Gordon Gayle, retired Marine awarded Navy Cross, dead at 95

Gordon D. Gayle, a retired Marine Corps brigadier general who received the Navy Cross after a fierce World War II battle in the Pacific and who later directed an influential study of tactics and battlefield planning, died April 21 at an assisted-living facility in Farnham, Va. He was 95.

He had an intracerebral hemorrhage, his son Mike Gayle said.

In World War II, "Lucky" Gayle served in the 1st Marine Division. He took part in all the division's campaigns from the struggle for Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands in 1942-43, an epic chapter in Marine history, to the bloody capture of Peleliu in the Palau Islands in 1944.

During that time, the division was awarded three Presidential Unit Citations, and Gayle received the Navy Cross, the highest naval award for heroism after the Medal of Honor.

He was a young captain when he boarded a troopship in Norfolk, Va., in May 1942 to sail for the Pacific and the war against Japan. By the time he was ordered back to the United States at the end of 1944, he was a lieutenant colonel who had commanded an infantry battalion of 1,000 men in two amphibious assaults.

At Peleliu, he was awarded the Navy Cross for organizing a force of tanks and infantry that repulsed a Japanese attack aimed at driving Marines from a newly captured airfield and into the sea.

battle.

Gayle's military decorations also included two awards of the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star Medal and the Purple Heart.

Gayle, who wrote the Marine Corps' official history of the Peleliu battle, was one of 69 Marines awarded the Navy Cross for their actions there. Eight others received the Medal of Honor, five of them posthumously.