Lieutenant General Victor Harold "Brute" Krulak was one of the most important officers in the history of the Marine Corps. And, as far as can be determined, he was the smallest. He stood 5'4" and 120 pounds, a size that, as a Naval Academy plebe, earned him the derisive nickname of "Brute." The nickname stuck but over the years it came to engender deep respect. Krulak was one of those legendary Marine officers about whom apocrypha and legend swirled, a man who always had an influence far out of proportion to his rank. He was a man who changed the course of history.
When he was in Shanghai in 1937, he received advanced word of a proposed amphibious landing by the Japanese. Along with a young naval officer, and flying the American flag, he boldly sailed a tug boat into the middle of the Japanese landing force, taking pictures of the drop bow landing craft. A few years later, as a member of General Holland Smith's staff at Quantico, it was Brute Krulak who made sure that Andrew Jackson Higgins installed a drop bow on his landing craft.
In late 1943 Krulak led the Second Parachute Battalion on a diversionary raid on Choiseul, a Pacific island inhabited by more than 3,000 Japanese soldiers. Krulak was so successful that Admiral William Halsey pinned the Navy Cross on him.
After surgery in the States to repair a nerve injured during jump training, Krulak returned to the Pacific where he was General Lemuel Shepherd's operations officer for the invasion of Okinawa. For his role in training the 6th Marine Regiment and for his role in the landing, he was awarded the Legion of Merit.
Today many Marine officers know only vaguely of something called the "Chowder Society" and the unification battle of the post-war years. Krulak was the most important member of that small group, and were it not for his efforts the Marine Corps would either have been subsumed by the Army and Air Force or would have been returned to its long-ago status as a shipboard gendarmerie. The turning point in that bitter battle was the "Bended Knee Speech" delivered to a Senate committee by Commandant General A. A. Vandegrift and one of the most powerful, moving, and effective speeches ever delivered by a military man to Congress. Krulak wrote most of the speech, all of the grand passages, including this one: "The bended knee is not a tradition of our Corps. If the Marine as a fighting man has not made a case for himself after 170 years of service, he must go."
He also wrote much of the language for the National Security Act of 1947 and for the 1952 amendment that made the Marine Corps the only branch of the U.S. military whose manpower minimums are set by law.
Overlapping the unification battle was Krulak's prominent role in developing Marine Corps tactical doctrine for the employment of helicopters. Krulak wrote doctrine that far exceeded the capability of helicopters at the time.
In 1964 Krulak became Commanding General, Fleet Marine Forces, Pacific, and was the primary force behind the Marine Corps creation of civil action platoons in Vietnam, which history has remembered as perhaps the best way to fight a counterinsurgency war in that country.
In 1967, when he was front-runner among those mentioned as the next Commandant, Krulak confronted President Lyndon Johnson over how Johnson was prosecuting the war. For that act of great moral courage, Krulak was denied the Commandancy and his fourth star.
But in the process he gained something else. Few men have ever loved anything as much as Brute Krulak loved the Marine Corps. That love and pride shine through every page of his book, First to Fight, a book read today by every Marine on orders from the current Commandant, General James T. Conway. And when those men who have the high honor of being known as "Giants of the Corps" are listed, none shines brighter than the name Brute Krulak.