Operation Independence took place in Quang Nam Province, South Vietnam, in February 1967. The action involved two battalions of the 9th Marines, 3d Marine Division. This was one of several operations that took place in late January and early February of 1967. 1stLt Leonard Dermott, USMCR documented the operation for the Marine Corps Combat Art Program. He was among the first Marines selected to serve as a combat artist in Vietnam. Initially, the combat art studio was going to be in Japan with the artists making trips to and from Vietnam to document the actions of the Marines. Dermott recommended finding a studio in Vietnam so the artists would not lose time and mobility by being so far away from the action. They would attend briefings and be able to move quickly to embed for several days, or for the duration of an operation, to record the experience. This was successful, with a studio set up at the Combat Information Bureau in Da Nang. Dermott and the other active duty artists were able to manage the activities of the reservists and civilian artists who came for several weeks at a time to document Marine Corps actions. During his time in Vietnam, Dermott covered a wide range of topics from everyday experiences, the wounded, patrols, and combat operations. The drawings below are Dermott’s impressions of the combat he witnessed and participated in during Operation Independence.

While Dermott was adept in working with watercolors and oils, when he was in the field, he worked in pencil, charcoal, and felt tip pens to be able to quickly document the events around him. In all, Dermott produced more than 180 works of art for the Marine Corps collection.
 
Further reading is available in the U.S. Marine Corps History Division publication Marines in Vietnam 1954-1973: An Anthology and Annotated Bibliography, 1985. This publication can be downloaded here.

The Marine Corps Combat Art Program traces its origins to 1942.  Its mission:  Keep Americans informed about what “their Marines” are doing at home and overseas.  Managed today by the National Museum of the Marine Corps, the collection has grown to include more than 9,000 works of art created by 350 artists. 

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​by Joan Thomas, Art Curator


After the tragic deaths of 220 Marines and 21 US service personnel on 23 October 1983 at the Battalion Landing Team Headquarters, in Beirut, Lebanon, the decision was made by the Marine Corps to send a combat artist to document the event and aftermath.
 
Major John T. “Jack” Dyer, USMCR (Ret.) was the curator for the Marine Corps’ art collection and had served as a combat artist during Vietnam. Following the terrorist attack, he was recalled to active duty, and within several weeks he received his orders to Lebanon.  Dyer departed in December 1983 and remained in country for the next several weeks, creating on-the-spot drawings, sketches and watercolors of what he was seeing on the ground.  Upon his return to the States, he resumed his retired status and once again took up his position as curator of art for the Marine Corps’ Museum and History Division (the predecessor to the National Museum of the Marine Corps).  During his time in Beirut, Dyer created over ninety-five works, and later continued to use his sketches and drawings to create finished studio works in watercolor.
 
For many of his pieces, Dyer preferred sepia brown toned ink in his drawings and sketches.  The ink also served as the underdrawings for several of his later finished watercolors.  The ink could also be combined with liquid to make a wash of brown toned color.  Below is a small sampling of the drawings and watercolors the artist completed or composed while in Beirut.

​"Hotel" Battery, 3/10 BLT, 2/8, Beirut by Major John T. Dyer, Jr., USMCR (Ret)
Pen and ink, wash on offset printing blotter paper
Accession number: 2012.1001.318
The remains of BLT HQ building in Beirut, Lebanon, which was destroyed by terrorist bombing on 23 October 1983.

By Eric Marr, Assistant Aviation Curator National Museum of the Marine Corps​

On the first day of the invasion of Okinawa in April 1945, the 6th Marine Division came across four unusual aircraft at the recently captured Yontan Airfield. These strange aircraft were only twenty feet long with a wingspan of less than seventeen feet. The small single-manned aircraft was powered by three rocket motors, carried a 2,600 lb warhead in the nose and had no landing gear.

What the Marines had found were examples of the Yokosuka MXY7 Ohka (or “Cherry Blossom” in Japanese) 11 manned suicide bomb. These aircraft were designed to be dropped from a Mitsubishi G4M bomber “mother ship” and then, using their great speed to avoid interception, target American naval vessels of the Okinawa invasion force.  Ohkas did not see wide usage during the war and often their G4M “mother ships” were shot down well short of their targets. However, Ohkas did damage the battleship USS Tennessee (BB-43) and sank the destroyer USS Mannert L. Abele (DD-733) near Okinawa.

An American Air Technical Intelligence Unit examined the Ohka 11, number I-13 on Okinawa, before the aircraft was shipped to the United States for further evaluation and study in Philadelphia by a US Navy Air Material Unit.  Its examinations finished, the aircraft traveled the States as part of a mobile exhibit of captured enemy weapons. 
​

Guest Blogger: Combat Artist, Richard Johnson

Winter 2003. Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. As I put the palm of my hand on the door, I could feel its coldness, and feel the cold wave of my own fear, the culmination of days of trepidation and worry about exactly this moment. I pushed the door open and crossed the threshold into someone else’s world of pain.

The door swings open and instead of another team of doctors, in walks an artist, or two artists, or three artists. I mean, really? Why wounded warriors don’t throw things at us, and tell us to ‘take a flying expletive at a rolling donut,’ is just amazing to me? But instead we walk in, and, they allow us – welcome us even ­– inside, inside their pain. They open themselves up to us. They tell us their stories. And we do our best to capture it all. In art.

“It is all fun and games until someone pokes an eye out,” as my old gran used to say as I was doing something stupid as a kid. In this world though, it is all fun and games until an IED takes your leg off, or an arm, or both legs, or both legs and an arm, or it takes your sight, and hearing, and maybe skin. Then maybe it takes your youth, then your vitality, or perhaps your friends, or spouse or partner. It is life changing.

The damage that weaponry of war can inflict is severe, and our increased medical expertise over the last seventeen years of the War on Terror - and its associated spin-offs - has allowed more and more men and women to survive their close encounter with death. Many of the wounded return vastly changed by their experience and dealing with an instant forced-perspective shift of who they are, and what their life will be, and how the world will see them now. Most of the people I interviewed and drew at Walter Reed were still at the apex of their adjustment to their physical change.

My first sit down was with Sgt. Heath Calhoun. He is sitting upright in bed with stumps of his legs lain out in front of him. One is still wrapped in gauze. From the waist up his body is in the peak of fitness and youth. Spine straight. Muscles delineated. Sgt. Calhoun lost both legs above the knee to an RPG in Mosul, Iraq.

In June 2019, the Museum deployed four combat artists overseas to capture Marines in action.  This is the Marine Corps Combat Art Program in action.


         “Go to war, do art.” 
           Brigadier General Robert Denig, 1942

The Marine Corps Combat Art Program traces its origins to 1942.  Its mission:  Keep Americans informed about what “their Marines” are doing at home and overseas.  Managed today by the Museum, the collection has grown to include more than 9,000 works of art created by 350 artists.
    
NMMC Public Affairs Team