While The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg released the full thread of the Signal chat he was accidentally brought into by the Trump administration’s top defense and intelligence officers, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth continued his tour in Hawaii — which included a stop at Kaneohe Bay.
With the video below, of Hegseth shaking hands and awarding commemorative coins to U.S. Marines, the SecDef wrote: “Motivating time spent with the warriors of K-Bay—Marines who embody discipline and lethality. America’s enemies take note—these Devil Dogs are always ready.”
Note: Hegseth’s post is receiving a wave of backlash on X with demands for his resignation and questions regarding his ability to serve as SecDef after the SignalGate scandal, including “They’re always ready. The better question is, are the people in charge ready?”
Motivating time spent with the warriors of K-Bay—Marines who embody discipline and lethality. America’s enemies take note—these Devil Dogs are always ready. pic.twitter.com/h2RFUYAJZh
— Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (@SecDef) March 26, 2025
The U.S. Marines were reportedly given the nickname “Devil Dogs” or “Teufelshunde” (German for “devil dogs”) by German soldiers during World War I, after the Battle of Belleau Wood.
According to the U.S. Marines website, the nickname “came about from Marines being ordered to take a hill occupied by German forces while wearing gas masks as a precaution against German mustard gas. While the Marines fought their way up the hill, the heat caused them to sweat profusely, foam at the mouth and turned their eyes bloodshot, and at some points the hill was so steep it caused the Marines to climb up it on all fours.
“From the Germans’ vantage point, they witnessed a pack of tenacious, growling figures wearing gas masks, with bloodshot eyes and mouth foam seeping from the sides, advancing up the hill, sometimes on all fours, killing everything in their way. As the legend goes, the German soldiers, upon seeing this spectacle, began to yell that they were being attacked by ‘dogs from hell.’”
Note: The veracity of that U.S. Marines story — of Germans coming up with the nickname — has been in disputed repeatedly over the past 100 years. In 1921, American Journalist H. L. Mencken wrote that the term ‘Devil Dogs’ was the invention of an American war correspondent. “The Germans never used it,” Mencken added, “This is army slang, but promises to survive.”
In 2016, Bob Aquilina of the U.S. Marine Corps History Division also said the history of the nickname is more mythology than fact. He said: “The term very likely was first used by Marines themselves and appeared in print before the Battle for Belleau Wood.”