The Marine Corps in San Diego County from 1941 to 1945: the recruit depot, Carlson's Raiders, the Navajo Code Talkers, three divisions on the Santa Margarita ranch and John Basilone. All records sourced and cited.
On the afternoon of September 25, 1942, the President of the United States rode into a cattle ranch in north San Diego County, and nobody was allowed to report it.
Franklin Roosevelt had stepped off his train at San Juan Capistrano at 1:15 and been driven south. At 2:25 he was at the new Marine Corps training base carved out of Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores. The widow of General Joseph H. Pendleton bent the flag onto the halyards. The Marine Band played. The war had a full news blackout on the President's movements, and the dedication of Camp Pendleton is known mostly because his secretary, Grace Tully, wrote it down.
Roosevelt spent about twenty minutes at the old 1828 ranch house. He joked that he was "going to pass a law making this place available to ex-Presidents." He told a ranch hand named Pancho Brown he would see the place kept "just the way it is now."
Seven months earlier, in the hills east of San Diego, his son James had helped form a battalion of Marines whose battle cry was "Gung Ho." A few months after that, twenty nine Navajo men arrived at the same camp and started building a code the Japanese never broke.
And in 1944, the most famous enlisted Marine in America, a Medal of Honor sergeant named John Basilone, turned down a safe job selling war bonds to train at Camp Pendleton, got married in Oceanside, and shipped out for Iwo Jima.
This is the story of what the Marine Corps did in San Diego between 1941 and 1945, and of the land it took to do it.
The Marines were in San Diego long before the war.
The Marine Corps Base on the north side of the bay, next to what became Lindbergh Field, opened in 1921. It would not be called the Marine Corps Recruit Depot until 1948, but it was already doing that job. West Coast recruits came to San Diego for boot camp. East Coast recruits went to Parris Island. Most Marines who enlisted in the West learned to be one on filled tideland off Pacific Highway.
By the late 1930s it was a quiet, handsome base of Spanish Colonial buildings with arcades along the parade deck. It was about to be swamped.
After Pearl Harbor, the line at the recruiting offices went around the block across the country, and a huge share of it ended up on a train to San Diego.
According to the depot's own history, published by the MCRD Museum Historical Society, eighteen thousand recruits arrived in one month after the attack. The base had not been built for anything like that.
The rifle range was a problem too. Marines learned to shoot at a range on the mesa at La Jolla, north of town. In April 1942 that range became its own installation, Camp Calvin B. Matthews. Generations of San Diego recruits marched up there to qualify. UC San Diego says more than a million Marines trained at Camp Matthews between 1917 and 1964, on more than a dozen rifle, pistol and skeet ranges. In 1964 the Marines handed the land to the new university, the same year it took its first undergraduates. The campus sits on that ground today.
The depot could not hold everyone, and it could not train combat units. The Marines needed room. They went looking for it in two directions: inland onto Kearny Mesa, and north up the coast.
The first place they went was Kearny Mesa, the flat, empty upland north of Mission Valley.
Camp Elliott was built there because recruits were overwhelming the depot on the bay. It served mostly as a replacement and training center, where Marines fresh out of boot camp learned to fight as units before they shipped out. The camp sat on a long stretch of scrub between what is now Tierrasanta and Miramar.
It would give the Marine Corps two of the most famous units of the war.
On February 19, 1942, the 2nd Raider Battalion was officially established at Jacques Farm, in the hills of Camp Elliott.
It was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Evans F. Carlson, a Marine who had spent time in China in the 1930s watching guerrilla armies fight the Japanese, and came home convinced the Marine Corps needed small, fast, hard units that could hit and disappear. His executive officer, his second in command, was Major James Roosevelt, the President's eldest son. According to the US Marine Raider Association, Roosevelt had written the letter to the Commandant pushing for commando units in the first place.
Carlson brought something else back from China. He made his men attend meetings where officers and enlisted Marines talked as equals, and he gave them a battle cry he had heard in China, "Gung Ho," which he translated as "work together."
Carlson's Raiders trained in the hills east of San Diego through the spring of 1942. On August 17, 1942, 222 of them came ashore on Makin Atoll in the Gilbert Islands from two submarines, the Nautilus and the Argonaut. It was one of the first American ground raids of the Pacific war. James Roosevelt went with them.
The raid was a mess and a success at the same time. The surf was so heavy that about 120 Raiders spent a rainy night stranded on the beach before they could get back to the submarines. Eighteen Marines were killed, and the US Naval Institute counts twelve missing. But the Japanese garrison of about ninety was nearly wiped out, and the Naval Institute reports that a Japanese force headed to reinforce Guadalcanal turned toward the Gilberts instead. The country, eight months after Pearl Harbor, finally had a raid to read about, and the President's son had been on it.
The phrase stayed. Americans still say gung ho, and it came into the language off a training farm on Kearny Mesa.
Three months after the Raiders formed, another group arrived at Camp Elliott.
The CIA's own history of the program says the first twenty nine Navajo recruits arrived at Camp Elliott near San Diego in May 1942. "One of the first tasks for these recruits," it says, "was to develop a Navajo code."
The problem they were solving was simple to state. American radio traffic in the Pacific was being intercepted. Codes could be broken, and code machines were slow in combat. The Navajo language was unwritten, complex and spoken by almost no one outside the Navajo Nation. Very few non-Navajos in the world could understand it. A Marine who spoke it could send a message by radio in plain speech, and the Marine on the other end could understand it instantly.
The recruits did not simply translate. They built a code inside the language, assigning Navajo words to military terms that had no Navajo equivalent, and an alphabet of Navajo words for spelling. All of it was memorized. None of it was written down in the field.
According to the MCRD Museum Foundation, Platoon 382, the first Code Talker platoon, graduated from boot camp in San Diego on June 29, 1942. The Code Talkers went on to serve in every Marine division in the Pacific.
The program stayed classified for decades after the war. The men who built it came home and could not tell anyone what they had done.
Camp Elliott was not enough. The Marine Corps needed a place to train entire divisions, twenty thousand men at a time, with room for artillery, tanks and beach landings. There was one obvious place in Southern California with that much open land and its own coastline.
Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores ran from the edge of Oceanside north to the county line at San Onofre, and from the beach inland into the hills. It had been a Mexican land grant, then one of the great cattle ranches of California. In 1942 it was still a working ranch.
The government took it.
The sources disagree on the exact dates, which is understandable for a wartime land taking. The Marine Corps History Division says the land was acquired in April 1942 under the Second War Powers Act. Richard Pourade, the San Diego historian, writes that a federal court condemnation order gave the government immediate possession on July 9, 1942. The Camp Pendleton Historical Society gives August 3. All three agree on the outcome.
Pourade gives the final judgment, entered ten months after the condemnation order: 121,387 acres for $4,110,035. The History Division puts it at about 121,000 acres and "a combined total of $4.2 million" paid to the families. Close enough. About 121,000 acres. About $4.1 million. Nearly twenty miles of coastline.
Construction moved faster than the paperwork. The first troops to arrive were the 9th Marines under Colonel Lemuel Shepherd, who marched in from Camp Elliott. It was a long walk, and the Marines did it on foot.
Roosevelt's tour of Southern California that day was a single long afternoon.
The FDR Presidential Library's daily log lays it out. He visited the Douglas Aircraft plant in Long Beach at 9 a.m. He left the train at San Juan Capistrano at 1:15. Camp Pendleton at 2:25. The San Diego Naval Hospital at 4:25. The Naval Training Station at 4:50. The Marine Base, the recruit depot on the bay, at 5:10. The Consolidated Aircraft plant from 5:20 to 6:00. Then dinner at the Coronado home of his son, Lieutenant John Roosevelt, and back to the train at 10:15.
He spent less than an hour at Camp Pendleton. It was long enough to dedicate it.
The ceremony was small. The base was named for Joseph H. Pendleton, the Marine general who had spent years in San Diego and pushed for a permanent Marine presence there. His widow raised the colors. The Marine Band played.
The next day the commanding general, Major General Joseph Fegan, wrote that Roosevelt "wanted to make a shrine of it," meaning the old ranch house. There is a popular story that Roosevelt ordered the house preserved. The Camp Pendleton Historical Society, which went through the records, says that order is not in them. What is in the record is the joke about ex-Presidents and the promise to Pancho Brown.
What happened at Camp Pendleton over the next three years is the reason it exists.
The 3rd Marine Division was activated there on September 16, 1942, nine days before the President's visit. The 4th Marine Division followed on August 16, 1943. The 5th on January 21, 1944.
Those three divisions fought at Bougainville, Guam, Saipan, Tinian and Iwo Jima. The 4th and 5th went ashore together at Iwo Jima in February 1945. The Marine Corps History Division says the base trained "fully one-half of the Marines who fought in the Pacific."
The California State Military Museum puts Camp Pendleton's wartime population at its peak in 1944 at 86,749 Marines, sailors and civilians. That was a bigger population than most cities in the county. It was, at that moment, one of the largest towns in San Diego County, and it had not existed two years earlier.
The training was as close to the real thing as the Marines could make it. Units practiced landings on the beaches below the bluffs, moved inland under fire, and fought mock battles in the hills. Hollywood noticed. According to the American Film Institute, most of the 1943 movie Guadalcanal Diary was shot on location at Camp Pendleton, and "a substantial number" of Marines appeared in it as extras or in small speaking parts. Men who would go to the real Pacific islands rehearsed them once on camera in San Diego County.
Hollywood also sent its own.
Tyrone Power was one of the biggest film stars in the country in 1942. According to the California State Military Museum, he enlisted as a private in the Marine Corps in August 1942, went through boot camp at San Diego, then went to officer school at Quantico and trained as a transport pilot. He flew transport missions in the Pacific before the war ended.
He went through the same recruit depot on Pacific Highway as the eighteen thousand who had come in the month after Pearl Harbor.
The most famous Marine to pass through Camp Pendleton did not have to be there.
John Basilone was a machine gun sergeant from Raritan, New Jersey. On October 24 and 25, 1942, at the battle for Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, he commanded two machine gun sections that held their line through two nights of Japanese attacks until only Basilone and two other Marines were left standing. He got the Medal of Honor for it in May 1943.
The Marine Corps knew what it had. Basilone was sent home in August 1943 to sell war bonds. His hometown parade in Raritan that September drew thousands of people and national press. He could have spent the rest of the war shaking hands.
He asked to go back. The Marine Corps said no. He asked again. On December 27, 1943 he left for Camp Pendleton, and in March 1944 he was promoted to gunnery sergeant. He was assigned to C Company, 1st Battalion, 27th Marines, in the new 5th Marine Division, the last of the three divisions built on the ranch.
At Camp Pendleton he met Lena Mae Riggi, a sergeant in the Marine Corps Women's Reserve. They were married on July 10, 1944 at St. Mary's Star of the Sea Church in Oceanside, with a reception at the Carlsbad Hotel.
Seven months later, on February 19, 1945, the first day of the landing on Iwo Jima, Basilone was killed on the beach. He was awarded the Navy Cross for destroying a Japanese blockhouse and guiding a tank through a minefield before he died. He was the only enlisted Marine of the war to receive both the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross.
Drive north on Interstate 5 past Oceanside and you are on the John Basilone Memorial Freeway. The exit into the base at San Onofre is Basilone Road.
The Marines spread across the county in ways that are easy to forget now.
The Marine air depot on Kearny Mesa, near Camp Kearny, was renamed Miramar in 1943. By 1945 it had two 6,000 foot runways. That field became Naval Air Station Miramar, the home of Top Gun, and is a Marine Corps air station again today.
At Gillespie Field in El Cajon, Marines trained as paratroopers, jumping over the East County backcountry.
In the mountains, Marines trained at a camp in Pine Valley. In October 1943, according to the MCRD Museum Foundation, nine Marines from that camp died fighting a wildfire in Hauser Canyon in the Cleveland National Forest. They had been sent in as firefighters. They are among the forgotten wartime dead of San Diego County.
In July 1944, Eleanor Roosevelt visited the Naval Hospital in Balboa Park. The National Archives holds the official photograph. In it, the First Lady sits with two Marines learning, the caption says, "first-hand details of the Battle for Saipan."
One of the Marines is Lieutenant Colonel Evans F. Carlson, "famous Marine Raider leader," who had been wounded on Saipan. The other is Colonel James Roosevelt, "who fought with Colonel Carlson on Makin."
Two and a half years after they formed the Raiders in the hills of Camp Elliott, the colonel and the President's son were back in San Diego, in a hospital ward in a park, telling the President's wife about a battle.
By 1944 the Marines had what they needed at Camp Pendleton. Camp Elliott was turned over to the Navy that year and used as a personnel distribution center. After the war it was folded into Camp Kearny and Miramar and then mostly abandoned. Aerial photographs of Kearny Mesa still show the ruins of the camp's roads and foundations in the brush.
When the war ended, the Marines who had shipped out of San Diego came back through it.
According to the depot's history, by the end of 1945, 24,000 Marines had been separated, meaning discharged, at the base on the bay, and transports were unloading "at the foot of Broadway nearly every week."
Many of them had trained in San Diego, shipped out of San Diego and been discharged in San Diego. A lot of them never left. San Diego's population nearly doubled in the decade after 1940, from 203,341 in the 1940 census to 334,387 in 1950. Some share of that growth was Marines and sailors who had seen the city on the way out and decided to come back to it.
Here is the real estate story, and it is the opposite of every other real estate story in San Diego County.
Linda Vista was built in 1941 as housing for defense workers. Clairemont went up after the war. Mira Mesa, Tierrasanta, Scripps Ranch, Rancho Peñasquitos, Carmel Valley and Del Mar Heights all went up on land that was empty in 1942. Almost every acre in the county that could be built on, was.
Camp Pendleton was not.
The 121,000 acres the government took for about $4.1 million in 1942 is still Camp Pendleton. It runs from Oceanside to San Clemente, and almost none of it has been developed. Drive Interstate 5 between the two cities and you are driving through the war. The hills on one side and the coast on the other look much as they did when Pancho Brown was running cattle on them.
The other Marine sites went the other way. Camp Matthews became UC San Diego. Camp Elliott became Tierrasanta and part of Miramar. The recruit depot is still on the bay, surrounded by the airport and the development that grew up around it.
The President's movements on September 25, 1942 come from FDR: Day by Day, the daily log kept by the Pare Lorentz Center at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library. The dedication itself comes from Calvin Frantz's account in the Camp Pendleton Historical Society journal, Groundbreaker, built on Grace Tully's journal and the base commander's letter.
The land taking comes from three sources that disagree on dates and agree on the outcome: the Marine Corps History Division's official history of Camp Pendleton by Breanne Robertson (2017), Richard Pourade's City of the Dream published by the San Diego History Center, and the California State Military Museum.
John Basilone's record comes from his Medal of Honor and Navy Cross citations and North County historian Tom Morrow's 2017 account in the North Coast Current. The Raiders come from the US Marine Raider Association, and the Makin raid figures from the US Naval Institute. Camp Matthews comes from UC San Diego. The Navajo Code Talkers come from the Central Intelligence Agency's published history of the program and the MCRD Museum Foundation. The recruit depot numbers come from the depot's history as reviewed in the Journal of San Diego History. The photograph of Eleanor Roosevelt with Carlson and James Roosevelt is in the National Archives.
Where the sources disagree, we have said so rather than picking one.
Roosevelt told Pancho Brown he would see the ranch kept "just the way it is now."
He did not mean it as policy. It was a passing remark to a ranch hand, from a President with less than an hour to spend and five more stops before dinner. Within weeks the ranch was full of artillery, tanks and twenty thousand Marines, and within three years more than eighty six thousand people lived on it.
But look at a satellite map of Southern California today.
From Los Angeles to the Mexican border, the coast is almost entirely built over. Houses, hotels, freeways, harbors, power plants. Except for one stretch. Between Oceanside and San Clemente there are about twenty miles of coastline and 121,000 acres of hills with almost nothing on them, because the Marine Corps has been using them to train for war since 1942.
Nobody planned it as a preserve. Nobody voted for it as open space. It is one of the largest pieces of undeveloped coastal land left in Southern California because of a war, and the man who took it promised, in a joke, that he would keep it just the way it was.
He was more right than he knew.
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