20th Commandant of the Marine Corps (1952-1955)
A general and a postwar commandant of the Marine Corps, Lemuel C. Shepherd Jr. was born on February 10, 1896, in Norfolk, Virginia. His father was a doctor whose family roots in Virginia’s Tidewater society dated to 1652. During the Civil War, most male members of the family fought for the Confederacy. Indeed, Shepherd was named for an uncle, Lemuel Cornick, who was killed at the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. His mother was a schoolteacher from Massachusetts who had moved from Nantucket to Norfolk in search of a job. As a boy, Shepherd was fascinated by both horses and electricity; he rode daily and assembled his own radio set. Years later, he would recall a night in 1912 when he monitored radio traffic heralding the sinking of Titanic. In 1913, Shepherd entered the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) with hopes of studying electrical engineering. The next four years were relatively undistinguished, except for one overexuberant New Year’s celebration that saw the newly made cadet corporal firing skyrockets out his barracks window. Caught in the act, Shepherd never again held cadet rank. But when the United States entered World War I in April 1917, Shepherd was filled with martial enthusiasm and applied immediately for a commission in the newly expanded Marine Corps. His request granted, he graduated from VMI early, on May 3.
Second Lieutenant Shepherd then joined the 5th Regiment of marines. After an extended period of training in both the United States and France, the 5th Regiment entered combat in late May 1918. As a platoon leader and then company commander, Shepherd established a heroic record. Wounded three times, he would be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Navy Cross, and the Silver Star for actions at Belleau Wood and Mont Blanc.
Following the war, Shepherd remained in the Marine Corps. He occupied a variety of billets that mixed the mundane with the unusual. While he attended the standard professional schools and commanded his share of shipborne marines, Shepherd also mapped European battlefields, commanded the marine detachment at Franklin Roosevelt’s Warm Springs, Georgia, retreat, and served as aide-de-camp to a commandant of the Marine Corps, Major General John A.Lejeune. Other assignments included staff and troop commands in China and Haiti and field-testing the Marine Corps’ newly developed amphibious warfare doctrine. By the time the United States entered World War II in 1941, Shepherd had become a colonel and assistant commandant of Marine Corps schools. The wartime expansion of the corps would bring him rapid advancement and continued success.
Shepherd, like many marines, asked immediately to be assigned a combat unit. In March 1942, he got his wish when the Marine Corps sent him to command the newly created 9th Regiment at San Diego, California. Shepherd trained the regiment rigorously and led it eventually to Guadalcanal in August 1943. There, the regiment continued to train as a part of the 3d Marine Division. However, Shepherd did not remain long. Promoted to brigadier general, he was made assistant divisional commander of the 1st Marine Division, then resting and retraining in Australia after its exhausting conquest of Guadalcanal. Shepherd would not have much time to adjust to the new position. On December 26, the 1st Division waded ashore at Cape Gloucester in New Britain. In this operation, General Douglas MacArthur, the theater commander, wanted the marines to secure the northern coast of New Britain and prevent the Japanese from reinforcing and supporting their operations in New Guinea. In the 3-week campaign to follow, Shepherd played a critical role. As a sector commander, he was responsible for pushing the Seventh Marines and its supporting units deep into the jungle to seize a series of prominent hills anchoring the Japanese position. The combat was brutal, because the marines had to fight not only the Japanese but probably the thickest jungle and deepest mud in the South Pacific. Nevertheless, by the middle of January, western New Britain had been secured.
Owing no small amount to his performance at Cape Gloucester, Shepherd was ordered in March 1944 to assume command of the 1st Provisional Brigade. Created out of two regiments filled with combat veterans, the Twenty-second and Fourth Marines, the brigade moved to attack Guam on July 21, 1944. Guam was to be the last objective in the U.S. campaign against the Mariana Islands. Joining the 1st Provisional Brigade were the 3d Marine Division and the 77th Infantry Division, which was to act as a corps reserve. The initial amphibious assault was unusual in that Shepherd’s brigade and the 3d Division landed at two widely separated beachheads. Although the navy provided an excellent pre-invasion bombardment, the initial landings occurred at great cost.
After establishing the beachhead and securing points inland, Shepherd turned his brigade north to clear out the Orote Peninsula so as to secure an airfield and Apra Harbor. In the heavy combat to follow, which included a highly effective Japanese nighttime counterattack on July 25–26, Shepherd could be seen in the forward areas exhorting and leading his troops. He always emphasized the necessity of getting forward in combat, as reflected in a comment he had made to a reporter during World War I: “You can’t find out how a battle is going sitting in a command post.” By July 29, Japanese resistance on the peninsula had been crushed. All that remained for Shepherd and the brigade was to bury the dead and conduct extensive long-range patrolling over the remainder of the island.
After the success at Guam, this most visible of marines was promoted to major general and given command of the then-organizing 6th Division. Assigned to the III Amphibious Corps and training for the attack on Okinawa, the 6th would combine Shepherd’s 1st Provisional Brigade and the Twenty-ninth Marines. With an extended period to prepare for the invasion, Shepherd trained his division hard. By this time, his marines had nicknamed him “the Driver.” While he certainly pushed his men, Shepherd drove himself no less, prompting even his chief of staff to wonder if the short and thin general would break down physically. He never did.
When the invasion of Okinawa began on April 1, 1945, the 6th Division occupied the northern-most, or left, flank of the amphibious landing. Like the rest of the landing force, Shepherd’s troops faced little opposition. Over the next few weeks, that opposition stiffened appreciably as the 6th Division moved north and conquered the Motobu Peninsula. Almost simultaneously, other units in the attack force began to experience heavy Japanese resistance to the south. Tenth Army commander Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner now reversed the 6th Division and fed it into the western, or right, flank of the attack. Beginning May 11, a general U.S. advance clawed its way south. The torturous phase of the Battle of Okinawa had started.
While Lieutenant General Buckner ordered the 1st Division to reduce the Shuri Castle in the Japanese center, Shepherd’s division drew the coastal capital city of Naha as its objectives. Chief among the obstacles facing the 6th Division was a series of hills, including one nicknamed Sugarloaf. After two weeks of heavy fighting made more difficult by rain and mud, the division seized Sugarloaf and punctured the Shuri line. The division’s trials were not yet finished. The Japanese retained strong points on the Oroku Peninsula. Rather than engage frontally, Shepherd decided to go around the enemy by using an amphibious landing on June 4. The operation was a brilliant success. Less than three weeks later, Okinawa was taken.
Shepherd left Okinawa with his reputation enhanced. Not only had the division accomplished its difficult mission, but Shepherd had cemented his standing as a front-line commander. Aggressive, and a firm believer in always maintaining the offensive, the general continued to lead by example. According to one observer, the future Lieutenant General Victor H. Krulak, each morning Shepherd determined where the day’s hottest activity would be. He then went there and remained as long as possible. Krulak even went so far as to state that Shepherd logged more frontline time than any private. While this may be stretching the truth, Shepherd did leave most of his marines with the impression that he was ever present at the front. It was an impression indispensable to Shepherd s ability to motivate marines and win battles.
Immediately after concluding the campaign in Okinawa, Shepherd and the 6th Division departed for Guam, where they began training for the expected invasion of the Japanese home islands. The dropping of the atomic bombs made the attack unnecessary, but the war was not quite over for Shepherd. On October 10, he moved his division to north China, where it supervised the surrender of Japanese forces. Shepherd remained in north China until December 26, when he departed for the United States and a resumption of peacetime marine duties. A succession of important billets followed, including assistant to the commandant of the Marine Corps, commandant of Marine Corps schools at Quantico, Virginia, and commander of the Fleet Marine Force, Pacific. This last position gave Shepherd one more taste of combat. Now a lieutenant general, he assumed his duties in June 1950 just as the Korean War broke out. As commander of Fleet Marines, Shepherd worked closely with General MacArthur, commander in chief of the Far East. With Shepherd acting as his amphibious warfare adviser, MacArthur mounted his brilliant Inchon landings. This attack temporarily reversed the tide of the Korean War and broke U.S. forces out of the cramped and deadly Pusan Perimeter. Repeating a career-long pattern, Shepherd made sure that he got to the front as soon, and often, as possible. He did this following the landings and then again at the near disaster that was the evacuation of the 1st Marine Division from the Chosin Reservoir in December.
Strategic stalemate in Korea did not stop the general’s advancement. On January 1, 1952, Shepherd became a four-star general and commandant of the Marine Corps. It was a promotion that President Harry Truman had promised four years earlier when the more senior Clifton Cates edged out Shepherd for the job. The new commandant made the most of his tour of duty. Beyond becoming the first marine to sit with the Joint Chiefs of Staff—an event beyond his making—Shepherd molded the corps for the remainder of the twentieth century. First, he reorganized marine headquarters in the manner of a general staff. Second, he emphasized the development of the helicopter and high-speed naval transport. Third, he convinced the secretary of the navy to codify in law the status of the Marine Corps within the navy. Fourth, and no less important, Shepherd paid meticulous attention to preserving the history, traditions, and public relations symbols of the modern Marine Corps. Accordingly, he ordered formal mess and parade proceedings, which were still in use at the beginning of the twenty-first century; he created the Marine Corps Museum and the official Marine Corps seal; and, finally, he drove to completion the Iwo Jima statue in Washington, D.C.
Shepherd retired in early 1956 only to be recalled to active duty by President Dwight Eisenhower. This time, he would serve as chairman of the Inter-American Defense Board. The board was a cold-war product created to organize hemispheric defense. Although faced with often insuperable difficulties bred of bringing twenty-one nations into some kind of military alliance, Shepherd operated with force and tact. After serving almost four years, he retired permanently in 1959, leaving a legacy of improved relations and closer ties among the forces of the U.S. military.
The general enjoyed a long and productive retirement, first in Virginia and later in California. He sat on corporate boards, supervised international policy forums, became active in his church, and worked hard on behalf of his alma mater, VMI. Shepherd died on August 6, 1990, to the end the personal symbol of the values of the U.S. Marine Corps. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery next to his wife, Virginia.
FURTHER READINGS Krulak, Victor H. “Lemuel Cornick Shepherd, Jr., 1896–1990,” Marine Corps Gazette (October 1990). Simmons, Edwin H. “Remembering General Shepherd,” Fortitudine: Bulletin of the Marine Corps Historical Program (Fall 1990). Thompson, P.L. “General Shepherd,” Alumni Review, Virginia Military Institute (Winter 1983).
