine Corps, 1945–1952

During the Korean War, a doctrinal interservice debate within the armed forces over “close air support [CAS]”—the use of aircraft closely coordinated with ground personnel to attack enemy forces in close contact with friendly troops—spilled over into the popular press and congressional debates. While the U.S. Marine Corps emphasized CAS during World War II and the postwar period, the army and army air forces considered it far less important. Between 1945 and the end of the Korean War, this debate played out amidst the much larger “unification” struggle, in which the marine corps faced the very real threat of being reduced to a tiny branch of regimental-sized units with no combined arms capability. The public and Congress showed only a vague awareness of the differences between the marines’ and the air force’s use of airpower until they read frontline reporters’ praise for the marines’ use of CAS during the Korean War. The marines’ alleged prowess in this use of airpower entered congressional debates and bolstered efforts by the corps’ supporters to guarantee a minimum force structure for the marine corps in the Douglas Mansfield Act of 1952, making the U.S. Marine Corps the world’s only marine corps with substantial organic air forces.