Admiral Arleigh A. Burke, one of the Navy’s most accomplished and distinguished leaders, is best known to many for his roles as commander of the Little Beavers of Destroyer Squadron 23 in the Pacific and as Chief of Naval Operations for six years under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.
After his retirement in 1961, he traced his 38-year active-duty career in oral histories published by the U.S. Naval Institute and the Marine Corps History Division. In the latter, he recalled toying as a midshipman with the idea of becoming a Marine, inspired by a meeting with Major General John Lejeune at the Naval Academy. Following commissioning, Ensign Burke served five years on the USS Arizona (BB-39), then received orders to Base Force staff in 1928. He was soon in action with the Marines.
Naval History and Heritage Command
I was a junior lieutenant. And we were going to conduct the first amphibious force landing under Brigadier General Charles Lyman. This was in the Pacific Fleet, what was then called the Battle Fleet.
General Lyman came on board the USS Procyon (AG-11), the flagship of the Base Force, and he had his headquarters in Base Force Flag. He brought a staff of about seven or eight people with him. They were going to conduct a landing on Culebra when we got around into the Atlantic.
The Base Force staff needed a couple of naval officers, so Burke was appointed to the staff as additional duty.
I was serving at the time as flag lieutenant and operations officer. I was named the boat officer. We had all the boats that were issued to the ships—motor launches, whale boats—we used all of them.
We got offshore for the landing. We had cargo nets but didn’t know how to use them to get the Marines off the ship. They didn’t know how to get off either without the gangways. That is how, in desperation, they decided on cargo nets for the Marines to land.
The exercise timing was slow, awful. In those days, when boats were lying off, they’d frequently stop their engines to save gasoline, and they did this when they loaded a boat. They’d go out and wait, and they killed their engines. When they wanted to start their engines, in half an hour or an hour, a lot of them wouldn’t start.
Well, I was desperate. I had repair people, boat repair people from the engine room, trying to start the damned engines. A coxswain came up and said, “Mr. Burke, why don’t you just keep the things going and running around in circles?” That’s my contribution to amphibious warfare! That was the rationale for having these amphibious circles.
The other thing was, we had three-inch field pieces, landing force guns. They were cumbersome, regular light artillery that we got from the Army. We could get those into the boats all right, but when we got up to the beach, there was no way of getting them out except “U-hauling” them. Of course, there was a little surf. We broke up a lot of boats. We lost a lot of landing force guns. The damned things got dumped into too-deep water.
There had to be some way of having a ramp on a boat. Well, the first ramps went up and over. That meant as soon as you got it over, it went like hell. You had to put ties on them to try to hold them back. That’s when they decided to start building ramps in boats.
I don’t know how many Marines took part in that landing force. It couldn’t have been more than a battalion—a very small battalion. That was the most horrible exercise I have ever seen. Everything went wrong. It was natural; we had never done one before. This was after what happened to the British in Gallipoli. Maybe that’s why they had the exercise.