3 Divisions With 3 Histories, 3 Styles and 1 Goal: Baghdad

Every year, veteran and active-duty members of the 1st Marine Division meet at Camp Pendleton near San Diego for a solemn ceremony. One at a time, Marines past and present are called forward to pin a battle streamer on the division’s red and gold banner.

Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Inchon, Chosin, the Tet offensive. From the South Pacific islands during World War II to Korea and Vietnam, the 1st Marine Division has tackled some of the bloodiest missions in the history of American arms. And, as the annual ceremony with the streamers reflects, that history is drilled into Marines from their earliest days.

“Wars are fought on emotion. And that loyalty, that sense of belonging to an organization with a proud history like the 1st Marine Division, can sustain them in times of great challenge and crisis,” said Jerry Brown, a retired Marine Corps colonel. “There’s a sense you would never want to let those that went before you down by doing other than your very best.”

The 1st Marine Division is one of three large units leading the assault on Baghdad. Together with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division and the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, they make up a fighting force of about 50,000 troops with advanced weapons, high-tech equipment and sophisticated tactics.

By design, they are able to work together on the battlefield with a degree of cooperation unthinkable in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. In those conflicts, each branch of the military tended to fight its own war -- even basic equipment such as radios were not compatible across branches. Recent emphasis on joint operations, however, has considerably increased the level of combat cooperation among the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.

Nevertheless, the Marines, the 3rd Infantry Division and the 101st are shaped by markedly different histories, traditions and internal cultures. They bring to the battlefield different weapons, doctrines and ways of fighting that shape the roles they are about to play.

Trying to delineate the cultural differences between the Marines, the Army mechanized infantry and Army airborne units is a perilous undertaking, military analysts warn. But there is more than a kernel of truth in some widely held perceptions.

The Marines -- the smallest U.S. fighting force and officially a subset of the Navy -- have always worn their esprit de corps more openly than other branches of the military. They have also worked harder to inculcate it into new recruits.

“Once a Marine, always a Marine, that’s really true,” said a retired Army artilleryman. “Some Army officers envy it.”

First among equals is the 1st Division, nicknamed “The Old Breed,” whose heroism at Guadalcanal during World War II set the standard for the entire corps.

At the opposite end of the cultural spectrum is the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division. It is the Army as much of the Army sees itself: Huge, ungainly, little-known but usually present for the heavy lifting. It scorns the very idea of elite forces, convinced that the burdens of war always come down to common soldiers.

The 3rd Infantry Division earned its nickname, “The Rock of the Marne,” in World War I. Its untested and outnumbered soldiers turned back a German advance in desperate fighting on the Marne River near Chateau Thierry, France. Though the Army had done the fighting, a headline back home reported, “Germans Stopped at Chateau Thierry with Help of God and a Few Marines.”

In World War II, no one fought longer, harder, or at greater cost -- in the bungled early campaigns in North Africa, up the boot of Italy through the carnage of Anzio and Salerno, into France and across Germany to the Nazi leaders’ mountain sanctuary at Berchtesgaden. Audie Murphy, the most decorated combat soldier of World War II and later a film star, was one of 38 members of the 3rd Division to win a Medal of Honor in those campaigns.

In training as well as equipment, today’s 3rd Infantry Division soldiers are a far cry from the draftees who took the division into two World Wars, Korea and Vietnam, but the culture of seeing themselves as ordinary soldiers has not disappeared.

There is a touch of defiance in the division’s song:

Wouldn’t give a bean

to be a fancy pants Marine.

I’d rather be a

dog-face soldier like I am.

The “Screaming Eagles” of the 101st Airborne, on the other hand, have never considered themselves anything but elite. When the division was activated in 1942 as a parachute and glider force, its members were handpicked and its training was more extensive than what most regular Army units received as an unprepared nation struggled to rearm.

The division’s first commander, Maj. Gen. William C. Lee, declared that the 101st had no history, “but it has a rendezvous with destiny.”

In 1944, when the German army launched a final attempt to reverse the course of the war in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge, troops of the 101st were surrounded at Bastogne. Called upon to surrender, a defiant Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe famously replied: “Nuts.”

On the battlefield, the three major units menacing Baghdad are as different as their cultures.

The 3rd Infantry Division is a classic heavy mechanized division, a battering ram of 70-ton Abrams tanks, armored Bradley fighting vehicles, Paladin M109 self-propelled howitzers and mechanized infantry.

An Abrams 120-millimeter smoothbore main gun and armor-piercing rounds can score one-shot kills on Iraq’s Soviet-era tanks long before coming within range of the Iraqi tanks’ guns, which in any case have difficulty piercing the Abrams’ multilayered steel cladding.

Moreover, while all U.S. tanks have laser sights that can penetrate darkness, smoke and fog, the advanced Abrams M-1A2 model is equipped with a double system that enables the tank’s commander to find and fix a second target while the gunner is firing at the first. The M-1A2’s main gun automatically swings to the new target when finished with the first -- all without requiring crew members to expose themselves to enemy fire.

The U.S. tanks’ sights automatically calculate trajectory, wind and other factors, making them extremely accurate.

The infantrymen move into combat in fully armored Bradley fighting vehicles that are much better protected than the aluminum-skinned armored personnel carriers of old. Designed to outmatch new Soviet vehicles during the later years of the Cold War, Bradleys have a turret-mounted M242 25-millimeter Bushmaster chain gun and a twin TOW antitank missile launcher that allows them to attack and destroy hard targets, including tanks and enemy bunkers.

Less talked about than the Abrams and the Bradley but no less important in the 3rd Infantry Division’s arsenal is the 155-millimeter Paladin M109 self-propelled howitzer.

Because it is self-propelled, equipped with a mechanically assisted loading and aiming system, and largely self-contained with its own global positioning system, it can move faster and respond to requests for suppressing fire more quickly than conventional artillery, which must be towed.

“In the middle of a maneuver fight, when most of the fires are on-call fires, the Paladin has a huge advantage,” says Richard Hart Sinnreich, former director of the Army School of Advanced Military Studies.

Thus, the 3rd Infantry Division can operate more independently than the Marines or Airborne because it has more armor, greater firepower of its own and hence less need for air support or other outside assistance. But it requires a huge logistical train to deliver the fuel, ammunition, repair services and other support necessary to keep it rolling. And the Abrams, Bradley and Paladin are too heavy to be moved easily by air.

The 1st Marine Division, though also equipped with Abrams tanks, probably has fewer of them. In place of Bradleys, it uses more lightly armored amphibious assault vehicles that offer more limited protection to its troops.

Balancing the equation, Marine divisions carry more infantry soldiers and excel in small-unit maneuvering of the kind required to campaign in populous, developed areas with minimal harm to civilians.

That helps explain why the 1st Marine Division drove north to Baghdad through the fertile and populous areas between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, while the 3rd Infantry Division made a rapid dash through the largely empty desert to the west of the Fertile Crescent.

The Marines’ M198 155-millimeter howitzer has its drawbacks: It must be towed by truck, and when a call for artillery comes in, time-consuming, backbreaking labor is required to set up and anchor the gun in firing position. But it has a significant advantage as well: It can be flown to new locations by helicopter.

Because the 1st Marine Division is operating as the major element of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, it has its own air force of Harrier jets and helicopters at its disposal.

One mark of interservice cooperation is the fact that when Marine units operate with the kind of long supply lines that exist in Iraq, the Army now routinely picks up much of the burden, using its far larger logistical capabilities.

The 101st Airborne has become a helicopter assault division, which travels to the battlefield in choppers rather than parachuting in. It is lighter still than the Marines in terms of armor and firepower.

It has no tanks or Bradleys of its own, though it may be getting supplemental armor when it faces possible attack from Iraqi tanks.

And its artillery is 105 millimeter rather than 155 millimeter, meaning it has significantly shorter range and fires lighter projectiles.

What the 101st has is the ability to leapfrog ahead to secure critical objectives and hold them -- with the help of large doses of close air support -- until heavier coalition ground forces arrive.

With the 101st and the 3rd Infantry Division operating in close proximity around Baghdad, the lightness of the airborne force is not likely to be a serious problem. And its well-honed infantry skills are an asset as the war moves to close quarters.

In urban combat, says Sinnreich, “a lot of the heavy lifting is going to be done by dismounted troops. But where you can use them, tanks can be really helpful.”

That is especially true in a city such as Baghdad, much of which consists of wide avenues, open parkland and relatively few tall buildings.

As a result, if the final phase of the invasion comes down to urban warfare, the three main forces arrayed at the edge of the city -- along with Navy and Air Force planes and Army and Marine attack helicopters -- are likely to mesh fairly smoothly. Cultural differences and rivalries are likely to mean little to those on the ground.

“I doubt that Pvt. Tentpeg and Sgt. Snuffy are down there worrying much about their divisions’ reputations,” Sinnreich said.