On 28 October 1664, King Charles II set his seal on an Order in Council directing the raising of the Duke of York's Regiment of Foot. Because James, the Duke of York and the king's brother, was Lord High Admiral, it was to be known as the Admiral's Regiment. A year later, on the outbreak of war with England and France, the United Provinces of the Netherlands—at the instigation of the great Admiral Michiel A.de Ruyter—formed the Korps Mariniers. About the same time there appeared in the armed forces of Louis XIV of France Le Regiment Royale Marine and Le Regiment Amirale. The Marine had arrived. A cynic able to foresee controversies ahead might have added that, from that day forward, the navies of the world would wonder what to do with him.
The fighting spirit displayed by the U. S. Marine Corps through two centuries on battlefields around the globe—and its great deeds in the Pacific in World War II—must be an inspiration to fellow countrymen, as indeed they are to fellow Marines. The Corps' continuing technical and organizational achievements in developing up-to-date means of assault from the sea are perhaps less widely known, but are no less appreciated by those who do know. But neither bravery on the field of battle nor technical resource and invention are limited to one arm of the fighting services or to one nation. To discover the unique achievements of a great corps we must, therefore, look further. If we do so, then we shall find it surely in the present century in establishing the distinctive place and purpose of the sea soldier as an instrument of sea power.
In the great days of sail, the function of Marines was understood well enough. Naval officers might grumble at the clumsy soldiers in their tight uniforms and heavy boots, and sailors might mock the gullibility of yokels coming after a few weeks on the barrack square to the strange, hard life at sea, but they knew what they were for. The few ships kept in commission in peacetime were manned by volunteers, true seamen with a penchant for naval life. But at the outbreak of war, with a host of ships to be commissioned and kept in commission, large bounties were offered to all and sundry willing to go to sea, the jails were scoured, and the press gangs got to work. In each new war, the ramshackle system was always on the verge of breakdown, and the crews it produced were motley and shorthanded. The bosun's mates and masters-at-arms would in time lick them into shape, but many a newly appointed captain must have heard with relief the firm tread of his Marine detachment as it marched down to join his ship.
In battle, both seamen and Marines provided small arms men for the fire fight on the upper deck, Marines as well as seamen might man the great guns below, and both appeared in boarding, cutting out, and landing parties. But a stiffening of Marines on the bullet-swept decks or in a tight corner ashore was well recognized as an advantage, if not necessarily as an essential.
In assessing the role of Marines in larger landing operations we must beware of modern preconceptions. Marine battalions did from time to time appear, and the familiarity of their officers and men with ships and boat-work was an advantage in a landing on a hostile shore, but there were not enough of them for large-scale operations, and the army had to be brought in. Nor did the special techniques of amphibious attack amount to very much. It was the job of the sailors to get the clumsy, seasick soldiers ashore, where they would form up as best they might to fight a land battle. It was not perhaps a very good way of doing things, and there is some evidence that the losses of the soldiers at sea from hardship and disease were greater than those of seasoned seamen and Marines, but that was the way that it was done.
In England it took nearly 100 years after 1664 for the new idea of Marines as a specialized corps to achieve organizational stability. When in 1755 fighting with the French broke out in America and India, Admiral George Anson, who had had bitter experience in the previous war of the old way of doing things and was now in charge at the Admiralty, raised a new corps of sea soldiers. As the Royal Marines, they have survived until today.
The new corps proved itself in the Seven Years War. Later, as the storm clouds gathered in the American colonies, a battalion was sent to Vice Admiral Samuel Graves at Boston; he disembarked it to reinforce General Thomas Gage's garrison. It was joined by a second battalion, and both fought at Bunker Hill, where the 2nd Marines and the 47th Foot finally carried the rebel defense works. But when the navies of France, Spain, and Holland entered the war, the main task of the Marines became to man the ships hastily commissioned to meet them.
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, which followed, illustrate clearly the role of Marines in the great days of sail. Declaration of war by revolutionary France in 1793 found the Royal Navy, as usual, desperately short of men. No fewer than ten Army regiments were sent to sea in place of Marines in ships of the line, leaving the balance and the frigates and smaller ships to the Marines. The presence of Marines failed to prevent the great mutinies of Spithead and the Nore in 1797. But in the Mediterranean under the great Admiral John Jervis, Earl of St. Vincent, vigilant Marine guards—and their performance of military ceremonial duties to impress ship's company—became part of the efficient administration which prevented the mutiny situation from arising. Great sea battles, culminating in Trafalgar, saw the Royal Marines, as they had become, in their place on the poop deck and on the gun decks below. Along the northern coast of Spain in 1812, two Marine battalions in Admiral Sir Home Popham's Flying Squadron raided French garrisons as Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington marched to Salamanca and Burgos. Crossing the Atlantic when the United States declared war, they raided the coast of Chesapeake Bay, fought in Canada, and finally appeared off the coast of Georgia.
Thus, when lasting peace came in 1815, it found the Royal Marines firmly established in a whole range of naval duties. They were not, perhaps, essential to the Navy in the way that artillery and engineers were essential to the Army. All, or almost all, of their duties could be done by seamen or land soldiers, but it was more convenient to have a specialized corps for the purpose. Not only did the system work, but it had become traditional.
General Edward Braddock's defeat at Fort Duquesne in the French and Indian Wars and Major General James Abercromby's at Ticonderoga had left the American colonists with good cause to suspect the usefulness of regular soldiers sent to America from the United, Kingdom. However, the naval record of that war—and more important, a tradition reaching back to the Elizabethans—left them in little doubt where to look for a model for the Continental Navy when it was formed in 1775 to fight the British. And as the Royal Navy had Marines, so too would the Continental Navy have the Continental Marines, to be disbanded like the Navy when the war had been won. In 1794, when the U.S. Congress passed the Naval Act providing for six frigates, it seemed, to assume as a matter of course that they would have Marines on board. In 1798, the Marine Corps was raised. Its functions—sea duty, duty in forts and garrisons and "any other duty ashore as the President may direct"—were more formally specified than those of the Royal Marines, but they came to much the same thing, and in the frigate battles of 1812 and 1813, Marine fought Marine on the decks of the ships of the two nations.
Did the navies but know it, the great days of sail were almost over by 1815. Robert Fulton's steamboat had appeared on the Delaware River, and the 100 years of industrial and engineering progress that would pro duce the battleships of Jutland had begun. Only once or twice more would the line of redcoats be seen in battle on the poop deck. With its disappearance, the Marine's place in navies would be open to attack.
But change was still a slow business. Despite the success of the American frigates, the Royal Navy in the aftermath of Trafalgar seemed unchallengeable Its task for the rest of the century would not be naval battle but policing the oceans and coastlines of the world. And in that, Marines could play a valuable part. In the Mediterranean, on the China coast, in Japan and in New Zealand, on the pestiferous West African coast, in Egypt, and in the Sudan, the Royal Marines would see plenty of action, hardship, and adventure. But only once again in the 19th century did they take part in a major war—the Crimean—that was without a fleet action. In France the successors of the Marine regiments became colonial troops with only the anchor badge to remind them they had once been Marines.
Meanwhile, against Tripoli pirates and Seminole Indians, in Mexico, in China, Formosa, Japan, Korea, and in Latin America, the U. S. Marines did what was, from a military point of view, much the same job as the Royal Marines, sometimes in much the same place. In Alexandria in 1882, the U. S. Marines—landed to guard the American consulate—stayed on after the bombardment of the forts and cooperated with the seaman Marine landing parties from the British Mediterranean Fleet. On the China coast, the navies of the two countries constantly met. In the Boxer rising 1901, detachments of the Marine Corps and of the Royal Marines Light Infantry were closely associated in the defense of the Peking legations, and both contributed to the force coming to their rescue.
Corning from what was in the 19th century a far more egalitarian society than that of Victorian Britain, one imbued with the frontier tradition and profoundly influenced in its military thought by the Civil War, the Americans brought a tougher and less formal approach to military matters—including those of sea-soldiering—than did Europeans. By comparison, the British of the period—even the British sailors—tended to be hidebound and a little prim. But the Marines of the two countries faced many of the same problems—savage warfare in primitive conditions, cramped life on board ships, and all too often tyrannical naval officers. When, toward the end of the era their appearance began to be recorded by the camera rather than by the imaginative eye of the artist, they even seem, in their spiked helmets, to have looked rather alike, though doubtless they would have denied it.
More to the point, the role of Marines as the century drew to a close came under attack in both countries. As the long shadow of Trafalgar faded, first the French and then the Germans appeared as potential challengers to the British at sea. Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, writing in America on sea power, was eagerly read in Europe. Despite the battle of the ironclads Merrimack and Monitor and one or two other clashes between steam warships, action between the new navies of steam-driven, steel-built and armored ships with turret guns was very much of an unknown quantity. It seemed unlikely, however, that Marines would play any distinctive part in it. As to discipline, the seaman had by now become a long-service man under much the same terms of enlistment as the Marine. And, because fighting in the latter part of the century had been almost entirely ashore, British and American naval officers, in the tradition of Sir Francis Drake and Vice Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, seized any opportunity to land at the head of naval brigades.
In the Royal Navy under the demonic influence of the great Admiral Sir John Fisher, Marines became naval gunners. Fisher, it is true, preached amphibious operations, even toyed with landing exercises, but it is just as well that he never practiced them in war. For all his reforming genius, he was far too egocentric and intolerant to understand the problems of the soldier, be he land soldier or sea soldier. Marine officers were, he wrote, "an anachronism . . . totally unsuited to do the combatant and executive work of the ships—an encumbrance to the Service and a humiliation to themselves." His remedy was to try to turn them into naval officers, recruiting new entries through the naval colleges.
In the new battleships and battle cruisers which began with HMS Dreadnought, launched in 1906, and HMS Invincible, launched in 1908, the Royal Marine Artillery would man one 12- or 13.5-in, turret and the Royal Marines Light Infantry would man battery guns. However, despite the rising strength of the fleet built to contain the Kaiser's navy, the strength of the Royal Marines fell from just under 20,000 in 1902 to 16,500 in 1913. The failure of Fisher's plan for officer recruitment left them seriously short of trained officers. That did not prevent him or his successor, Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, from proposing that in event of war, the Marines should storm German North Sea islands.
Fisher was a senior admiral and in the years leading up to World War I, First Sea Lord. The attack on the Marine Corps in the United States began in 1894 and continued almost until the outbreak of World War I. Ostensibly at least, it opened at a lower level. Marines, said U. S. Navy Lieutenant William Fullam and his associates in a petition to Congress, should be taken out of ships and transferred to the Army as coast defense artillery. It would have brought an explosion from Fisher, a bitter critic of the British Army, and was strongly opposed by the Marine Corps and its friends. But it was not in ships' detachments and naval gunnery that the Marine Corps would find the distinctive role which, consciously or otherwise, it and its friends were seeking.
Three things were necessary to sea power, Mahan wrote: a battle fleet, a merchant marine, and naval bases. If the Marine could play no distinctive role in the first, then perhaps he might find one in the last. In the British Empire the Royal Navy had worldwide bases and required only that they should be held, but the U. S. Navy would in the event of war have to seize as well as hold such overseas bases as it needed.
So when in 1898 the USS Maine blew up in Havana Harbor, the Marine Corps got its chance. Huntington’s battalion, (named for the Civil War officer who still commanded it), landing from a transport and sup ported by the guns of the fleet, seized and held Guantanamo as an advance base. Thereafter, during the Presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, the involvement of the United States in the Caribbean opened further opportunities to the Marine Corps. From 2,600 in 1896, its strength rose to 6,000 in 1899 and just under 10,000 in 1912. After further exercises and operational employment in Panama and in Cuba, the Advance Base Force was activated in December 1913. The following April, units from it landed against the Mexicans in Vera Cruz in 1915, they were in action again in Haiti, and in 1916 in Santo Domingo. The main weight of the Marine Corps effort had shifted from life at sea to land-based forces deployed by sea.
Before that could get very far, World War I broke out. Naval mobilization brought the strength of the Royal Marines in the Grand Fleet to over 10,000, and almost immediately afterward, that Corps was called upon to find a number of improvised forces for operations on land. The most demanding of these tasks was to provide a Marine brigade to make up with two naval brigades formed from reservists surplus to the Fleet, the Royal Naval division.1 After fighting briefly at Antwerp, Belgium, the division served through the Gallipoli campaign and finally from 1916 to 1918 on the Western Front. "By their conduct in the forefront, of the battle and by the feats of arms they performed, wrote Winston Churchill of the Royal Naval Division, "they raised themselves into that glorious company of the seven or eight most famous divisions of the British Army in the Great War."
But, apart from minor landings in support of the naval attack on the Dardanelles and one Marine battalion employed under the Army in the mismanaged Helles assault, the division was not used as amphibious infantry. Indeed, when in 1917 it was planned to land a division from the Western Front behind the German lines near Ostend, Belgium, it was the 1st Infantry Division that was chosen for the task. The projected "Great Landing," as it was called, was abandoned in October because of lack of progress on the land front. In November, the 1st Division attacked in deep mud and heavy rain in the final phase of the Passchendaele battle, in which the Royal Naval Division under similar conditions had already added to its laurels.2 Next spring a marine battalion from England stormed the mole at Zeebrugge, again in Belgium, to cover the approach of blockships in an attempt to close the canal entrance to submarines.
When, in April 1917, the United States declared war on Germany, the Marine Corps, recruiting under the slogan "First to Fight," was swamped by a rush of high-spirited young Americans eager to do battle against the Germans. But the Army was reluctant to accept Marines in the American Expeditionary Force. It took a Presidential order to get the 5th Marines to France, and General John J. Pershing at first insisted on using them for lines of communication duties. It was not until March 1918 that the 4th Marine Brigade, comprising the 5th and 6th Marines, got to the trenches. But from then on, its rise to fame in the 2nd Infantry Division, U. S. Army, was spectacular, as Belleau Wood, Soissons, St. Mihiel, Blanc Mont, the Argonne, and other battle honors bear witness.
Thus, by the time the armistice was signed in November 1918, the Marines of both countries had shown themselves to be good fighting troops against a first-class enemy. But any claim the Royal Marines might have had to expertise in amphibious assault was, if anything, weaker in 1918 than in 1914, while the U. S. Marine Corps had won fame on battlefields far from the sea.
Under the Washington Treaties of 1922, the fleets of Britain and the United States were carefully equated, but the financial strain of maintaining a great fleet for the United Kingdom, with a population a quarter that of the United States and an economy overtaxed by four years of ruinously costly war, was disproportionate to that for the States. There was, in consequence, little to spare for Marines other than those required for ships' detachments. Nor, to be realistic, was there much of a case for spending money on amphibious forces, when the only fighting in which British forces were engaged was going on the Northwest Frontier of India, hundreds of miles from the sea.
The Marine Corps, in contrast, had during the war become more deeply engaged in the Caribbean. At the end of 1918, while the 5th and 6th Marines and two regiments which had arrived too late to see action on the Western Front awaited their return to the States, five other Marine regiments were engaged in a shooting war in Haiti, Cuba, and Santo Domingo, a sixth was in the States on the Mexican frontier and there were small garrisons in the Virgin Isles and the Azores. Operational employment continued in the Caribbean on a slowly falling scale and later in Nicaragua, until the last Marines were withdrawn in 1933 from Nicaragua and in 1934 from Haiti.
Thus, for most of the interwar years, a large part of the strength of the Marine Corps was employed in formed units ashore under Marine command against guerrilla enemies, a thing which would prove an invaluable moral and military preparation for the next great war that lay ahead. Moreover, the Marine Corps seems to have acquired exclusive rights in the Caribbean, enabling it to develop as a balanced force with its own supporting and logistic units, including air squadrons.
But employment as what amounted to colonial infantry would not by itself provide a distinctive role for Marines, nor, in a nation traditionally critical of colonialism, was it likely to last indefinitely. On the other hand, the primarily defensive Advance Base Force of the early years would not by itself have been adequate preparation for the oceanic offensives of World War II.3 Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., in his masterly Soldiers of the Sea, writes that sentences in the Commandant's Annual Report of 1901 describing Advance Base landing exercises in Massachusetts mark "the germination of the seedlings from which American amphibious doctrine and amphibious victories would later spring."4 A shift of emphasis was still needed from defense to amphibious attack, a shift always difficult to explain in nations condemning war and aggression. Yet it is just those well-meaning, unready nations, which lose territory under threat or on outbreak of war which must regain it if aggression is not to pay off. Luckily for the Marine Corps, in General John A. Lejeune, the Marine who had succeeded to the command of the 2nd Infantry Division in August 1918, it had in the early interwar years a professional head with the vision to see what had to be done and the ability to persuade Presidents and Congress to give him the means, if not to do it, at least to prepare the way.
Lejeune and the able group of officers around him turned the Advance Base Force into the East Coast, Expeditionary Force, and, although as America prepared to enter World War II, Marine expansion would be camouflaged as- defensive, the Marine Corps under Lejeune turned its attention to the question of amphibious attack. A planning section set up by Lejeune watched the Japanese as they fortified mandated islands in the Pacific, the Marine Corps Schools analyzed the British failure at Gallipoli, and Lejeune himself lectured the Naval War College. Fleet landing exercises revealed how much needed to be done, and the first tentative steps were taken to build landing craft. In 1927, the Joint Army and Navy board laid it down that the Marine Corps would not only provide forces for limited naval landing operations, but would also find specially trained forces for major invasions in which the Army provided the bulk of the force.
But in the Western democracies, the hope held sway that war was a thing of the past. American isolationism and the Great Depression dominated international affairs, and the Caribbean commitment those of the Marine Corps. It was not until the 1930s that—in face of the manifest failure of the League of Nations in Manchuria and Abyssinia and the rise of Hitler in Germany and of the war party in Japan—the democracies began slowly and reluctantly to rearm. Then, as the Marine Corps withdrew from the Caribbean and Nicaragua, its amphibious development gained pace. In 1932, a Marine battalion took part in the Oahu Joint, Army-Navy exercises—a dismal affair pointing the need for radical development—and work began on the Tentative Manual for Landing Operations. In 1933, the Marine Corps Schools Advance Base Problem Team gave its first presentation at the Naval War College. Toward the end of the year, the East Coast Expeditionary Force became the Fleet Marine Force. A succession of landing craft designs followed each other, and in 1939 the Higgins boat appeared. That year the Army withdrew from amphibious exercises, General George C. Marshall having decided they were impracticable.5
No American needs to be reminded of the great Pacific campaigns of World War II and of the part played in them by the Navy and Marine Corps. At the time the struggle against Hitler that had begun two years earlier occupied the attention of Europeans more closely. The dominant body of British opinion, which after Gallipoli had dismissed amphibious operations as impossible, now imagined that the amphibious renaissance began in June 1940 and in Britain. And indeed, under the impact of war and the need to retrieve initial defeat, great advances were made in equipment and technique. At the level of Whitehall and Washington, there were fruitful exchanges of ideas and designs, but a U. S. Marine was rare in Britain.
In contrast, as the great invasion of Normandy drew near, the U. S. Army and Air Forces were everywhere. Under the wise direction of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, high-level rows and occasional low-level jealousies notwithstanding, Americans and British worked together regardless of nationality. The invasion itself, massive and short range, was only the prelude to a great continental campaign. Once the landings were over and the beachhead secure, the armies thankfully put aside the amphibious techniques they had laboriously acquired in the past four years. Overlord, the brilliant success, like Gallipoli, the tantalizing failure, was a never-again operation.
In the postwar years, NATO was primarily concerned with the threat of the Red Army looming over central Europe. In facing it, the role of navies would be the ancillary one of keeping the Atlantic open for reinforcements and supplies, should war with nuclear weapons last long enough for that to matter. The demonstration of amphibious potential given by the 1st U. S. Marine Division at Inchon, though brilliant, seemed irrelevant as far as defense of the European continent was concerned.
The United States had, however, become the dominant sea power; the U. S. Navy was in consequence the model for other navies, and its task forces with integrated air and amphibious elements were the paragons of naval power. NATO brought the U. S. Navy back to Europe, now with elements of the Fleet Marine Force. And there was a sense, too, of something amiss that Britain in 1940 should have had to start from the beginning in amphibious technique. When in the mid-1950s the Royal Navy turned its main attention east of Suez, it would do so to deploy carrier task forces, and it was with that area in view that a small, modern amphibious lift was built.
For the Royal Marines, as the battleship faded out, amphibious attack offered the best, indeed almost the only prospect of continuing usefulness. The 3rd Commando Brigade, having escaped postwar disbandment, was indeed engaged in colonial warfare, now in the reverse sense of ensuring orderly devolution of imperial power, but that could not last indefinitely. If the brigade was to survive, it would have to evolve along the lines of the Fleet Marine Force. A start was made East of Suez; then in the mid-1960s as that commitment closed down, the commando brigade and the amphibious lift were declared to NATO and earmarked to SACLANT for the northern and southern flanks.
In the Netherlands the Korps Mariniers, which during the war had trained with the Marine Corps, now attached a company group for exercises with the 3rd Commando Brigade, renewing an association 250 years old. In France Les Fusiliers Matins Commandos trained with the cruiser helicopter-carrier Jeanne d'Arc. In the Italian Navy the San Marco Regiment appeared and in the Army the Laguna Regiment. Greece had formed a commando brigade in the postwar years, and now Turkey raised a marine regiment. The Soviet Navy equipped itself with a numerous amphibious lift and reconstituted the Morskaia Pekhota.6
To pretend that all this has been modeled on the U. S. Marine Corps would be an exaggeration, if only because few if any of the other seaborne forces have the equipment and amphibious lift to follow its example fully. What has happened is that in finding for itself a distinctive modern role, the Marine Corps has pointed the way and supplied the evidence from which others have argued their own case. Armed forces often learn from their enemies, less frequently from their friends, but this time it happened.
But old habits persist. Today, in a new round of defense cuts in Britain, it is the seaborne and airborne forces that are hardest hit. In a situation of nuclear stalemate, wrote Basil Liddell Hart in 1962, "local and limited aggression becomes more likely, and amphibious forces become more necessary, both as a deterrent and a counter to aggression—a counter which can he used without being suicidal, and a deterrent which is therefore credible."7 The United States has withdrawn from Southeast Asia, but the need in NATO for the U. S. Marine Corps as a military presence and, perhaps more important, as an exemplar of seaborne potential, remains and increases in urgency.
General Moulton entered the Royal Marines in 1924, served in HMS Rodney and Revenge, then was a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm from 1930 to 1935. In 1940, he was at Dunkirk as a general staff officer with the Army. The next year he was with headquarters of the new Royal Marines Division and in 1942 took part in the planning and operations of the Madagascar campaign. Later in World War II, General Moulton commanded commando Marines at Normandy and Walcheren, and in 1945 had command of the 4th Commando Brigade. He held a series of posts from the end of the war until his retirement in 1961. His last duty was as Chief of Amphibious Warfare. Since retiring, General Moulton has been Chairman of the Council of the Royal United Service Institute (1967-69) and editor of Brassey’s Annual (1964-73). He has written extensively on military and defense matters, including contributing several essays to the Naval Review.
1 A British infantry brigade is the equivalent of a U. S. regiment, and in 1914 had four battalions. By the time it entered the battle of the Somme the division as a result of its Gallipoli casualties and drafting difficulties had six naval battalions (four of which were commanded by Marines), two Marine and four Army battalions, and had been reorganized as the 63rd (Royal Naval) Division.
2 In the battle of the Somme in 1916, the British Army lost some 400,000 killed, wounded, and missing; in the third battle of Ypres of 1917, almost universally known as Passchendaele, it lost 245,000. It was, however, the latter, much of it fought under appalling conditions of mud and she devastated terrain, that remained in national memory as the culminating horror of the Western Front offensives. American author Leon Wolff gives a memorable description of it in his In Flanders Fields (New York: Longmans Green, 1958).
3 The Advance Base Force of 1913 comprised: 1st or Fixed Defense Regiment—one battery of naval landing guns, one signal company, one engineer company, one harbor defense mine company, and two batteries of 5-in. naval guns; 2nd or Mobile Regiment—one battery of naval landing guns, one machine gun company, and four rifle companies.
4 R. D. Heinl, Soldiers of the Sea (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press 1962), p. 159. I am heavily indebted to this work for historical information on the U. S. Marine Corps.
5 In Britain the Inter-Service Training and Development Centre, a 51'211 committee set up in 1938 to make a start on the study of amphibious warfare, was broken up on the declaration of war in September 1939. It is said that a senior officer at the Admiralty announced, "We do not see any likelihood of Combined Operations in this war, except possibly a landing at Petsamo [then in Finland]."
6 These developments are described more fully in my article "Seaborne and Airborne Mobility in Europe," U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 1974 (Naval Review Issue), pp. 122-143.
7 B. H. Liddell Hart, from his foreward to Heinl's Soldiers of the Sea, P. xii. Although he refers also to the use of airborne forces in this role, Liddell Hart says that while it is desirable to have an airborne force, it is essential to have a Marine force.