\u201CSKILLED WATERMEN AND JUNGLE FIGHTERS, TOO\u201D (The Interwar Years, 1919-1941)

“SKILLED WATERMEN AND JUNGLE FIGHTERS, TOO” (The Interwar Years, 1919-1941)

Smedley Butler led Marines and sailors in an assault on Fort Riviere that effectively ended the Caco rebellion in Haiti during one of the “Banana Wars.” Unpopular at home, they helped forge a new generation of Marine Corps officers and NCOs. Fort Riviere, Haiti – 1915, Colonel Donna J. Neary, USMCR (Ret.), 1989, oil on canvas.

Collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps

T he Marines returned from Europe after World War I to national acclaim for their sacrifices and valor. Yet the Corps would soon be in dire straits because they still lacked a unique warfighting mission, a distinctive role that would satisfy national security interests without unduly competing with the Army.

In the doldrums ahead, a shadowy prophet would illuminate the path – the brilliant and doomed Lieutenant Colonel Earl “Pete” Ellis.

In the immediate postwar years, when most Marines envisioned their future role simply as renewed service in another continental campaign, Pete Ellis perceived a radically different naval mission.

Ellis foresaw a major war in the Pacific with Japan and projected the use of Marines as amphibious shock troops to forcibly seize advanced naval bases along the island stepping-stones leading to Japan.

Then came the nine-year commandancy of John Lejeune in the 1920s. Very much akin to his nineteenthcentury predecessor Archibald Henderson, Lejeune managed to return the Corps to its naval roots and ensure his officers and NCOs gained meaningful combat experience around the world.

Lejeune proposed the principal future focus of his fighting men as “a mobile Marine Corps force adequate to conduct offensive land operations against hostile Naval bases.” The key distinguishing word in this concept: offensive.

At Lejeune’s insistence, the Navy and Marines conducted experimental fleet landing exercises in the Caribbean in the winter of 1923-1924. The results were not pretty.

Offensive landing operations turned out to demand the solution of significant problems that Marines were far from ready to handle. These involved command and control, communications, fire support, and – desperately – the challenge of moving men and their major weapons ashore.

Lejeune was hamstrung in conducting further amphibious tests in his tenure because he had virtually no field forces left at home. The Marine Corps, reduced to less than one third of its WWI strength, became heavily committed for years in “limited wars” in Haiti (1913- 1934), the Dominican Republic (1916-1924), and Nicaragua (1926-1933). These were the so-called “Banana Wars,” unpopular at home and among the native populations. The fighting, small in scale, savage in execution, was ugly and relentless.

The no-quarter fighting in these nasty little undeclared jungle wars had as their sole undisputed reward the training and hardening of many superb Marine officers who would command significant forces in the Pacific War to come.

U.S. Marines with Nicaraguan guerrilla leader Augusto Sandino’s flag, 1932.

National Archives

The Marines’ new role as suppressors of unfriendly unrest didn’t end with the tiny nations. Most Marines in the interwar years rotated between overseas duties in not only Haiti and Nicaragua but also China, another nation rent by civil disorder and threatened by strong neighbors.

Although not involved in combat, the Leathernecks assigned to the Legation Guard at Peking or to the 4th Marines in Shanghai learned the ways of the Orient, which would prove invaluable in World War II.

Both [Lieutenant Lewis] “Chesty” Puller and [Captain Merritt] “Red Mike” Edson [who had served in the Marines’ “banana wars”] scrutinized the Imperial Japanese military forces that occupied Shanghai and other major cities after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937. Edson was particularly interested in the rikusentai, the Special Naval Landing Forces.

Captain Evans Carlson, who with Edson would soon form the first Marine raider battalions, learned to speak Chinese, then boldly asked permission from Mao Tsetung to spend a winter learning guerrilla warfare tactics from the masters of the art, the Communist Chinese Army in Yenan.

Another China Marine who developed combat instincts in the interwar years was First Lieutenant Victor Krulak. While assistant intelligence officer of the 4th Marines in 1937, Krulak observed a Japanese amphibious assault conducted against Liuho near the mouth of the Yangtze River. The amphibious expertise displayed by the Japanese impressed and alarmed “The Brute.” “What we saw was that the Japanese were light-years ahead of us in landing craft design,” he said.

Krulak photographed the Japanese’s sturdy, bowramped landing craft and telegraphed a full report to the Navy’s Bureau of Ships. (Two years later, puzzled at the lack of response, he visited the bureau and found his report in a dead file, annotated with the comment that it had been submitted by “some nut out in China.”)

Krulak’s experience with the Naval bureaucracy notwithstanding, the Marines and the Navy in the 1930s were finally merging along a similar path leading toward amphibious warfare.

Amphibious warfare, they discovered, had certain inviolable principles. Of these, unity of command was paramount. There could only be one man, naval or ground, in command at any one point in time. There was a logical sequence of transfer of this command from sea to shore as the assault progressed. Also, there had to be at least temporary command of the seas – and the air and the subsurface – in the objective area for the assault to proceed. Good communications would be absolutely vital.

The most galling challenge was how to overcome the amphibious assault’s inherent weakness, the fact that the whole affair begins with a single man – the first man ashore – facing the combined might of the defenders. There was a crying need for specialized landing craft to get great bunches of men, in tactical order, through the surf and on the beach as quickly as possible.

Tanks and howitzers would have to land right behind the assault troops. Solving the vulnerability of the shipto-shore movement would prove the greatest hurdle.

Having digested all these corollaries and believing there was a future for amphibious warfare after all, the Navy and Marines resumed their annual fleet landing exercises.

But each exercise from 1934 to 1941 simply proved the point that amphibious landings are the most difficult of all military operations to execute.

A caustic, scowling figure emerged from these annual nightmares of chaos and recrimination – Marine Brigadier General Holland M. (soon to be nicknamed “Howlin’ Mad”) Smith, the nation’s leading authority on amphibious assault.

As Smith struggled to teach amphibious warfare to the Army, Navy, and his own Marines, he vented his sulfurous spleen against the snail’s pace of the Bureau of Ships in developing suitable ship-to-shore craft for the landing force. Holland Smith began to look elsewhere.

The search for the ultimate landing craft finally brought the Marines to Andrew Higgins. Higgins, an enterprising New Orleans boat designer, modified his proven, flat-bottomed, shallow-draft Eureka boat, used in bayou waters by oil-drillers and trappers, to include a retractable bow ramp and a protected propeller. It would be a world-shaking innovation, one that would defeat Germany and Japan as ineluctably as any other technology.

Inventor Donald Roebling’s “Swamp Gator,” a tracked amphibian designed to rescue downed aviators in the Everglades, caught the Marines’ eye just before the new war erupted. Roebling modified his prototype to meet naval specs, leading to production of the ubiquitous LVT (Landing Vehicle Tracked). Known almost universally as “Alligators,” they would serve all over the world, initially as logistics haulers, then – beginning with Tarawa – as the troop-carrying cutting edge of amphibious assault.

The so-called “dead” years between the world wars had been anything but that for the Marines. They had bled and learned prodigiously, developed their unique role, and prepared with amazing foresight for the Pacific cauldron ahead.