Manifest Destiny (1859-1914)

� Manifest Destiny (1859-1914)

While the combat role for fighting Marines on warships declined, the Marines still proved useful in battle. In declared wars, the nation always found a need for an instantly available, rigorously trained force of relentless fighters. But in the “extra-curricular” fighting of the imperial age they were especially handy, presenting a powerful national military presence in something of a seagoing constabulary role, always politically easier to commit than the Army.

The Marines had a pivotal role in a crucial moment in the countdown to the Civil War.

When abolitionist John Brown seized the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry with an insurrectionist force, took hostages, and barricaded himself in an engine house as he sought a general uprising of slaves, the situation represented a national tinderbox. The Marines got there first.

It was November 1859. Lieutenant Israel Greene mustered a full company of regulars from Marine Barracks Washington in short order – armed, equipped, and aboard the first train to Harper’s Ferry in three hours. Greene led two columns of his Marines in a storming attack against the barricaded engine house at daybreak.

Two Marines fell. Greene flattened John Brown with a back-handed slash of his sword. His troops killed or captured the other kidnappers with deadly efficiency. All hostages survived. Nice work. But the Corps faced deep problems. While all armed services suffered the loss of Southern officers resigning their commissions, the Marine Corps arguably lost its best and brightest.

The U.S. Marines also missed a ripe opportunity to provide the spearhead in forcible amphibious assaults along the entire Southern coast, as well as in thousands of miles of inland rivers. Instead, [Commandant Colonel John] Harris clung mutely to the old ways, providing “penny packets” of Marine detachments for outdated 1812-era functions on the major warships. His few attempts to organize larger fighting forces were disastrous.

The fighting heart of the Corps continued to beat, quietly and effectively, in a thousand close-range naval engagements. At Drewry’s Bluff on the James River below Richmond, Confederate Marines and Union Marines dueled each other with muskets while the forts and the federal ironclads swapped thundering broadsides. Hardest hit was USS Galena, whose gun decks quickly ran red with blood. Through all the death and destruction strode U.S. Marine Corporal John Mackie, who pulled the wounded to shelter and matched his Rebel counterparts round for point-blank round until Galena could extricate herself from the firestorm.

Abraham Lincoln personally awarded John Mackie the Medal of Honor, the first such award ever earned by a Marine.

While Lt. Israel Greene and his men performed well in capturing John Brown and safely releasing all his hostages at Harper’s Ferry, the aftermath, in the form of the Civil War, was not a good time for the Corps. Harper’s Ferry, Col. Charles H. Waterhouse, USMCR (Ret.), 1987, acrylic on masonite.

Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

More Marine citations followed. Eight Marines earned the Medal of Honor for extraordinary bravery under fire during the Battle of Mobile Bay with its close encounters with the mammoth Confederate ironclad Tennessee.

Other Marines were frittered away in valiant but disorganized operations which achieved little but casualties.

At no time during the war did Marine Corps strength exceed 4,000 men, truly a drop in the bucket compared with the hundreds of thousands who served in the Union Army or Navy.

In truth, the only shining achievement for the Corps during this cataclysmic war was the enhancement of its traditions of strong NCO leadership. These men proved to be highly responsible, technically proficient, tough-asnails fighters. And they carried the Corps through its doldrums.

Fifteen of the seventeen enlisted Marines to receive the Medal of Honor during the Civil War wore the stripes of corporals or sergeants.

Small detachments of Marines, led by junior officers and NCOs, continued to spearhead landing parties around the world: China in 1866; Formosa, Japan, and Nicaragua in 1867; Japan again and Uruguay in 1868; Mexico in 1870. “A ship without Marines is like a garment without buttons,” said a grateful Admiral David Dickson Porter.

In 1871, Commodore John Rogers’ Far Eastern Squadron launched a battalion-sized landing party to seize a series of forts from pugnacious Salee River pirates in a land the Marines would visit again for mortal combat – Korea.

Naval gunfire paved the way for the landing. Marines and sailors lugged field pieces through the mudflats, charged with abandon, scaled the walls, overwhelmed the garrison, and came away with huge Korean flags as souvenirs.

The Marines rode into the new century on the bowwave of public enthusiasm for Imperialism.

On the evening of February 15, 1898, the proud new armored cruiser Maine, moored in Havana harbor to “show the colors” during Spain’s unpopular repression of its Cuban colony, erupted in a violent explosion and sank, killing 260 Americans, among them 28 Marines.

“Remember the Maine” became the national cry. Congress soon recognized Cuba’s independence and authorized military action against Spain.

Lieutenant Colonel Robert Huntington, a bearded, bristling Marine … assembled a large, well-armed battalion of troops from posts and stations throughout the east.

With most of the Spanish fleet holed up in Santiago Harbor, Admiral William Sampson ordered the forcible seizure of Guantanamo Bay as an advance naval base and coaling station.

Eight thousand Spanish troops occupied the rugged hills around Guantanamo, but none opted to oppose Huntington’s landing on June 10, especially after a pelting bombardment by the cruiser Marblehead.

Huntington soon realized that Guantanamo’s fate remained inextricably linked to access to fresh water. Spaniards and Marines alike had their eyes on Cuzco Well, several miles away.

Huntington sent two Marine rifle companies under Captain George Fielding Elliott to seize the well. Supporting fire would come from the gunboat Dolphin steaming along the coast.

Elliott maneuvered into position and launched his attack. Spanish riflemen of the 6th Barcelona Regiment returned a brisk fire.

Dolphin, lying offshore, began dropping shells into the Marine lines. In the middle of this unwelcome chaos, Sergeant John H. Quick scrambled to an exposed overlook to wave an emphatic semaphore message to Dolphin. The ship abruptly shifted its fire to the nearby Spaniards, as directed by Quick, and the Marines resumed their advance with a growl.

Intense fighting ensued in the thick vegetation, but the Marines had the advantage of momentum and the corrected fire of the gunship. The Spaniards yielded the precious well.

Later that month, the U.S. Army’s 5th Corps landed east of Santiago. Soon Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders battled their way into history at San Juan Hill, and the “Splendid Little War” petered out.

Commodore George Dewey, victor over the Spanish fleet in the Battle of Manila Bay, later confessed to Congress that many of the subsequent problems of the Philippine Insurrection (1899-1902) could have been avoided “had I had five thousand Marines embarked with my Naval force.”

The violent Philippine Insurrection foreshadowed the American War in Vietnam sixty years later: a jungle war against shadowy guerrillas – a protracted, brutal campaign increasingly unpopular on the American home front.

Washington responded to the guerrillas’ challenge by sending overseas the Army’s VII Corps and an entire regiment of Marines, the largest organized body of Leathernecks to take to the field in their history.

[Filipino guerrilla chieftain] Emilio Aguinaldo’s capture by U.S. Army forces in March 1901 led to an uneasy peace throughout the Philippine Islands, except for Samar in the southeast. There, six months later, rebel tribesmen attacked an outpost of the 9th U.S. Infantry at breakfast, killing forty soldiers, mutilating their bodies obscenely.

Major Littleton Waller Tazewell Waller – short, stout, and fierce – commanded the provisional brigade to “pacify” Samar.

By mid-November, Waller’s scouts located the rebel jungle headquarters in a series of fortified caves in a 200- foot cliff over the Sohoton River.

Waller executed a brilliant three-pronged attack against the heavily jungled cliffside caves.

The insurrection on Samar effectively ended with this battle.

Unknowingly, the Marines had commenced a full century of combat in the Pacific. The first of several conflicts to come with the Chinese began in 1900 with the so-called Boxer Rebellion. Marines fought in north China to rescue Western diplomats from the murderous, xenophobic “Society of the Righteous Harmonious Fists,” the Boxers.

The Marine Corps emerged from the Boxer Rebellion with a greatly enhanced reputation after their heroics at Peking and Tientsin. Defense of Peking – 1900, Staff Sgt. John F. Clymer, USMCR, 1945, oil on canvas.

Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

In May 1900, Captain John “Handsome Jack” Myers led a contingent of U.S. Marines to Peking to help protect the legations. Within hours, Marines and Boxers began exchanging fire.

On June 5, Britain’s Sir Edward Seymour led a multinational force, including 112 U.S. Marines and sailors, north by train from Tientsin to relieve the beleaguered legations at Peking. Heavily armed Boxers stopped Seymour’s advance, then surrounded him in an arsenal at Hsiku.

On June 18, Major Waller led ashore at the Chinese port of Taku a battalion of Marines, fresh from fighting in Luzon. Joining with a battalion of Russian infantry, Waller’s Marines set off for Tientsin to relieve Seymour’s encircled group at the Hsiku Arsenal.

Meanwhile the famous “Fiftyfive Days at Peking” began with the Boxer siege initiated on June 20. Thousands of foreigners, mainly noncombatants, jammed the besieged Legation Quarter, an area less than three quarters of a mile square. There was little food or water, and the Boxers kept the enclave under constant bombardment.

Marines under Captain Myers held the Tartar Wall, a critical position at the southern end of the Quarter.

Nowhere did the Marines take a backward step along the perimeter. They were indeed in their element: helpless women and children depending on them, professional counterparts from a dozen nations eyeing them critically, a savage, implacable enemy to fight.

Back at Tientsin, with even more U.S. Marines swelling its ranks, the International Army launched its attack against the towering walls.

Feisty Lieutenant Smedley Butler fell wounded as he led his Marines against the fortified city’s gates. Tientsin finally fell.

The International Army commenced a ten-day overland march to Peking, arriving in force before the massive gates on August 14. The next day, after a brief bombardment, the Marines led the attack, scaling the wall south of the Tung Pien Gate to open fire on the Boxers inside.

Smedley Butler, newly promoted to captain for his heroism at Tientsin and barely healed from his first wound, received another bullet wound in a repeat performance at Peking, climbing the wall to open the main gate to the British compound. Thousands of fighting men, their various uniforms now a quilt of different colors, swarmed inside. The fifty-five-day siege had been broken.

In 1914, in a final period of naïveté before the monstrous world war, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for approval to employ armed force in Mexico for “affronts and indignities committed against the United States.” The target, first Tampico, shifted to Veracruz.

The Marines mobilized half the entire Corps to deploy five provisional regiments in Veracruz within the first ten days. They raced to the scene in anything that would float – transports, warships, coal ships, a target ship, even a chartered commercial liner. They stormed ashore in surfboats, launches, tugs, or scows. And they gleefully beat the more heavily laden Army to the fight by a full week.

[Lieutenant Colonel Wendell “Whispering Buck”] Neville’s Marines streamed ashore throughout a very hot June afternoon, fanning out to seize the customs house and cable office.

Organized Mexican forces pulled back, but sufficient militia, cadets, and armed civilians remained to put up a stiff resistance.

A day and a half of this close-range fighting cost the Americans nineteen dead and seventy-five wounded. Hundreds of Mexicans died.

Now Wilson agreed to mediation, and the Mexican crisis would go away, to be replaced very shortly by a war where desperately fighting Marines would lose more men in an hour than they had lost in all of these far-flung forays on behalf of “Manifest Destiny.”