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Greg McCourt-Historian
to remember
Marine Gen Vernon Megee.
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Contact Info
Last Address Tulsa
Date of Passing Jan 14, 1992
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Last Known Activity:
Vernon E. Megee, a pioneer in combat aviation for the Marine Corps and the only person in that service to rise from private to the service's highest rank, four-star general, died Tuesday at the St. Francis Gardens nursing home in Albuquerque, N.M.
General Megee, who was 91 years old, was a resident of Albuquerque the past three years and previously lived in Austin, Tex. He died of pneumonia after a long illness, his family said.
General Megee helped develop the Marine tactic of supporting ground troops with air strikes against nearby positions, using rockets, napalm and strafing, with pilots directed by radio messages from land controllers. In World War II, he was the first commander of a Marine Landing Force Air Support Control Unit. 'Scrape Your Bellies'
Carrying out his strategy of close air support as an air commander at Iwo Jima in 1945, he instructed Marine pilots to "go in and scrape your bellies on the beach." He also commanded the air support units at Okinawa.
In his 40 years with the Marines, General Megee also fought against Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua in 1930, when a plane he piloted sustained dozens of hits, and in the Korean War, when he was commander of the First Marine Aircraft Wing. He won the Legion of Merit, Bronze Star and several other medals.
Among his assignments, he was the first aviator to serve as assistant commandant and chief of staff of the corps at the Washington headquarters and served on the staff of the War College. He was also director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chief of staff of the Fleet Marine Force in the Atlantic and assistant director of aviation at the Washington headquarters.
He reached his four-star rank toward the end of his career and retired in 1959 as commanding general of the Fleet Marine Force in the Pacific. An Enlistee in 1919
Born in Tulsa, Okla., General Megee grew up in Chandler, Okla., and attended Oklahoma A.&M. College. He finished his degree more 30 years later.
He enlisted in the Marines in 1919, then went through officers' training at Quantico, Va., and was commissioned a second lieutenant in 1922. His early assignments took him to Haiti and China. Because Marine aviation was in its infancy, he trained at Navy aviation schools in San Diego , and Pensacola, Fla., and an Army Air Corps School in Montgomery, Ala.
After retiring from the military in 1959, General Magee earned a master's degree from the University of Texas in Austin with a thesis on the Marines' intervention in Nicaragua. Then he served about a decade as the first superintendent and president of the trustees of the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen, Tex., a preparatory school with unofficial ties to the Marines, which opened in in 1963.
Other Comments:
Also awarded Peruvian Aviation Cross, 1st Class. I cannot find any information or photos on this award.
Western Pacific Campaign (1944-45)/Battle of Iwo Jima
From Month/Year
February / 1945
To Month/Year
March / 1945
Description The Battle of Iwo Jima (19 February – 26 March 1945), or Operation Detachment, was a major battle in which the United States Armed Forces fought for and captured the island of Iwo Jima from the Japanese Empire. The American invasion had the goal of capturing the entire island, including its three airfields (including South Field and Central Field), to provide a staging area for attacks on the Japanese main islands. This five-week battle comprised some of the fiercest and bloodiest fighting of the War in the Pacific of World War II.
After the heavy losses incurred in the battle, the strategic value of the island became controversial. It was useless to the U.S. Army as a staging base and useless to the U.S. Navy as a fleet base. However, Navy SEABEES rebuilt the landing strips, which were used as emergency landing strips for USAAF B-29s.
The Imperial Japanese Army positions on the island were heavily fortified, with a dense network of bunkers, hidden artillery positions, and 18 km (11 mi) of underground tunnels. The Americans on the ground were supported by extensive naval artillery and complete air supremacy over Iwo Jima from the beginning of the battle by U.S. Navy and Marine Corps aviators.
Iwo Jima was the only battle by the U.S. Marine Corps in which the Japanese combat deaths were thrice those of the Americans throughout the battle. Of the 22,000 Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima at the beginning of the battle, only 216 were taken prisoner, some of whom were captured because they had been knocked unconscious or otherwise disabled. The majority of the remainder were killed in action, although it has been estimated that as many as 3,000 continued to resist within the various cave systems for many days afterwards, eventually succumbing to their injuries or surrendering weeks later.
Despite the bloody fighting and severe casualties on both sides, the Japanese defeat was assured from the start. Overwhelming American superiority in arms and numbers as well as complete control of air power — coupled with the impossibility of Japanese retreat or reinforcement — permitted no plausible circumstance in which the Americans could have lost the battle.
The battle was immortalized by Joe Rosenthal's photograph of the raising of the U.S. flag on top of the 166 m (545 ft) Mount Suribachi by five U.S. Marines and one U.S. Navy battlefield Hospital Corpsman. The photograph records the second flag-raising on the mountain, both of which took place on the fifth day of the 35-day battle. Rosenthal's photograph promptly became an indelible icon — of that battle, of that war in the Pacific, and of the Marine Corps itself — and has been widely reproduced.
