'Gung Ho!': The Story of Carlson's Makin Island Raiders

I thought it was interesting that Carlson claims in the beginning that he was with Mao Tse Tung on his Long March. Apparently, Carlson takes the skills and lessons that he learned from the Red Army in Guerilla Warfare and trains a couple of hundred bad boy Americans how to kill and throw themselves on barb wire. The first half of the film follows the training and even has time for a bit of a love story with Noah Beery Jr. (best known from "Rockfile Files" perhaps).

The second half involves a submarine ride and a raid on an island held by the Japanese. The action is surprisingly intense. Some scenes, like the shooting of Japanese out of trees reach the level of brutal poetic metaphor. These action scenes detail fierce fighting and are surprisingly even handed with both American and Japanese troops biting the dust pretty regularly.

Unlike, "Walk in the Sun" where the audience is given the chance to know and care about each soldier, there is only a pretty stereotyped introduction and then they are molded into one tough killing machine. The title "Gung Ho" we learn means "harmonious work" and that is what we get with precision maneuvers and no hesitation in the face of death on the battlefield.

One could call this communist propaganda, but without films like this, could fascism East and West have been defeated?

The campaign of Makin Island which was the very first piece of Pacific Island we invaded against the Japanese in World War II. It serves as the basis for this film. Not much of an island the island was directly between the Hawaiian Islands and a place called Guadalcanal. The theory was get in, destroy the Japanese base and communications and get out. That much is true. The rest of the film is Hollywood hype.

Randolph Scott plays a character based on Major Evans Carlson of Carlson's Raiders which was an elite unit of Marines trained to take the island. Carlson had seen service in China and was impressed with the Chinese guerrilla campaign against the Japanese there. He studied the tactics of Chu The who was the military commander of Mao Tse-tung's Chinese Communists. I don't know much Marxism, if any, Carlson took to heart, but after World War II it got him in no small amount of trouble. In an organization as conservative and tradition bound as the United States Marines he became a pariah. He died in 1951.

Since the Makin Island campaign was the start of our Pacific Offensive it was natural that Hollywood seized on the opportunity to make a quick B picture as a morale booster. Universal assembled a good cast that included a young Robert Mitchum before stardom. Besides Mitchum, I liked J. Carroll Naish and Sam Levene who gave good support to Scott. Levene played the typical serviceman from Brooklyn which by that time was becoming a cliché in war pictures.

Anyway Carlson's lasting contribution to the Marines was the phrase Gung Ho. So if you want to know how that got into the Marine vocabulary, see this movie.

Of the two Marine Raider Battalions made famous by their exploits at Guadalcanal and elsewhere, Edson's First and Carlson's Second, the Second was by far the ideologically weirdest. Both were thought of -- and thought of themselves -- as elite units, but in many ways they couldn't have been more different. Edson was a by-the-book military man who took marinehood several powers beyond the norm. They were looked at askance by other members of the military. Edson's emphasis was on combat performance locked into a rigidly authoritarian cast structure.

But Carlson's (here Thorwald's)background, temperament, and training methods were revolutionary, in a literal sense. Between the wars, Carlson had taken a kind of vacation from the Marine Corps and spent it studying the Chinese Communists and learning from them, especially the development of what they called "Gung Ho," which translates as something like "good public spirit" but has been degraded in meaning over the years until, when I was in the military, it had all the pejorative value of "chickenshit." Carlson was a committed leader, openly concerned about his men's welfare, what William James would have called "tender minded." His outfit, men and officers alike, lived together in both training and combat, suffered the same hardship, ate the same food, held bellyaching sessions in which anyone could say anything, good or bad, about anyone else, as close as you get to group therapy. The movie soft pedals much of this, and God forbid the word "communism" should be spoken aloud.

The Raider Battalion's most famous engagement was the raid of Makin Island in the Gilberts (pronounced more like "Moggin" than what it looks like). It wasn't the unqualified success the picture gives us. After the rubber boats reached shore and the attack was initiated, resistance increased and it looked like the raid would fail, so Carlson called for a retreat back to the boats. Unfortunately, as Carlson had foreseen, the heavy surf flooded outboard engines and overturned many of the craft, drowning numbers of men. As it turned out, however, the Japanese had more or less disappeared and the mission was accomplished, except that nine of the men who had not been killed in combat or drowned had gotten lost in the dark or wound up on another atoll. They were later rounded up, taken to Kwajalein and beheaded.

The raid did no long-term damage except to convince the enemy that the Gilberts would soon be invaded (which was true) and that fortifications should be reinforced (which they were). I love this movie. It has every cliché in the book. Brawling rivals, a Jewish sidekick called "Transpawt" by Randolph Scott, treacherous Japs, stupid Japs, Marines throwing knives with deadly accuracy, one of our boys can beat a dozen of theirs, explosions galore filling the air with flying balsa wood, bayonets, judo, interesting rifle-shot sounds, Japanese pilots giggling maniacally while they unknowingly slaughter their own soldiers -- ding hau!

The crowning moment: Colonel Thorwald begins one of those patriotic speeches about how we have to win the war, and the peace that will follow too, and turns mid-way through the speech and looks directly through the camera lens at the wartime audience, and the image on screen becomes a sinking ship flying a Japanese flag. Could there be anything better if you're seeking patriotic laughs from a movie? Shortly after Guadalcanal, the Raider Batallions were both disbanded, the Corps believing that since every Marine was elite anyway the Corps had no need for whole outfits of them.

You can say the film is dated. But then again, Shakespeare is also dated. Shakespeare is also dateless, and this film is too. We won't get another Randolph Scott and here he stars in perhaps his most entertaining, if not most sobering, war film. Sure, it's jingoistic, racist, preachy, and cliché-ridden. It's not exactly historical, except in showing how Americans viewed themselves and the Marines at the time.

The real history behind this highly romanticized dramatization has been covered well by the other commentaries. The Makin Island raid was a folly that movie glamorizes, and Carlson was an idealist whose comrade-oriented methods had little influence on later commando tactics. However, even he didn't like the Hollywood result. Despite seeing his name on the credits and Randolph Scott ideally cast to portray him, Carlson walked out of the movie theatre in disgust when he first viewed the film.

When will this gem get remastered and restored? They truly don't make 'em like this anymore.

I've seen this film several times and it reflects the patriotism of America during WWII. It actually intertwines real history with Hollywood fantasy by modeling the story from the Marine Corps' Raider Battalion. Randolph Scott's Col. Thorwald is loosely based on Lt.Col. Evans Carlson's philosophies and his own experience in China. I enjoyed seeing Noah Beery, who would later become James Garner's dad in "The Rockford Files", and Robert Mitchum, already possessing his laid-back approach to acting. Most war-themed movies made during the war were aimed to boost morale and make our boys into the heroes they eventually became, although at times the dialogue was over-the-top. Still entertaining, and gives an idea what a war with a purpose was about.