The WWII Hero Who Became Hollywood’s “Tough Guy”: The Story of Lee Marvin (Hollywood Goes to War)

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and beside the grave of World Heavyweight Boxing Champion Joe Lewis in Arlington National Cemetery is the resting place of a film star who chose to be remembered first and foremost as a US Marine. To tell you another Hollywood Goes to War story is Roger McGrath. McGrath is the author of Gunfighters, Highwman, and Vigilantes. He’s a US Marine, former history professor at UCLA, and has appeared on numerous History Channel documentaries. He’s a regular contributor here on Our American Stories.

Let’s take a list leave.

Marvin was one of Hollywood’s iconic tough guys. He was convincing and suchs because he was one. He was a Marine veteran of the Island Hockey campaign in the Central Pacific during World War II and came home badly wounded.

Like every Marine that islanded with on the beaches of Fladolen and we talked Saipan during World War II, we were ready to fight before we shipped out to the Pacific, hammered into fighting shape in the forge of intense training, pardoned by the fires of Marine tradition, galvanized by self-discipline, pride, and patriotism.

Six years later, he appeared in the first of his sixty movies. He grabbed the attention of movie fans in 1954 when he starred opposite Marlon Brando as the leader of an outlawed motorcycle gang in The Wild One.

“Hi, sweet. I… Hey, what are you doing in this visible gully?”
“Johnny Malone? I love you, Johnny. I’ve been looking for you in every ditch from Fresno to here, hoping you was dead. You’ve been staying out too late at night.”

That’s Mitch, you know. “Take it off.” He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the dual roles he played brilliantly in Cat Ballou, half old-fashioned Western and half comedy. “Look at your eyes?”

“What’s wrong with my eyes?”

“Well?”
“Red? Bloodshot?”

“You want to see him from my side?”

Lee Marvin was born in 1924 to Lamont Marvin, an advertising executive, and Courtney Davige Marvin, a fashion writer. Lee is named in honor of a distant relative, Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Lee and his older brother Robert enjoyed an upper-middle-class existence, including shooting, and I mean, with their fault other, a decorated veteran of World War I. However, Lee had problems in school. In hindsight, it’s clear he had dyslexia and attention-deficit disorder at the time, though he’s simply a student who acts up and gets in trouble for routiness, fighting, and truancy. He didn’t like school and later says, “Every day it was a toss-up whether I go or skip.” He’s expelled from several private schools in New York, mostly for fighting. When his father went to Florida for a job, he took Lee with him and enrolled him in Saint Leo Preparatory School, a Catholic boys’ high school in Lakeland. Saint Leo’s had an excellent athletic program, which made life at the school tolerable for Lee. He excelled at track, running the hurdles in quarter-mile and throwing the javelin. He also excelled at swimming. He even managed to pass all his academic classes. Lee still had a wild hare. He and a couple of his good friends, with natures similar to Lee’s, snuck out of the rooms at night and rowed a small boat across Lake Jovida, which separates Saint Leo’s from Holy Name Academy, the Catholic girls’ school. The schools held regular dances together, but for Lee and his buddies, a nighttime row across the lake for a rendezvous with a girlfriend was high adventure. He also found adventure with his father on weekend hunting trips through Florida’s still-wild areas, home to deer, mountain lions, faral hogs, and alligators. Lee Marvin was in his senior year at Saint Lewis when the Japanese launched their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. This made school more difficult for Lee. “All I can think about now is joining up to fight the Japanese.” His older brother Robert went into the Army Air Corps, and his father, although in his late forties, began making plans to serve the Army as he had in World War I. On August 12, 1942, the 18-year-old Lee Marvin joined the Marine Corps. For someone who had problems with authority and discipline, it seemed like an odd choice of services. “‘I knew I was going to be killed,’ explains Marvin. ‘I just wanted to die in the very best outfit. There are ordinary corpses and Marine corpses. I figured on the first-class kind and joined up.’” The six-foot-two-inch, lean, and athletic. Marvin excelled in boot camp at Parris Island and South Carolina and in further training following graduation by the timing station to Camp Elliott near San Diego, California. Has been promoted to corporal in the newly forming 24th Regiment of the 4th Marine Division, which is being organized at Camp Pendleton. Marvin was on track to become a sergeant in the near future, but a brawl gets some busted back to private, confined to base and assigned to mes duty for a month.

And you’ve been listening to our own Roger McGrath, himself a US Marine, tell the story of Lee Marvin. He was a senior in high school when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor, and all he said he could think about was joining the fight. His older brother had joined, his father was figuring out how to join, and in August of 1942, he joined the Marine Corps. His explanation: “I knew I was going to be killed.” “I wanted to be killed in the best outfit.” When we come back, more of Lee Marvin’s story here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories. Every day we set out to tell the stories of Americans past and present, from small towns to big cities, and from all walks of life doing extraordinary things. But we truly can’t do this show without you. Our shows are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and make a donation to keep the stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we continue with Our American Stories and our Hollywood Goes to War series with Roger McGrath’s story. Today, Lee Marvin’s. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

Marvin’s luck changed for the better when he was assigned to a scout sniper platoon, which after World War II would become known in the Corps as a reconnaissance or recotton platoon. The Scout Snipers were more conducive to Marvin’s personality. They were organized more horizontally and less hierarchically than other outfits in the Marine Corps. Camaraderie, physical prowess, and the ability to do one’s job are more important than rank and regulations. Marvin, who starred in track and field at Saint Leo’s and in a spare time undered feral pigs with a bamboo spear and a forest near the campus, found a home. In January 1944, Marvin shipped out with his unit bound for the Japanese-held Marshall Islands.

“It begins with a waiting—waiting to go in, waiting to take off, to move out, to move up, waiting to go into what one Marine combat veteran calls ‘the savage, brutal, exhausting, and dirty business of war.’”

His first action came at the northern end of the quadrillin Atoll, which consists of some ninety small islands and islands. The Marines concentrated their efforts on Roy and Namur, two islands joined by a 400-foot-long causeway. On January 31, Marines landed on five small islands before at in Number on February 1. Long before the main body marines hit the beaches, teams of scout snipers landed in rubber boots in the dark to reconnoiter and gather intelligence. When interviewed years later, Marvin made light of his own efforts. “So you’d land with maybe twelve guys, and you’d wander around and not see a thing because you didn’t want to see anything. All you wanted was to get off. The next morning, the sun would come up and there would be the whole United States Navy out there because it’s D-Day, and they’d be showing you because if they saw you, they figured you were jabs, and nobody told them otherwise. So that you eventually swim out to a reef and pray and hope that somebody’s listening.”

Fair a reality of war.

Fear of the always-present danger of being killed or wounded, anticipation of the unexpected, apprehension that one may not measure up as a Marine under fire or letting a brother Marine don. Fear grips all men going into combat to some degree or another. But fear does not mean the lack of courage. Courage means overcoming fear and doing one’s duty in the presence of danger, not being unafraid.

Later, with the main landings out, roaring, the mirv, Marvin came upon six Japanese huddled in a trench. They were wearing uniforms of white that he didn’t recognize. They weren’t fighting, but were only hunkered down for protection. Marvin hesitated to fire. Another Marine, a veteran of earlier campaigns, came up alongside Marvin and asked, “What’s going on?” “I don’t know,” says Marvin. “They look like Merchant Marine to me.” The other Marine gave Marvin a look, curses, and emptied his gun into the trench. For good measure, he threw in a hand grenade. There were still six Japanese in white uniforms in the trench, but now they were full of bullets and shrapnel and were dead. The reality and brutality of war made an impression on Marvin. He would never forget. The Marines lost 313 men on rowing the murr. The Japanese lost more than 3,500. Marvin was again in action three weeks later at any We talk, a coral atoll of some 40 small islands and islets, about 330 miles west of Roaring the Murr. The Marines’ principal assaults occurred at Angebi and Perry Islands. On Angebi, Marvin and five others were ordered to destroy a machine gun and placement that has his platoon been down. Marvin and his fellow Marines crawled within hand grenade throwing distance, and then lobbed in grenades. Several of the Japanese gunners were killed. Marvin leaped to his feet and rushed to kill the survivors. His foot caught on a sand-covered trapdoor, and he was sent sprawling. Out of the trapdoor comes to Japanese. “He popped out of that hole like a little animal,” said Marvin. “For a second, I just lay there, surprised as hell while he blinked at me. Then he lunged. He tried to stick his bad in my eye, so I took it away from him. It wasn’t hard to do, because he was just a little, maybe five-foot-two or so. I shoved that thing into his chest all the way to the gun barrel.” The battle for Ngibbi crossed the Marines 85 dead and the Japanese 2,000. These major engagements, Marvin was also involved in more than a dozen riekmmissions with other Scout snipers to islands and islands. In March 1944, Marvin and his outfit were shipped to Hawaii for little rest and recreation and a lot of training before heading back out into the Pacific for the assault on Saipan in the Marianas. The Japanese had occupied Saipan since the 1920s and had built major air and naval bases on the island. They had also settled some 25,000 Japanese civilians on the island until the Japanese outnumber the name of Tomorrow 5 to 1. Saipan’s size, about 5 miles wide and 20 miles long, and rugged terrain of volcanic mountains, jagged ridges, and hundreds of caves make an ideal for a defensive warfare. Moreover, Japan had some 32,000 of her best troops on the island. It would be a tough nut to crack. The day before the assault, a Navy medical officer briefed the Marines who would be landing on Sidpan, warning that they had more to worry about than the Japanese. He told the Marines that on the way to the shore they could encounter sharks, barracuda, poisonous sea snakes, where’s their sharp coral, poisonous fish, and giant clams. Then once ashore they could contract leprosy, typhus, philariasis, typhoid, and dysentery. A young Marine private, who was listening with rapt attention, asked the medical officer, “Sir, why don’t we just let the jets keep the island?” That night, over the airwaves came an ominous warning from Tokyo Rose, the dulcet-voiced young woman who broadcast Japanese propaganda aimed at American troops. “I’ve got some swell recordings for you, just in from the States. Your Marines better enjoy them while you can, because tomorrow morning, at 0600, you’re hitting Saipan and we are ready for you. So while you’re still alive, let’s listen to Glenn Miller, Penny Goodman, and the Dorsey Brothers.”

And you’ve been listening to our own Roger McGrath tell the story of Lee Marvin in our continuing series called Hollywood Goes to War, and Lee Marvin. My goodness, what an assignment he drew in the Pacific Islands, first the Marshall Islands, and he talked there about the waiting. “It begins with the waiting,” he said years later. Fear grips all men going into combat in some way or another. He also said, but courage is the—to get past that, to get through that fear. And then, of course, the dreaded invasion of Saipan after a bit of a hiatus in Hawaii, and that rough terrain of the island, 32,000-strong Japanese army, sharks, disease-infested, and occupied since the 1920s, and that one young Marine sing to his CEO, “Why not just let the jets keep the island?” And of course, that ominous message from Tokyo Rose, psychological warfare of the worst part, warning them of what was to come, letting them know they knew, and then, well, teasing them by playing their favorite American tunes from back home. When we continue, more of this remarkable story, the story of Lee Marvin’s service to our country here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories and with Roger McGrath’s telling the story of actor and screen legend Lee Marvin and his experience in the Pacific Islands during World War II. Let’s pick up where we last left off.