Russell Hamler, thought to be the last of WWII Merrill's Marauders jungle-fighting unit, dies at 99
HARRISBURG, Pa. — The alleged last member of the famed World War II American jungle fighting unit nicknamed the Merrill's Marauders has died.
Russell Hamler, 99, died Tuesday, his son Jeffrey said. He did not give a cause of death.
Hamler was the last living Marauder, the daughter of a deceased former Marauder, Jonnie Melillo Clasen, Stars and Stripes said.
Hamler lived in the Pittsburgh area.
In 2022, the Marauders received the Congressional Gold Medal, Congress's highest award. The Marauders inspired a 1962 film called “Merrill's Marauders,” and dozens of Marauders received individual awards after the war, from the Distinguished Service Cross to the Silver Star. The Army also awarded the Bronze Star to every soldier in the unit.
The soldiers spent months behind enemy lines, marching hundreds of miles through the tangled jungles and steep mountains of Burma to capture a Japanese-occupied airfield and open an Allied supply route between India and China.
They battled starvation and disease between firefights with Japanese forces during their secret mission, a grueling journey of about 1,000 miles (1,610 kilometers) on foot that left nearly all of them dead.
In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to have the Army assemble a ground unit for a long-range mission behind enemy lines into Japanese-occupied Burma, now Myanmar. Both seasoned infantrymen and newly recruited soldiers volunteered for the mission, which was deemed so secret that they were not told where they were going.
Merrill's Marauders – nickname for the unit's commander, Brig. General Frank Merrill – were tasked with cutting Japanese communications and supply lines during their long march to the airfield near the occupied city of Myitkyina. Often outnumbered, they successfully fought Japanese forces in five major battles, plus thirty smaller ones, between February and August 1944.
Starting with 3,000 soldiers, the Marauders completed their mission five months later with barely 200 men left in the fight.
The plunderers spent most days making their way through the dense jungle, with only mules to carry equipment and supplies. They slept on the floor and rarely changed clothes. Supplies dropped from aircraft were their only means of replenishing rations and ammunition. Malnutrition and the wet climate made the soldiers vulnerable to malaria, dysentery and other diseases.
The Marauders eventually captured the airfield that was their main objective, but Japanese forces had attempted to take it back. The remaining Marauders were too few and too exhausted to hold it.