Devil Dogs: The Marine Corps League's Inner Circle
Near Lake Geneva, Wisconsin
The nickname Devil Dogs dates to the ferocious fighting around Belleau Wood in France during the summer of nineteen eighteen. Marine tradition says German soldiers, impressed and unnerved by the tenacity of United States Marines, called them Teufelshunde, or Devil Dogs, though historians have found no German source for it. The Marines adopted the name as a badge of honor.
Two decades later, in nineteen thirty-nine, the Marine Corps League formalized it by creating the Military Order of the Devil Dogs, a fun and fraternal branch designed to boost camaraderie within the larger organization. Members hold tongue-in-cheek ranks drawn from marine animal titles. The Badger Detachment based here in Kenosha County is one of hundreds of local dens, called Pounds, that carry the tradition forward.
What started as a battlefield legend has become one of the proudest monikers in American military identity.
