O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [82]
Zach had come down to the key element of amphibious warfare that had to be instilled in the Marine Corps.
“What should Darius have done?” Ben asked.
“He should have made a hard landing. The Persians should have come in with fifty boats filled with Immortals and elite troops, hit the beach running, moved inland, and staked out their battle site.”
Ben was near dazed with the clarity of Zach’s analysis. In truth, he had hit on the key to the way that amphibious warfare had to develop.
“There is a big problem with this, Zach. As of today, there isn’t a commanding admiral or general who wouldn’t select a soft landing over a hard landing.”
“Yes, sir, casualties.”
“Casualties. What military staff of a democracy would order a landing and knowingly take heavy casualties?”
“There is no other way except to hit the beach running and break the enemy’s back on the initial assault.”
Ben closed his eyes and squealed his rocker into motion. “I’m going to have this study classified as secret . . . let it out piecemeal . . . until there can be a realization that a hard-landing alternative must be the centerpiece of the doctrine.”
• 24 •
GEORGE WASHINGTON BARJAC
The Eastern Shore—a Retrospective
Major Pierre Barjac was at the side of George Washington when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. Barjac, an aide of the Marquis de Lafayette, had served the American cause well.
The Calvert dynasty that founded and governed Maryland, as the Barons of Baltimore, awarded Barjac a land patent of three thousand acres on the Eastern Shore.
The Calverts were of Irish Catholic descent in a sea of Protestants. Maryland became the most tolerant of the colonies. It did not go unnoticed that Pierre Barjac was also of the R.C. persuasion.
Pierre Barjac began his plantation with little agricultural background, but slaves, overseers, and some of the richest land on earth provided a fortune and a lordly way of life.
Tobacco, a ceremonial drug of the Indians, found its way to Europe and addicted the continent. Tobacco was the golden crop and the Eastern Shore yielded the gold of gold in bonanza fields!
Greed-driven plantation owners oversaturated the market, as greed is apt to do, and there were wild swings in prices, causing that blessed land to go into an economic skid.
By the time Major Pierre passed on, slash-and-burn farming tactics had taken their toll. Jacques Barjac inherited a plantation on the fringe of failure.
Jacques Barjac was the basic high-living rotter who pushed his slaves to the brink in order to keep his privileged life and stay ahead of his gambling debts.
Jacques’s three sons bailed out. The youngest, George Washington Barjac, obviously named, bought a commission into the Marine Corps and fought in the Mexican War of the late 1840s. He commanded a company that took the fearsome, disease-ridden overland march from Vera Cruz to Mexico City.
Barjac’s company was on the flank of a company commanded by Ben Boone during the storming of Chapultepec. The two men were bound for life by the experience.
When Father Jacques sent out a desperation call, it was ignored by his older sons, but six years’ service in the Marines had satisfied George Washington’s wanderlust, and he returned to a decrepit plantation.
The father, on his deathbed, was filled with remorse and the need for salvation. George was faced with selling the place off or making it go.
Overbreeding of hogs had all but ruined the marshes and creeks along the boundary. They were sludgy and contaminated by slimy oxygen-sucking algae blooms . . . and the fields were not much better.
The Eastern Shore survived despite gluttonous landowners because of its unmatched abundance. There was timber and shipbuilding, blizzards of water fowl and wild hogs and wild horses. The soil was fertile for near any crop, grain and fruit orchards and vegetables. There was fur trapping of beaver and muskrat and raccoon, and bursting oyster and