Why Marines of the Gilded Age?
1APR21 Blog Post Gilded Age Marines – Why am I doing this? If you pick up a book on Marine Corps history, you’ll probably find a few paragraphs on the landing and battle at Guantanamo, Cuba, in June of 1898, during the Spanish American war. If you pick up a book on Naval history of the era between 1897 and 1917, you may see a note that a forward base was established at Guantanamo before the Battle of Santiago, with or without a mention of a landing and battle fought by Marines. If you pick up a book on Army history of the era, or a more popular history of the war, you may not see any mention at all of Guantanamo, or the Marine action during the war. Yet, conventional wisdom regards the taking of Guantanamo as a pivotal point in the development of the USMC’s amphibious mission. Marines embarked aboard ship, landed on a foreign shore, fought, and defeated an enemy holding that terrain. This is what Marines do, no? Conventional wisdom also regards the ten-fold gro...