As the Pacific war recedes into history, together with many of us who waged it, the time seems appropriate for an appraisal of the Marine Corps as it now stands. This appraisal, be it understood, is of the Marine Corps now, not of the Corps which spearheaded the trans-Pacific sweep from Guadalcanal to Okinawa; nor of its military intellectuals who succeeded prior to World War II in developing singlehanded the basic techniques of amphibious warfare.
It would be less than a commonplace in preface to observe that the Marine Corps, no less than other components of our Military Establishment, stands at a crossroads. This is not, however, the crossroads at which the extraordinary scientific developments of the time have, almost unhappily, placed all soldiers. The crossroads I envisage is the one which all victorious, successful, and vigorous military organizations encounter after signal victory. We have come so far by time-tried methods; will they continue to serve? Can we adjust ourselves to new tests involving new military situations with which we are no more familiar than those which confronted us at the onset of World War II? In a word, can we retain the vital flexibility of a healthy organism?
To answer these questions we must first take stock of ourselves and of our situation.
The Marine Corps, as it is presently organized, consists of 7,000 officers and 80,000 enlisted men. It is deployed in units and stations which span the globe from China to the British Isles. To accomplish our various roles and missions—which I shall presently discuss—the Corps is divided essentially into tactical units, ground, air and service, for expeditionary duty with the Fleets—the Fleet Marine Force, that is—and into various security and supporting establishments afloat and ashore, which back up the Corps as a whole and carry out its extensive subsidiary responsibilities within the Naval Establishment.
The roles and missions of the Marine Corps, which until passage of the National Security Act of 1947 had been purely matters of tradition or of administrative assignment, are now affirmed in law, a development which, as Commandant, I am happy to have sponsored.
These roles and missions, which bear so directly upon the present and future status of the Marine Corps, which are in fact its present-day charter of existence, can best be stated in the very language which the Congress saw fit to use when enacting them:
The primary mission of the Marine Corps shall be to provide fleet Marine forces1 of combined arms, together with supporting air components, for service with the fleet in the seizure or defense of advanced naval bases and for the conduct of such land operations as may be essential to the prosecution of a naval campaign. It shall be the duty of the Marine Corps to develop, in coordination with the Army and the Air Force, those phases of amphibious operations which pertain to the tactics, technique, and equipment employed by landing forces. In addition to its primary mission, the Marine Corps shall provide detachments and organizations for service on armed vessels of the Navy, shall provide security detachments for the protection of naval property at naval stations and bases, and shall perform such other duties as the President may direct; Provided, that such additional duties shall not detract from or interfere with the performance of the primary mission hereinbefore set forth.2
It is thus apparent that our traditional status as the developmental agency of U. S. amphibious technique (at least insofar as the landing force is concerned) remains unchanged, and that our equally long-standing role of providing Fleet expeditionary forces is new recognized in law. Inasmuch as the only organic legal sanction enjoyed by the Marine Corps previous to 1947 was that found in a now-obsolete statute, the so-called Marine Corps Act of 1798, we may consider ourselves fortunate to have been brought, so to speak, up to date in our present entity.
In that entity the Marine Corps is shaping its post-war establishment for crucial days to come. Broadly speaking, this entails three inter-related types of problems, all of which are under attack:
- Procurement of suitable personnel and individual training.
- Unit training.
- Organization and doctrine.
Procurement of personnel, together with its succeeding corollary, basic individual training, has always received careful attention from Marine Corps Headquarters. Since the very capstone of our structure has always been quality, it follows that maintenance at the input end of high standards and levels in all ranks is of prime importance. In all our recruiting activities, Regular and Reserve, this factor is constantly before us.
Basic individual training and indoctrination, likewise, is a matter of the greatest importance, and I am pleased to report that we are progressively re-establishing, at our Recruit Depots as well as our officers' Basic School at Quantico, the individual peacetime standards which have so distinguished Marines in the past. At this stage in the new Marine's career—be he officer or enlisted man—we attempt to mold him into the disciplined, professional, and loyal individual whom the Corps regards as essential to its proper functioning.
Marine Corps unit-training, as distinct from that of individuals, is also now progressing. Since 1945, one of our two divisions (the 2d Marine Division, FMFLant) has completed full-scale maneuvers in conjunction with Marine air and Fleet units in the Caribbean area; and similar major exercises are projected for all elements of the 1st Marine Division and Pacific Fleet in 1948. In addition to these two annual maneuvers, Marine BLT's (battalion landing teams) have participated in several such special exercises as "Operation CAMID," a demonstration assault landing for midshipmen and cadets of the two Academies. Inasmuch as the regular periodic execution of large-scale amphibious Fleet Marine Force, which attained much of its virtuosity by such means from 1935 on,3 I feel that there is no substitute in the Marine Corps scheme of things for actual doing and testing, and resumption of such exercises, I believe, is one of our best guarantees for the future.
The major questions posed by the future, however, are not those of procurement or training, in both of which fields the Marine Corps can move with the confidence of applicable experience, but in the very rapidly-changing area of organization and doctrine. Perhaps I should reverse the order of those two words, because one shapes organizations to execute doctrines.
Despite its outstanding record as a combat force in the past war, the Marine Corps' far greater contribution to victory was doctrinal: that is, the fact that the basic amphibious doctrines which carried Allied troops over every beachhead of World War II had been largely shaped—often in face of uninterested or doubting military orthodoxy—by U. S. Marines, and mainly between 1922 and 1935.4
As a result of this fact it is evident that the present-day Marine Corps stands in the shadow of its successful creation, the amphibious doctrines with which we finished World War II. The question has sometimes been raised, however: are those doctrines now wholly relevant? Indeed, is not the concept of amphibious warfare itself somewhat dated?
As a general answer to these questions—which I propose to analyze in further detail—I might rejoin that the concept of amphibious war is just as "dated" as the concept of naval warfare, and only so much so; that so long as control of the sea remains the indispensable element of victory, so also amphibious warfare remains an essential element of that formula.
It is loosely remarked—usually by cocktail strategists, I should interpolate—that airborne operations have already rendered obsolete the seaborne amphibious assault. The landings of the future, even the very immediate future, these "experts" predict, will be executed by mass airborne armies.
In no disparagement whatsoever of a vital and significant military technique, however, I believe that such talk actually does injustice to the airborne method, for it implies capabilities of sustained, independent action to the airborne arms which they do not, of course, yet possess.
To illustrate what I am driving at, let us consider the battle of Okinawa. Remember, at the outset, that Okinawa was no major land-mass, that its defenders labored under considerable handicaps in the way of reduced mobility, isolation, and supply, which would exert no adverse effect upon the future operations of any possible enemy entrenched upon a major land-mass, or perhaps a continent.
To reduce the island of Okinawa alone, with its two defending Japanese divisions—surely a small force compared with those which the defenders of a continent might muster at any point of attack—the following major masses of men and materiel were required:
- 277,000 U. S. troops (of whom approximately 132,000 were in combat-units).
- 729,305 measurement-tons of equipment and supplies.
- 37,000 tons of naval ammunition delivered against shore targets in support of the ground troops.
- 7,000 tons of aerial munitions (bombs and rockets, principally) delivered against land targets in support of ground troops.
In other words, almost a million measurement-tons had to be moved physically from the Western hemisphere to Okinawa in order to conclude that single battle.
It can readily be realized, from the foregoing statistics, that the assault and reduction of a defended overseas objective—even the overseas maintenance of any considerable force not at grips with the enemy—can now be achieved in only one way. Obviously this is by seaborne amphibious methods. That important subsidiary or ancillary thrusts may and will be delivered by airborne attack, I do not question. But the main effort in any overseas assault, even in its most streamlined form, must of necessity and of sheer bulk be amphibious.
A further corollary along these lines is this: reversing our thinking, for the moment, to defensive concepts, the United States, now and for many years to come, can only be reduced by seaborne attack. Therefore, as long as we can defend the sea approaches of our continent, we retain strategic safety. In other words, to summarize the matter plainly, our naval establishment (of which the amphibious components are so vital a portion) is now and still will be, far into the future, a first line of defense. In its operations, naturally, you will find prominent the units of the Fleet Marine Force.
It has also been suggested by many persons, because a vast land-mass, Eurasia, is sometimes projected as a possible area of future operations, that the importance of amphibious warfare will be slight—that the day of island war is past.
To me, the facts that the Eurasian landmass is encircled by a coastline approximately eight times that of the United States, and that it is fairly ringed with islands, every one of which might become a potential base of operations, seem to indicate that, should such operations ever be forced upon us, there would then exist a vaster scope for amphibious warfare than ever before in the military history of the United States.
To implement all these concepts of present-day duties and predictable future commitments, the Marine Corps, after considerable study of means available and the trends of future war, is in process of completing its first major postwar reorganization—a series of very basic changes within our Fleet Marine Force tables of organization.
In broad outline these changes, when stripped of the multitudinous details which almost immerse the larger pattern, consist of an abolition of the traditional rifle regiment and the creation in lieu thereof, within the Marine division during operations, of a number of independent BLT's (battalion landing teams), each sell-sustaining and balanced with the combined arms. By establishing a number of identical command-groups within the new division-headquarters, it is possible to hand-tailor the striking force for any operation to exactly that needed, whether it be nine BLT's or four, or two. In addition, by equal parcelling-out of the various supporting arms and services to each BLT, we realize a sort of protective and homogeneous compartmentation throughout our division such that the loss of any single unit will never cost us disproportionate losses in any specialist category. Needless to say, this last consideration has been greatly emphasized in importance by the possibility of atomic defense against an assault.
In the amphibious campaigns of the future, as I visualize them, there will be three major phases. These will consist of:
(1) The dispersion phase, during which, for maximum protection (as well as to prevent disclosure of impending operations), our forces will be widely and uniformly dispersed.
(2) The phase of concentration prior to close combat. During this stage we shall be forced to concentrate and assemble our striking units, collect our supplies and, generally speaking, form for combat.
(3) Concentration in combat. This final phase will see our forces locked in close combat at the objective with immediate opponents, both sides employing more or less conventional weapons—or their ultimate developments—to decide a single prolonged engagement.
Before we discuss these phases in detail, as they apply to the Marine Corps, it should be generally understood that the military problem of such a war is simply to reduce the second stage to its minimum; that is, to be able to shift from extreme dispersion to rapid concentration in the presence of the enemy, thus reducing the vulnerability of assembled but uncommitted forces to long-range attack by weapons which could not with safety or feasibility be employed in close support of friendly troops.
It is primarily to answer this insistent demand that we be able "to march divided and fight concentrated" that we have adopted the new organization within the Marine division. A secondary, and hardly less important reason is the fact that peacetime operations of Marine units—usually, in effect, as "State Department troops," for the support of U. S. foreign policy—call for small, highly compact, and mobile task units capable of rapid and flexible employment.5 In the Marine BLT as now envisaged, we have a balanced force of all arms, remarkably self-sufficient and always organized as a team for embarkation and debarkation as an amphibious unit on minimum notice.
We have been fortunate that modern developments, especially in the fields of communications and firepower, have permitted us to take this radical forward step.
As Admiral Mahan wrote—when radio was hardly a spark in a laboratory, be it remarked—"Communications dominate war." This is trebly the case in amphibious warfare, and it can be said without fear of contradiction that the factor which finally permitted us to proceed with development of the new Fleet Marine Force organization was the effectiveness and ease of modern military and naval communications. Because of this we can disperse our BLT's far beyond the single radius of any conceivable super-weapon and yet retain them concentrated and under full control of a higher commander.
Modern infantry and artillery weapons have of course likewise immeasurably increased the effectiveness of small units. Correspondingly, they have permitted streamlining of Marine formations so that less men can deliver more fire, a factor which has not been overlooked in our new organization.
The subject of firepower, however, is related, especially in amphibious warfare, to mobility, mass, and weight.
In the conventional division of the present, shaped as it must be, for land warfare, we find masses of armor, self-propelled artillery, and transportation undreamed of in amphibious war. Supporting these juggernaut-like divisions we find self-propelled, major-caliber heavy artillery and tanks whose weight runs to many tons. Obviously such material—even, in fact, its ammunition and gasoline—cannot be accepted for units which are to deliver initial amphibious assaults, because of weight, bulk, and difficulty of handling.
The Marine Corps, on the other hand, enjoys commensurate if not possibly greater advantages in its amphibious operations, despite the fact that we cannot readily employ such behemoths of ordnance.
While a Fleet Marine Force landing may necessarily be restricted as to the quantity and size of weapons employed, the landing force enjoys the vast supporting resources of ships' gunfire, the potentialities of which are by no means yet wholly exploited, despite its initial technical development by Marines and its extensive employment in the Pacific War.6 When the student ponders that in a month's battle, that of Iwo Jima, 265,000 rounds (all of 5-inch or larger calibers), or approximately 13,000 tons, of naval gunfire, were delivered against shore targets, he will realize that as a Fleet arm, the Fleet Marine Force possesses unique supporting firepower of extraordinary weight and quantity.
Another great advantage of the amphibious landing force is that it can be sheltered by local air-superiority and be supported by mobile airdromes, the aircraft carriers of the Fleet, from the very moment of landing, without waiting for the development of fields ashore.7
This particular advantage, which accrues to all amphibious assaults, is available in special measure to the Marine Corps because we possess integral close-support aviation squadrons which, based either on carriers or ashore, are specially trained to support their comrades on the beaches, and of course are themselves highly specialized in amphibious matters. As a result, the Marine Corps, unlike the conventional ground army, possesses its own tactical air force, and, what is more, a proven successful technique for its employment without inter-Service protocol and the a-coordinated delay which is necessarily inherent in other methods for rendering close air support. Nothing characterizes the versatile spirit and genius of the Marine Corps more than its air arm, capable of operating from carriers as part of the parent Naval Aviation and yet ready at a moment's notice to serve on shore—airmen par excellence, and yet like every other Marine, soldiers on the beach.
It is precisely because of such factors that we have been able to organize the Fleet Marine Force as it now stands.
To return now to an idea which I touched upon earlier in this article, I feel it important that we think of the Marine Corps now and in the future, not as it fought the war against Japan.
It is too often the failure of successful military forces and philosophies that they tend "to fight the last war." This is an understandable tendency, but one which must nevertheless be curbed at every opportunity.
Our reorganization, I believe, is a progressive step away from such tendencies, but unfettered thinking and psychological approach to the possibilities of future war is even more important.
In the Pacific we fought a rather stylized war, if I may use the phrase. Its characteristics were in large measure shaped by its predominantly amphibious character and by the extraordinary and still unfathomable mentality of our enemy. Inasmuch as approximately 98 per cent of all Marine officers served overseas—the overwhelming majority in the Pacific—most of the present crop of Marine officers are thoroughly—almost too thoroughly—indoctrinated in the methods for waging this stylized war against an enemy who will never again confront them.
For example, the Japanese never mustered effective tank or armored units. As a result we came, with good reason, to dismiss Japanese armor as a negligible factor; this in turn shaped somewhat negatively our anti-tank and armored defensive doctrines. No other first-class potential enemy whom I can envisage will be weak in armor. Quite the contrary, I believe that enemy armor will play a major and most uncomfortable role in countering our attempts to establish the beachheads of the future. This is a field of tactics and doctrine in which Marines must divorce themselves from the thinking of 1945.
Massed, accurate, and flexible enemy artillery is another type of opposition which, fortunately, we did not often encounter (although on both Iwo Jima and Okinawa we detected signs of awakening Japanese progress along these lines). We must never in the future go into battle anticipating a clumsy and uncoordinated enemy artillery but instead, concentrated, accurate, and unceasing fires.
At night in the Pacific war, with few exceptions,8 again because of the known pattern of enemy activity, we tended to halt active operations, dig in, and tie in. This was a wholly suitable formula for the war with Japan, but I doubt that it would retain much validity for the next war. Night operations, therefore, are another field of tactics and doctrine to which we must give attention if we are to cut the hampering ties which bind us to past methods and thinking.
As a means of overcoming this psychological canalization, in our training we must avoid situations and habits, great or small, which tend to repeat the patterns of the past war. As one Marine officer entitled an article recently published on this subject,9 we must "Stop Fighting the Japs."
I could never conclude any article dealing with the Marine Corps without touching upon one more matter, one which in some respects is paramount in the philosophy of our Corps. The Japanese had a phrase to describe this attribute, namely, "spiritual training." By spiritual training the Japanese meant morale, discipline, loyalty, will to win, individual quality, and related characteristics—all compounded and intertwined within the individual and within the unit as a whole.
This something, which the Marine Corps often terms esprit—it is obviously more than "morale" in the commonly-used sense—is crucial to the Corps now, as it was 172 years ago. Among many traditions which we cherish, it is foremost, and, in all the welter of change which now besets our profession, I look upon esprit as one of the few unaltered and unchanging requirements for unconditional victory.
Of course it is a great thing to talk of massed armed forces whose numbers run into the millions: they have their necessary place. But unless mass quality can be attained, these huge forces readily degenerate into little more than herds; and as we learn more of what the future holds in the field of warfare, the concepts of esprit and quality become, in my mind, ever more dominant.
To these two, let me add a third: readiness. By this I do not mean "preparedness" in its general sense, but readiness almost on hourly terms. This has always been an attribute of the Marine Corps, particularly of the Fleet Marine Force, and it is a contribution which, with those other qualities just mentioned, I believe our Corps is uniquely able to render.
So long, then, as Marines can be employed upon those terms, and so long as they meet those standards of quality, I have no fears for the future of the Corps.
A graduate of the University of Virginia, General Vandegrift was commissioned as second lieutenant in the Marine Corps in 1909. His first foreign shore duty included the capture of Coyotepe in Nicaragua, and the engagement and occupation of Vera Cruz, Mexico. After taking the Marine Advance Base Course, he saw action against the Cocos in Haiti, and subsequently was a member of the Haitian Constabulary. Further shore duty and training was followed by two tours of duty in China. He was assistant to the Commandant of the Marine Corps when ordered to command the First Marine Division which spearheaded the capture of Guadalcanal. After commanding the First Marine Amphibious Corps in the landings at Empress Augusta Bay he returned to Washington to become eighteenth Commandant of the Marine Corps.
1 The term Fleet Marine Force, new in law but well established in American Naval lexicon, is presently defined in Navy Department General Order 245, para. 10(a) (4), dated 27 November 1946 as follows:
"A fleet marine force is defined as a balanced force of land, air and service elements of the U. S. Marine Corps which is integral with the United States Pacific and/or Atlantic Fleet. It has the status of a full type-command and is organized, trained and equipped for the seizure or defense of advanced naval bases and for the conduct of limited amphibious or land operations essential to the prosecution of a naval campaign."
2 National Security Act of 1947, section 206(c).
3 Fleet Landing Exercise One (FLEX-1), executed in 1935 by the 1st Marine Brigade, FMF, at Culebra, P. R., was the first modem amphibious maneuver ever to be carried out by U. S. forces. It was succeeded annually by similar exercises alternating between the Pacific and Caribbean areas up to 1941, at which time similar training for organized Army units was likewise initiated under FMF supervision.
4 It was in 1935 that Marine Corps Schools issued its now famous "Tentative Landing Operations Manual" which was adopted verbatim in 1938 as FTF-167, "Landing Operations Doctrine, U. S. Navy," and was subsequently, in 1941, likewise copied by the U. S. Army's initial amphibious publication FM 31-5.
5 For example, the orders to occupy Iceland in 1941 were issued on 16 June 1941. Within one week the First Marine Brigade (Provisional), a task-unit specially created for this critical mission, had been organized from Fleet Marine Force elements, was embarked and en route to the target. The recent dispatch of Fleet Marine Force detachments to the Mediterranean perfectly exemplifies this role as well.
6 Approximately 129,000 tons of naval ammunition were fired throughout the Pacific war against shore targets in support of Fleet Marine Force operations.
7 Like naval gunfire support, the modern technique of close air support was to a great extent pioneered by the Marine Corps, and it is because of this technique that the landing force can enjoy such effective and powerful air support from its mobile airdromes.
8 One notable night operation conducted by Marines was the pre-dawn attack delivered by the 9th and 21st Marines of the 3d Marine Division to seize Hills 331 and 362 on Iwo Jima.
9 Marine Corps Gazette, August 1946, by Capt. Leo B. Shinn, U.S.M.C.