Kentucky Marine: Major General Logan Feland and the Making of the Modern USMC
David J. Bettez. University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 2014. 367 pp. Biblio. Index. Notes. $26.
Reviewed by Dick Camp
In Kentucky Marine David Bettez has authored an exceedingly detailed and fascinating account of Major General Logan Feland, one of the Marine Corps’ great leaders during America’s expansion as a global power in the early 20th century. Bettez describes Feland as a transitional figure who embraced change and “played a significant role in the Advanced Base Force, a forerunner of the Fleet Marine Force and subsequent amphibious warfare operations,” the basis for the Navy/Marine Corps island-hopping campaign in World War II.
Bettez has expertly brought together an “incredible number of obscure sources to bring Feland to life,” as noted by J. Michael Miller, Marine Corps History Division. Feland, as described by the author, was a “Marine’s Marine: tattooed, much decorated for bravery and leadership in World War I, a drinker, a smoker, and occasionally a cusser,” but he was also an intelligent, polished officer, who was comfortable in high-society drawing rooms. He was ambitious and, as documented by Bettez, possessed a single-minded determination to become Marine Corps commandant.
Kentucky Marine traces Feland’s military career from militia service in the Spanish-American War to his final retirement three decades later as a major general of Marines. Bettez describes Feland’s trials during that 30-year period in a literary style that the reader will find pleasantly refreshing. It is a readable, well-documented book about a little-known era in Marine Corps history. The book addresses three major themes that played a significant role in Feland’s long career: the historical context of the time, legendary Marine Corps personalities, and the internal politics of the Corps’ senior leadership.
In the early 20th century the Marine Corps acted as America’s “policeman” in the Caribbean. Bettez thoroughly documents the trials, tribulations, and accomplishments of Feland’s expeditionary duty in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Panama. The result is a fascinating and rare look at the Marine Corps before and after World War I. The war marked a turning point for Feland. He became a charter member of the “Belleau Wood gang”—decorated veterans of the famous battle that shaped the modern Marine Corps, including Robert Dunlap, Harry Lee, Fritz Wise, “Buck” Neville, “Tommy” Holcomb, and Army General James Harbord, a friend and valuable supporter. The battle, according to Bettez, solidified Feland’s reputation as a genuine war hero destined for higher office.
The book abounds with famous Marines—Smedley Butler, two-time recipient of the Medal of Honor; John A. Lejeune, long-serving commandant; and Earl Ellis, farsighted thinker who developed the island-hopping strategy in the Pacific—which Bettez uses to highlight relationships and introduce friction among a diminished group of officers as they climbed the promotion ladder.
The Marine Corps’ promotion system rewards good performance and punishes those who transgress. It is a system designed to promote individuals who by their actions deserve to lead the Corps into the future. There is also a “good old boy” network outside the system that “selects” individuals for higher rank. The book brings that system to light with telling detail. Personality clashes, ego, innuendo, and ambition make Kentucky Marine an extremely interesting read.
Few authors can sum up such a wide spectrum of research in such a facile manner, and the result is a work guaranteed to enlighten, entertain, and educate—it is an excellent study of the early Marine Corps as experienced by one of its unsung heroes.
The Admiral and the Ambassador: One Man’s Obsessive Search for the Body of John Paul Jones
Scott Martelle. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2014. 288 pp. Illus. $26.95.
Reviewed by Lori Lyn Bogle
Journalist Scott Martelle’s latest monograph, The Admiral and the Ambassador, is a work of love. It is also a complex undertaking. Martelle, the author of Detroit: A Biography and The Fear Within, began his investigation into the 1905 discovery of the long-lost grave of John Paul Jones in an abandoned Parisian cemetery and the elaborate reinterment ceremony in Annapolis, Maryland, after reading a 2006 article that questioned whether or not the corpse buried in the Naval Academy Crypt was actually Jones’. Martelle sees little reason to doubt the body’s authenticity. He is captivated, however, by the life and times of Ambassador Horace Porter, the man who eventually found the Revolutionary War hero’s casket at the turn of the century.
The author begs the reader’s indulgence in the introduction, explaining that he will take an unconventional approach by narrating the discovery and reburial of John Paul Jones chronologically while taking a number of major detours into other relevant materials. Detours include not only large segments of biographical material on Jones and Porter interspersed here and there but also considerable materials on geopolitical and cultural aspects of the era.
While the biographical interludes are a bit jarring, the author claims that taken together the lives and actions of the two men “were inextricably linked [and through their lives] . . . we can see on a human scale the evolution of a nation from its birth in revolt against the British through the patriotic fervor and burgeoning militarism and imperialism” of the 20th century. Martelle does tell a fast-paced and engaging story about the discovery of Jones’ burial site. His biographical materials on Jones and his commentary on a variety of late 19th-century topics, however, lack historical weight and interrupt the flow of his well-written narrative.
The book certainly has much to offer, but Martelle’s decision not to do primary research on Jones’ life plus his scant footnoting throughout are serious flaws. On the positive side, Martelle did considerable archival work on Porter. In addition, he incorporates a French perspective into his discussion of the search and recovery of Jones’ body, claiming that the positive Franco-American feelings that resulted helped Americans not only to forgive the French for supporting their enemy in the recent Spanish-American War but also provided France some positive PR during the divisive Dreyfus Affair. Materials from the privately held Elsie Porter diary are an especially welcomed addition to the narrative. Missing from the bibliography, however, are essential works on John Paul Jones. The most glaring omission is James Bradford’s The Reincarnation of John Paul Jones: The Navy Discovers Its Professional Roots (Naval Historical Foundation, 1986) on the discovery and recovery of Jones body in great detail. In addition, the 2010 medical analysis on Jones’ death in the American Journal of Nephrology could have enriched the story.
The fact that the author omits material about the Navy’s low opinion of Jones in the early 19th century is regrettable. Few besides Jones himself envisioned him as the “Father of the Navy”; instead he was believed to be a poor leader and unpatriotic for serving abroad after the war. In addition, President Theodore Roosevelt’s role in the recovery of Jones’ body gets less attention than it deserves. Roosevelt, who had dismissed Jones’ significance in his earlier historical writings, had played an equal role to Porter in elevating the importance of the Revolutionary hero in naval publicity. While its biographical materials on Jones are problematic, Martelle’s narrative on the discovery process is informative as is his discussion of Porter’s life.
Ship of Death: A Voyage that Changed the Atlantic World
Billy G. Smith. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2013. 256 pp. Maps. Illus. Index. Notes. Glossary. $35.
Reviewed by Andrew C. A. Jampoler
Professor Smith, a historian at Montana State University, has written a fascinating book. Two books, really, linked smoothly together by the Hankey, an eight-year-old ship-rigged merchant vessel with an incompetent master. He, Captain John Cox, would become one of the very few survivors of a minor, misbegotten adventure that Smith and his publisher argue “profoundly changed the course of world history.”
Smith’s first 150 pages describe the catastrophic failure in 1792−93 of 275 British abolitionists to establish an interracial utopian colony on Bolama, the pestilential but otherwise uninhabited easternmost island in the Bijagos Archipelago at the mouth of West Africa’s Rio Grande de Buba (draining present-day Guinea-Bissau). The party—including paid subscribers, indentured laborers, and personal servants spanning three generations, among them 58 women and a small number of children—left in the Hankey and two other ships from England for Africa 11 April 1792 with high hopes but also in near-perfect ignorance of where their destination was and how to subsist and survive when they arrived at an island they knew only by name. They also lacked even the basic skills and tools necessary to build shelters.
Near the end of May 1792 the 149 passengers in the Calypso, at 290 tons the largest of the expedition’s three vessels, arrived off Bolama, having missed a rendezvous at Tenerife and found their way alone to the destination “by sheer luck.” A few days later these first would-be settlers were attacked by Canabac warriors from a neighboring island, a surprise assault that appeared to leave behind horrifying evidence that those killed had been eaten. The raid prompted the Calypso to weigh anchor hastily and sail off, so swiftly that she abandoned seven captives held by the natives. The following month, after an accidental meeting with the other vessels, the Calypso resumed her flight back to England via Sierra Leone, carrying more than half of the frightened Britons home.
The Hankey and a tiny cutter, the Beggar’s Benison, continued bravely on to Bolama with the remaining settlers and a small menagerie of barnyard animals. The last six settlers abandoned the place in November 1793. These few left behind some graves and little else beyond an unfinished blockhouse, some cleared fields, and the vision of a thriving European settlement in Africa based on hired rather than enslaved labor.
Smith’s last 100 pages are about the transatlantic flight in the Hankey of the second group of defectors from Bolama, who left behind in the shrinking colony only a scant handful of settlers under the autocratic leadership of Philip Beaver, a beached Royal Navy lieutenant. (Beaver’s 500-page African Memoranda, published in 1805, is one of Smith’s most important sources.) Together with her exhausted crew and passengers, the Hankey at sea was also home to swarms of Aëdes aegypti mosquitoes, the vector for an especially virulent local form of yellow fever that infected many on board.
Touching at a half dozen Atlantic and Caribbean ports during the next ten months on her long voyage to London (including, most significantly, Cap Français, in Sainte-Domingue—present-day Cap Haïtien—and the then-American capital, Philadelphia), the Hankey triggered a pandemic that infected citizens, soldiers, and sailors with yellow fever. The disease, Smith writes, tipped the military balance in Hispaniola toward slaves in revolution against the British and French, eventually leading Napoleon to sell Louisiana to the Americans. It also literally decimated the panicky population of Philadelphia, killing some 5,000, forcing over three times that number to flee the city, and strengthening the case for relocating the capital.
That the Hankey had shed the fatal disease as she sailed home was suspected in the 18th and 19th centuries, but no one then drew any larger implications from the ship’s cruise. Smith has. Readers will have to judge for themselves if the Hankey can carry the heavy freight of historical consequence that Smith has loaded her with, but he’s done a handsome piece of archival research, and the story he tells is a captivating one.
With the Help of God and a Few Marines: The Battles of Chateau Thierry and Belleau Wood
Albertus W. Catlin. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, & Company, 1919. Reissued by Westholme Publishing, 2013. 306 pp.
Reviewed by Colonel Joseph H. Alexander, USMC (Retired)
In April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against imperial Germany, ending three years of American neutrality in the European slaughter fields. As the nation mobilized, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels and Assistant Secretary Franklin Roosevelt managed to embark a regiment of Marines among the initial convoy of Army regulars sailing for France, later reinforced by a second infantry regiment and a machine-gun battalion. The consolidated force became a 9,000-man brigade, to that date the largest contingent of Marines ever sent to war.
Although dwarfed by the two million soldiers in the American Expeditionary Forces, the Marines sought to prove they could fight alongside U.S. Army and French forces. Ably led by veteran field-grade officers, such as Colonel Albertus W. Catlin, and an exceptional core of senior noncommissioned officers, the Marines steadily transformed themselves from seagoing light infantry to frontline shock troops capable of close combat against the Germans, beginning with the three-week battle for Belleau Wood in June 1918.
Colonel Catlin commanded the 6th Marine Regiment from its 1917 creation in Quantico until the first day of the Marine assault against German-infested Belleau Wood. He was 49 years old, an 1890 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, and a veteran of 25 years of expeditionary service. In 1914 he became one of the first Marine officers to receive the Medal of Honor, awarded for his valor in commanding a regiment of fleet Marines in the chaotic landing and streetfighting in Veracruz, Mexico. Popular with his men and respected by his former classmates at the Army War College, Catlin seemed well qualified to lead his regiment against any German forces lurking in the shadows of Belleau Wood.
Ironically, Catlin never reached the woods. A German rifleman shot him in the chest shortly after he launched his Marines in their first assault. Poison gas shells exploded overhead as his aides struggled to strap on his gas mask. Catlin recalled, “It was hard enough for a man to breathe with a lung full of blood without having one of those smothering masks clapped over his face.” He survived an overnight ambulance ride to Paris and was soon promoted to brigadier general, but his war was over.
Catlin wrote his wartime memoirs in collaboration with novelist Walter A. Dyer. He intended to describe only the episodes he had personally experienced, but Dyer convinced him to include secondhand reports of the Marine Brigade’s subsequent battles at Soissons, St. Mihiel, Blanc Mont, and the Meuse/Argonne. Catlin worried that the mid-book shift from eyewitness testimony to rear-echelon cheerleader might prove awkward.
Originally published in 1919, With the Help of God and a Few Marines became the first postwar book to publicize the Marine Brigade’s combat performance, beating Captain John Thomason’s acclaimed Fix Bayonets! (C. Scribner’s Sons, 1926) into print by several years. The combination of Dyer’s narrative skill and Catlin’s combat authenticity attracted readers hungry for uncensored battle reports. The book also benefited by its release in the wake of a best-selling memoir by Chicago Tribune war correspondent Floyd Gibbons, And They Thought We Wouldn’t Fight (George H. Doran Company, 1918). Renowned for his flamboyant battlefield dispatches, Gibbons devoted two chapters extolling the performance of the Marine Brigade at Belleau Wood. By coincidence, Gibbons and Catlin had both been grievously wounded at the same hour and within a few hundred yards of each other. A year later their published memoirs briefly supplemented each other.
Catlin’s book was too fragmented to retain popular appeal. The authenticity of his firsthand accounts in the opening chapters could not offset the dry and disjointed “postscript” chapters of official communiqués, newspaper excerpts, sea stories, and unbridled personal letters. His upbeat view of the privations of war also came into question. Subsequent postwar books by enlisted Marine survivors like Thomas Boyd, Martin Gulberg, Carl Brannen, Elton Mackin, and Louis Linn unveiled a darker, more haunting picture of exhaustion, fear, sickness, and endless slaughter.
Notwithstanding its initial rise and decline, With the Help of God and a Few Marines can still resonate with veterans and historians today. Catlin’s professional, preassault observations of Belleau Wood remain illuminating—for example, the objective’s foreboding appearance (“that frowning wood . . . filled with threat and menace”); the dangerously exposed wheatfields surrounding the woods like a castle moat; and the brigade’s fatally inadequate intelligence reports and “hit-or-miss” preattack bombardment.
Albertus Catlin’s legacy in the pantheon of history is assured on his own hard-earned merits, not his book’s. It was his misfortune to be invalided on the first day of the closing five-month Allied counteroffensive. Had he somehow survived that entire campaign his postwar memoir might very well have proven immemorial.