Merrill’s Marauders OK’d for top honor

WWII jungle unit to get Congressional Gold Medal

The soldiers spent months behind enemy lines, marching hundreds of miles through the tangled jungles and steep mountains of Burm-a as they battled hunger and disease between firefights with Japanese forces during their secret mission.

In February 1944, the American jungle fighting unit nicknamed Merrill’s Marauders set out to capture a Japanese-held airfield and open an Allied supply route between India and China. Starting with 3,000 soldiers, the Marauders completed their mission five months later with barely 200 men still in the fight.

The journey of roughly 1,000 miles on foot was so grueling that fighting “was the easy part,” said Robert Passanisi, who at age 96 is among just nine known Marauders still known to be alive.

Now the Marauders, officially designated by the Army as the 5307th Composite Unit (Provisional), have been approved by Congress to be awarded its highest honor: the Congressional Gold Medal.

Passanisi enlisted his fellow surviving Marauders and the families of many who have died to begin lobbying for the honor four years ago. A final bill approved in September was sent Oct. 6 to the White House, where it awaits President Donald Trump’s signature.

“After many years, all the sacrifices, and the suffering, are now finally recognized,” said Passanisi, of Lindenhurst, New York. “It makes you feel like it was all worthwhile.”

In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to have the Army assemble a ground unit for a longrange mission behind enemy lines into Japanese-occupied Burma, now Myanmar. Seasoned infantrymen and newly enlisted soldiers alike volunteered for the mission, deemed so secret they weren’t told where they were going.

Merrill’s Marauders — nicknamed for the unit’s commander, Brig. Gen. Frank Merrill — were tasked with cutting off Japanese communications and supply lines along their long march to the airfield at the occupied town of Myitkyina. Often outnumbered, they successfully fought Japanese troops in five major engagements, plus 30 minor ones, between February and August 1944.

Marauders spent most days cutting their way through dense jungle, with only mules to help carry equipment and provisions. They slept on the ground, and rarely changed clothes. Supplies dropped from planes were their only means of replenishing rations and ammunition. Malnutrition and the wet climate left the soldiers vulnerable to malaria, dysentery and other diseases.

“These guys were subsisting on one K-ration per man, per day,” said Christopher Goodrow, arms curator for the National Infantry Museum in Columbus, Georgia. “You’re talking about a can of tuna, some crackers, a chocolate bar and cigarettes.”