From Belleau Wood to Bougainville

Introduction

The main portion of this book consists of the Oral History of Major General Robert Blake USMC, as told to Marine historian Benis Frank. In 1972 the Marine Corps Historical Center bound two copies of the interview transcript, and recently reproduced it electronically. The transcript is published here verbatim from an electronic copy of the original, furnished by the Historical Center.

The second part of this book, the journal of Rosselet Wallace Blake, has not previously been published.

In 1918 my father, then a 1st lieutenant, won the first of his two Navy Crosses for his role with the 5th Marines at Belleau Wood in World War I. In 1943, as a colonel, he was awarded the Legion of Merit for his role in the landing at Bougainville by the 3rd Marine Division. Hence the title of this book.

My father, General Blake, retired in 1949 after thirty-two years service spanning both World Wars. In 1968 he was interviewed at his home in Oakland by Benis Frank, head of the USMC Oral History program. Present during the interview was my stepmother, Elynor Alexander Blake. She was the “third person in the room” noted at one point in the interview. As she had not known my father until after World War II, she was very interested in the events of his career before they had met. Though she did not know it, she had only a few more months to live. My father was then 74 and lived another fifteen years.

He died in 1983. That is when I first read his Oral History interview. Like most such interviews, this one focused on the military career itself, as opposed to life in the military. Several of my father’s peacetime assignments were passed over lightly, including our family years in Spain and Panama, which figured large in my own life. Spanish history and literature also became my father’s avocation. He collected a small library in Spanish that filled the shelves of a large reading room on the third floor of his and Elynor’s house on Divisidero Street in San Francisco.

With the help of Benis Frank for records of my father’s military career, and a probe of family documents and my own memories, I pieced together a narrative of my father’s life which I originally saw as a companion to the Oral History. That is not what happened, but my memoir was eventually published in 2002 as Bayonets and Bougainvilleas by 1st Books Library.

Since then I have heard from a number of readers of that book. Many of them observed that I had made frequent references to my father’s Oral History, but nowhere had I reported its contents. Others asked why I had not said more about my mother, since she had seemed very important in my life with my father away so much. So here they both are, in their own words; my father with Benis Frank, and my mother in her journal.

My father’s Oral History ends with his retirement. My mother’s journal begins in Quantico and ends with World War II, which she did not survive. My father’s early life is capsuled in the Oral History. In a preface to my mother’s journal I have given a brief account of her early years. For more than that, a reader must refer to Bayonets and Bougainvilleas.

Robert Wallace Blake
Seattle 2003