D-Day with bikinis

It was July 15, 1958, and Second Lieutenant Simon L Leis Jr was nervous. As he waited for orders aboard the USS Taconic, he peered across the rough waters of the Mediterranean towards the yellow sands of Khalde beach, just five miles south of Beirut. Like the other members of the United States Marine Corps that day, Leis was preparing for battle. Briefed to expect the possibility of a hostile reception, the young leatherneck from Cincinnati, Ohio, knew little of the complexities surrounding Lebanon’s predicament. But when the call to arms finally came, he was ready. As whoops of anticipation and nervous tension rang out across the ship’s sun-scorched deck, Leis, together with his fellow comrades from the 2nd Battalion of the 2nd Marine Regiment, clambered into a waiting landing craft below, and immediately set off for an amphibious assault on “Red Beach” at Khalde, some 500 yards from their position.

“We left for the beach at three o’clock in the afternoon,” recalls Leis, who was among the first wave of Marine landings. “And that was the first time in the history of the Marine Corps that a landing was started in the middle of the afternoon. Landings like this were always done first thing in the morning, which gave us all day to unload the ships. Nevertheless, we were told that we were going into combat, and so that’s what we expected.”

Leis, who, at 23 years old, was one of the oldest members of the landing force, didn’t have long to ruminate, yet what little time he did have he spent thinking about home.

“I was a married man for only about two months before being shipped out,” remembers Leis, then on his first military campaign. “And as the landing craft surged towards the beach, I thought, ‘Hell, I’m too young to die!’”

Minutes later, when the steel ramp of the landing crafts hit the deck, Leis and his 2000-strong battalion stormed the beach, an angst-ridden moment somewhat tempered by the sight of bikini-clad girls, sunbathers, ice-cream vendors and other interested observers, who found the presence of such a large, and fully-armed, body of men a mite bewildering, if not a little exciting.

Carrying some 90lbs of battle gear, including Tommy guns, grenades and bazookas, and surrounded by the roar of amphibious tractors and the thunder of naval planes overhead, the men – all sweltering under the 90-degree heat – scrambled up the glistening shore towards their goal – Beirut International Airport. As some observers waved and cheered, the surreal nature of the landing was compounded further when a number of local boys made for the water’s edge in an attempt to help the Marines drag their heavier equipment through the surf.

The US intervention in Beirut arose from the roiling political tensions between Arab nationalists and the Lebanese government of Christian Maronite President Camille Chamoun. As pan-Arabism swept the Middle East in the mid-1950s – spurred on by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose ties to the Soviet Union unnerved the Western powers – Chamoun signed up to the anti-Soviet Eisenhower Doctrine in 1957, which declared: “The United States is prepared to use armed forces to assist any nation or group of such nations [in the Middle East] requesting assistance against armed aggressors from any country controlled by international communism.” Chamoun’s covenant with the US was a direct affront to Lebanon’s Muslims, who were already fuming at his refusal to sever diplomatic ties with Great Britain and France in the aftermath of the Suez crisis in 1956.

The forces of Arab nationalism, seen by the US – dubiously – as communist-inspired, came to a head in February 1958 when Egypt and Syria united to form the United Arab Republic (UAR). Lebanon’s Sunni Muslim population called on the Chamoun-led government to join the newly-created union, which was widely welcomed by the Middle East’s Muslim majority. Civil unrest – exacerbated by substantiated rumours that Chamoun hoped to serve a second-term in office by changing the constitution – quickly spread, as those loyal to the ruling administration clashed with the largely Sunni Muslim-led opposition.

Lebanon’s internal fracas might have remained as such were it not for a military coup d’état in Iraq on July 14, which led to the murder of the country’s king and prime minister – Chamoun’s allies in opposition to the forces of Arab nationalism. The bloody revolution in Baghdad was too much for Chamoun, and his appeal to the United States for immediate assistance led US President Dwight D Eisenhower to unleash the full force of the US military the next day.

Dickey Chapelle, a journalist who came ashore in the third wave of Marine landings, later wrote “that the real thing didn’t look much different from a rehearsal except for the hazard offered by Arab families sunbathing on the sand.” Chapelle, one of the world’s first female war correspondents, who was later killed while on assignment in Vietnam, also recalled one of the strangest commands ever given to any Marine landing in the history of the Marine Corps: “You will make every effort in this assault not to disturb the swimmers on the beach…”

She observed: “All of us had considered it the most extraordinary order to a moving assault force we could imagine, and historically I later learnt we were right to be astounded.”

As Leis and his company moved swiftly towards the capital’s airport, Private First Class John E Dreisbach, a Morse Code Operator and a member of the Naval Gunfire Team, moved inland to set-up a command-post.

“When we landed, what hit me immediately was the heat,” recalls Dreisbach, then only 19-years-old. “While the line companies went to secure the airport, we dug in, and although that night was pretty quiet, it was still so very hot and large mosquitoes buzzed all around us.”

The following day, as the initial deployment was reinforced by further Marine landings – others from the Airborne Division would arrive within days – the Pennsylvania-born Dreisbach joined the long military push into Beirut itself.

“On the long column – containing tanks, amtracks, trucks and jeeps – that entered Beirut, I was sitting on a jeep fender,” remembers Dreisbach. “There were thousands of people lining the streets, half of whom seemed to welcome us. The looks of the others made me get off the fender and jump into a truck, as they didn’t look that friendly. I was also uneasy about the buildings, which seemed to be damaged by explosives. A lot of one town, which I knew as a resort town, was damaged pretty badly.”

US involvement in Lebanon in the 1950s would prove far less troublesome and less costly than many other American anti-Soviet ventures. Such measures, of course, dominated US foreign policy in the age of the Cold War, a rivalry that only ever turned “hot” in the form of third-party conflicts and proxy wars – of which the 1958 Beirut landing is one particularly quixotic example. Indeed, when the US Marines landed on the shores of Beirut on July 15, 1958, it was nearly five years to the day since the end of the Korean War in which over 35,000 American troops were killed. The subsequent US intervention in Vietnam – perhaps the most demoralising and debilitating war in American history – would go on to claim the lives of some 58,000 US combat personnel.

In Beirut, by contrast, it soon became clear that Eisenhower had used a boulder to crack a nut. Lebanon’s first civil war never did portend the stirrings of international communism, which was the real target of the Eisenhower Doctrine. Lebanese internal affairs of 1958 can best be explained as a battle of political wills – as a reaction against Chamoun’s excessive pro-Westernism and his Machiavellian approach to politics – rather than as a religious, sectarian or strictly ideological conflict. (Those terms would, however, characterise the subsequent and devastating 1975-90 Lebanese civil war.) Indeed, the Muslim population opposing Chamoun was joined by many disaffected Christians, including four ex-foreign ministers and the Christian Maronite Patriarch himself.

The American presence, while giving the warring parties an excuse to stand down, did little to enhance US credibility in the region. It also gave rise to accusations that Christians in the Middle East were anti-Arab. And the ease with which the US entered and occupied Beirut almost certainly led to the mistaken impression that Lebanon had no stomach for a real war – a myth that would be mercilessly debunked in 1983 when a suicide bomber killed 241 US Marines in Beirut.

The three-month 1958 campaign ended (with only one US casualty) when Chamoun finally saw sense and resigned, removing the sting from the crisis. Until then, the US troops spent most of their time in Lebanon puzzled, not only by the lack of opposition – military confrontations were few and sporadic – but also by the politics behind their presence. Many even wondered what they were doing there at all.

“We didn’t know anything,” recalls Dreisbach. “We just did what we were told to do, and I don’t even think we asked anyone about it. To this day, I bet the Marines that landed in Lebanon then still don’t know why they were there.”

But Pennsylvania-born Rod LaPearl, then a 17-year-old Private in the 187th Airborne Infantry and 24th Airborne Brigade, does know one thing. “The armed rebels were obviously more afraid of us back then than many of them are today.”

wow, a thread with the word "bikinis" in the title and it's all words, lots of words, and no pictures.

Don't you know a picture's worth a thousand words?

The beaches of Lebanon? So, who was wearing the bikinis? I would have thought the women would be garbed in traditional Middle Eastern attire, even at a beach, given the laws over there.

You can wear bikinis in Lebanon. In fact, Lebanese are notorious for wearing revealing clothing.

Are they not also notorious for having hairy legs?

Lebanon was the hot spot of the Middle East in the 50's, and in a good way. It was a shining example of cooperation and commerce, until the muslims bred themselves into the majority in the 1970's. If you want to educate yourself on Lebanon instead of lumping it in with the Arab world, read Brigitte Gabriel's "Because They Hate". It's a powerful story about how political correctness absolutely destroyed a prosperous nation.

And just to show you who's still fighting for Lebanon's return to the civilized world...

They would be if they didn’t shave. Middle Easterners are very hairy people. The usually fashion-conscious Lebanese girls shave/wax, though.

Lebanon, and Beirut in particular, was a prime destination for high rollers. There were world class casinos and night clubs, and plenty of scantily clad ladies on the beach. Of course it eventually became a hell-hole once the Muslims gained the upper hand, just as every place does.

Simon Leis was the prosecutor who nailed Larry Flynt in Cincinnati back in 1977. He has been the sheriff of Hamilton County, Ohio (Cincinnati) since 1987. Very conservative.

12 posted on 07/30/2008 4:15:17 PM PDT by MeanWestTexan ("Jesse Jackson was an important figure; paving the way for Osama bin Laden to appear" -- Dan Rather)

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