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Marines


Always Faithful

Marine Corps University Press logo
Marine Corps University Press
Quantico, Virginia

Chapter 13

A President’s Marine

Jimmy Roosevelt

By Kater Miller, Curator

Featured artifact: Colonel James Roosevelt II’s Service Coat (2016.2.12)

 

James “Jimmy” Roosevelt II was a lot of things in his life: businessman, politician, political leader, secretary to the president, and most interestingly, U.S. Marine. All four of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s sons who survived to adulthood joined the military during World War II, and all of them went into harm’s way. Elliot Roosevelt served as a reconnaissance pilot in the U.S. Army Air Forces and as a military aide to the president. Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. joined the U.S. Navy and served on destroyers, receiving a Purple Heart and a Silver Star for his bravery. John A. Roosevelt also joined the Navy, serving in the supply corps on the aircraft carrier USS Wasp (CV 18), rising to the rank of lieutenant commander, and earning a Bronze Star. Three of the four Roosevelt brothers served in the nation’s naval Service, which is little surprise considering their father served as assistant secretary of the Navy during World War I.[1]

Born on 23 December 1907, Jimmy Roosevelt was the second child of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. He led a privileged life. He attended the Groton School, an elite preparatory school in Groton, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At Harvard, he enrolled in the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps.[2] His father served as a New York state senator (1911–13), as assistant secretary of the Navy (1913–20), as governor of New York (1929–32), and finally as the longest-serving president in American history (1933–45).

 

Col Jimmy Roosevelt attends his father’s fourth presidential inauguration in 1945.
Official U.S. Marine Corps photo.

 

Col Roosevelt’s Marine Corps service coat.
Photo by Jose Esquilin, Marine Corps University Press.

 

In 1936, while visiting his father at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia, Jimmy Roosevelt met a dynamic Marine Corps officer named Evans F. Carlson who would later set the course of his military career.[3] Carlson had spent time in China and was bucking to go back to the Far East to see how the Chinese armies were fighting against Japan in the Second Sino-Japanese War. Carlson had also attempted to learn Mandarin and Chinese culture while he was there. After meeting President Roosevelt as the second-in-command of the Marine detachment at Warms Springs, the president asked Carlson to keep tabs on the Japanese military’s operations in China. Returning to China in 1937, Carlson embedded with the Eighth Route Army, a Chinese Communist Army unit specializing in guerrilla warfare. Carlson returned to the United States ready to share his views on fighting this kind of irregular war and how the Marine Corps might be able to use similar tactics to strike fear into the Japanese forces should the two nations become embroiled in war.[4]

 

Evans F. Carlson made a huge impact on Jimmy Roosevelt’s military career.
Official U.S. Marine Corps photo.

 

Jimmy Roosevelt’s involvement with the Marine Corps came in late 1936, after the presidential election of that year. The newly reelected President Roosevelt wanted to take a goodwill tour of South America, but he needed a close relative to accompany him. His wife Eleanor did not want to make the trip, so the president agreed to take his eldest son in her place. In Jimmy Roosevelt’s autobiography, he stated that he was always drawn toward the Marines because of their uniqueness, and it so happened that his father wanted to commission him to make him an official aid. Roosevelt was directly commissioned as an officer in the Marine Corps Reserve. As he put it, “It was ridiculous, really, but my papers came through and he made me a lieutenant colonel. It was just that easy.” Father and son steamed to South America on the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis (CA 35).[5]

 

LtCol Roosevelt with his father and officers of the USS Indianapolis (CA 35) on its South America goodwill tour.
Official U.S. Marine Corps photo.

 

Jimmy Roosevelt remained in the Marine Corps Reserve after the trip. He had trouble performing as a lieutenant colonel while on training exercises, though he did try. He soon moved away from the White House. Following a scandal in which he allegedly funneled business to the insurance agency that he was president of Roosevelt resigned his role as his father’s advisor in the White House. He then moved to California to establish himself on the West Coast and resumed work at his insurance agency. Roosevelt realized that he could not continue to serve as a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel effectively, so he resigned his commission. But he did not stay out of the Corps long.[6]

In 1937, Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China, and in 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Though there was a strong sentiment of isolationism in the United States, the Roosevelt administration knew that it was only a matter of time before the United States became involved in the widening conflict.

 

Japanese troops march into Peiping (Beijing), China.
Naval History and Heritage Command.

 

On 24 November 1939, Jimmy Roosevelt received a new Marine Corps Reserve commission as a captain and worked hard to become a good Marine. In early 1940, he was assigned to active duty due to the massive war that was unfolding throughout the world. He served as a battery commander in 2d Battalion, 10th Marines, until January 1941, when he was ordered to go oversees as an assistant naval attaché and was stationed at the British Army’s Middle East headquarters in Cairo, Egypt. In this capacity, Roosevelt visited Crete, Palestine, and Iraq before returning to California.[7]

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on 7 December 1941, Jimmy Roosevelt requested an assignment with a combat unit in the Corps. Meanwhile, Carlson agitated for a special group of Marine commandos to practice guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines such as the Chinese soldiers of the Eighth Route Army. In December 1941, Roosevelt even wrote to his father requesting the formation of a Marine commando unit. Though the Commandant of the Marine Corps, Major General Thomas Holcomb, did not want to create special commando units, he was overruled by President Roosevelt, who saw potential for victories that would give heart to the American public. British prime minister Winston S. Churchill even put his thumb on the scales in support of the commando units.[8] In the opening weeks of 1942, two units were created.

At Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Merritt A. Edson, was redesignated as the 1st Separate Battalion. This battalion would be renamed the 1st Raider Battalion on 16 February 1942. On 4 February, the 2d Separate Battalion was formed at Marine Corps Base San Diego, California, under Lieutenant Colonel Carlson. Unlike the 1st Separate Battalion, this unit was created without the backbone of an existing battalion. Edson was as opposite to Carlson as could be. He built his battalion into the best possible light infantry unit, organized in a conventional manner, with the idea that his Marines would hit the enemy hard behind the invasion beaches before a main assault to soften resistance to the amphibious landing. Carlson, on the other hand, eschewed traditional rank structures and created three-man fire teams to attack the enemy. He wanted to fight a guerrilla war, operating behind enemy lines to kill enemy soldiers and strike fear into their hearts. Both groups practiced using rubber boats for rapid, quiet insertion.[9]

 

Carlson, Roosevelt, and their Marine Raiders during training in California.
Marine Corps History Division.

 

Roosevelt leads a brief for a group of officers of the 2d Raider Battalion.
Marine Corps History Division.

 

Then-LtCol Merritt A. Edson, commander of the 1st Raider Battalion. Carlson and Edson were polar opposites.
Marine Corps History Division.

 

Staffing a brand-new battalion on the West Coast became a problem, as the Marine Corps was expanding and there were not enough trained Marines to go around. One third of Edson’s 1st Raider Battalion was shipped to California to form a cadre for the 2d Raider Battalion. Carlson dismissed most of Edson’s cadre because he viewed them as being unable to switch to his mode of leadership, which created rancor between the two groups that lasted for the remainder of the war and beyond. Carlson wanted Marines who he could mold to his vision and who would fight because they believed it was the right thing to do. He conducted “ethical indoctrination” within his unit so that they would understand what they were fighting for.[10]

Carlson selected Captain Jimmy Roosevelt as his executive officer. Roosevelt was an unlikely candidate as a leader of a commando unit. He was ungainly and tall, standing at six feet, four inches. He wore glasses and his feet were so flat that he could not wear the boots that the Marines of the time wore in the field. Instead, he wore canvas athletic shoes when he wore his utility uniform.[11]

Together, Carlson and Roosevelt trained their Raiders hard. The Marines conducted 65-kilometer forced marches. They trained in knife fighting. They rode rubber boats in the surf off the California coast. They also were not granted liberty very often. Carlson’s Marines remained cloistered for much of the time they were in California training for combat.[12]

Ten days after the 1st Marine Division landed at Guadalcanal, Tulagi, and Florida Islands in the South Pacific, the 2d Raider Battalion launched one of the most daring raids of the war. On 17 August 1942, two companies of Raiders under Lieutenant Colonel Carlson and now-Major Roosevelt launched rubber boats from the decks of the submarines USS Argonaut (SM 1) and USS Nautilus (SS 168) to conduct a raid on Makin Atoll in the Central Pacific. The raid was supposed to draw the attention of the Japanese away from Guadalcanal, and the Raiders were to try to capture prisoners and gather intelligence. The Marines landed on the island of Butaritari, which hosted a Japanese seaplane base and a small contingent of soldiers. The raid was planned to take one day, so each Raider only carried two canteens, a C-ration, and two D-ration bars ashore. By the end of the first day, the Marines were out of food and water.[13]

Roosevelt’s personal leadership helped keep the raid from devolving into a disaster after the Marines were not able to leave Butaritari on the first day as planned due to heavier-than-expected surf. Seawater swamped the rubber boats’ engines, and the exhausted Raiders had to paddle out of the surf. The next morning, 18 August, 70 Marines remained on the island. Roosevelt himself had made it out early that morning, and he personally rescued three Marines on the way back to the submarine. The Marines on the island could not evacuate because of Japanese air patrols, and the submarines waiting to pick them up had to spend the day submerged to protect themselves. Roosevelt helped arrange for one of the submarines to enter a protected lagoon on Butaritari so the remaining Raiders could withdraw. That night, the Marines completed their withdrawal from the island. Tragically, several Marines were left behind, and they were captured by the Japanese and executed a few weeks later.[14]

 

Carlson and Roosevelt hold a captured Japanese flag from the Makin Island raid.
Marine Corps History Division.

 

Adm Chester W. Nimitz greets Maj Roosevelt aboard the USS Argonaut (SM 1) after it pulled into Pear Harbor following the Makin Island raid.
Marine Corps History Division.

 

The surviving Marines pulled into Pearl Harbor to a hero’s welcome. Both Carlson and Roosevelt received the Navy Cross for their gallantry on the raid.[15] Though the raid had nearly been a complete disaster, it offered a tremendous morale boost for the American public, which had seen so many defeats since the United States entered the war. However, as the 2d Raider Battalion begin to prepare for its next operation, Carlson’s “long patrol” on Guadalcanal (6 November–4 December 1942), Roosevelt received orders to Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California. There, he was to form and command the 4th Raider Battalion and to establish the Raider Training Center, an eight-week course to train replacement Raiders.[16]

 

Roosevelt leads the newly created 4th Raider Battalion in the South Pacific. He would soon be hospitalized and would not get to take part in the landings on New Georgia.
Marine Corps History Division.

 

Roosevelt did not stay in California long, deploying with the new 4th Raider Battalion to the island of Espiritu Santo in the South Pacific, where the battalion prepared to participate in the New Georgia campaign. Roosevelt began training his unit for the operation, with his command now falling under the 1st Raider Regiment, commanded by Colonel Harry B. Liversedge. Before the operation commenced, Roosevelt fell ill and was evacuated back to the United States. He did not participate in the New Georgia campaign.[17]

 

Roosevelt’s green service coat with unit patch. 
Photo by Jose Esquilin, Marine Corps University Press.

 

Roosevelt’s green service coat (inside tag).
Photo by Jose Esquilin, Marine Corps University Press.

 

Back in California, Roosevelt bought this green service coat from Phelps-Turkel, a high-end department store in Los Angeles. During the war, many department stores and tailors made officers’ uniforms for the U.S. military, with this coat being an example. Other manufacturers included Brooks Brothers, A. M. Bolognese and Sons, and Alexander’s of San Diego.[18] Officer-quality uniforms were made of a finer material than enlisted uniforms, but they also went for a much higher price.

In the spring of 1943, now-Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt participated in the Aleutian Islands campaign as an observer. In November 1943, while attached as an observer to the U.S. Army’s 27th Infantry Division, he participated in the capture of Makin Atoll during the Gilbert Islands campaign. He received the Silver Star for remaining under fire and exposing himself to danger for the duration of the three-day assault.[19]

 

Roosevelt with several U.S. Marine, Navy, and Army Air Force officers aboard a Navy warship waiting
for the landings at Kiska Island to begin.
Marine Corps History Division.

 

During the last year of the war, now-Colonel Roosevelt trained Marines in preparation for the invasion of Okinawa. Following the Okinawa campaign, he transferred to the Philippines to participate in the consolidation of the Southern Philippines on the staff of U.S. Navy rear admiral Ralph O. Davis, the commander of Amphibious Group 13. He was transferred back to the United States in July 1945 and released from active duty in October. Roosevelt remained in the Marine Corps Reserve until 1959, when he was promoted to the rank of brigadier general and retired.[20]

Following his service in World War II, Roosevelt held leadership positions in the Democratic Party and campaigned for President Harry S. Truman’s reelection campaign. He also ran for governor of California in 1950 but lost to the incumbent, Earl Warren. However, Roosevelt did become a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from California in 1955 and served in this capacity through 1965. After his decade-long stint in Congress, he unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Los Angeles.[21]

 

James “Jimmy” Roosevelt.
Marine Corps History Division.

 

James Roosevelt’s experience in World War II was much tougher than it could have been. As the president’s son, he could have chosen to remain out of harm’s way in a stateside billet, but instead he chose to serve in combat with the Marine Corps. He sought out a tough assignment that put him at great risk to be killed or captured. His service coat is a reminder of his service to his country as a U.S. Marine, when he exhibited great leadership and courage under fire. Brigadier General Roosevelt’s service coat is now part of the Raider Collection at the National Museum of the Marine Corps.

 

Endnotes


[1] “Sons of the Commander in Chief: The Roosevelt Boys in World War II,” Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, 31 January 2018.

[2] “Brigadier General James Roosevelt,” Marine Corps History Division, accessed 13 May 2024.

[3] “Camp Roosevelt Vignettes,” Leatherneck 19, no. 1 (January 1936): 7, 50–51.

[4] Maj Jon T. Hoffman, USMCR, From Makin to Bougainville: Marine Raiders in the Pacific War, Marines in World War II Commemorative Series (Washington, DC: Marine Corps Historical Center, 1995), 3, 5.

[5] James Roosevelt and Bill Libby, My Parents: A Differing View (Chicago, IL: Playboy Press, 1976), 233–35.

[6] Roosevelt and Libby, My Parents, 233–35.

[7] “Brigadier General James Roosevelt.”

[8] Hoffman, From Makin to Bougainville, 1.

[9] Hoffman, From Makin to Bougainville, 5.

[10] Hoffman, From Makin to Bougainville, 5.

[11] Brian Altobello, Into the Shadows Furious: The Brutal Battle for New Georgia (New York: Presidio Press, 2000), 76.

[12] Hoffman, From Makin to Bougainville, 5.

[13] Gordon L. Rottman, Carlson’s Marine Raiders: Makin Island, 1942 (Oxford, UK: Osprey Publishing, 2014), 77.

[14] Hoffman, From Makin to Bougainville, 8.

[15] Hoffman, From Makin to Bougainville, 9; and “Brigadier General James Roosevelt.”

[16] Hoffman, From Makin to Bougainville, 23; and “Brigadier General James Roosevelt.”

[17] “Brigadier General James Roosevelt.”

[18] There are examples of each of these uniforms in the collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps.

[19] “Brigadier General James Roosevelt.”

[20] “Brigadier General James Roosevelt.”

[21] “James Roosevelt,” United States Congress Bioguide, accessed 13 May 2024.