Why Marines of the Gilded Age?

 1APR21 Blog Post


Gilded Age Marines – Why am I doing this?


If you pick up a book on Marine Corps history, you’ll probably find a few paragraphs on the landing and battle at Guantanamo, Cuba, in June of 1898, during the Spanish American war.


If you pick up a book on Naval history of the era between 1897 and 1917, you may see a note that a forward base was established at Guantanamo before the Battle of Santiago, with or without a mention of a landing and battle fought by Marines.  


If you pick up a book on Army history of the era, or a more popular history of the war, you may not see any mention at all of Guantanamo, or the Marine action during the war.  


Yet, conventional wisdom regards the taking of Guantanamo as a pivotal point in the development of the USMC’s amphibious mission.  Marines embarked aboard ship, landed on a foreign shore, fought, and defeated an enemy holding that terrain. This is what Marines do, no?


Conventional wisdom also regards the ten-fold growth in the Marine Corps over the two ensuing decades as natural, organic process, as the US became a colonial power and prepared for World War I.  In 1897 fewer than 2600 men wore the uniform of a United States Marine ; in 1917 Congress authorized the Corps 1200 officers and 30,000 enlisted   Now that number wasn’t realized, the war ended before that many could be enlisted and trained, but evidently a lot of military leaders and elected officials realized the worth of a dedicated Marine Corps.  


But the growth wasn’t necessarily natural, nor preordained.  Forces within the services and Washington, DC,  were often times at odds over the path the Marine Corps would take between 1897 and 1917.  And the Marine Corps of 1917 looked little like the Corps of 1897.  


So what happened?  


Over time, the Marines finally adopted the role that the Navy had determined for it a decade before the growth began.  The history of these three decades, the last of the 19th century and the first two of the 20th, are fraught in regards to the continued relevance and survival of the Corps.  Periodically Navy leaders, some politicians and some Army leaders, called for the dissolution of the Corps. Progressive and conservative leaders within the Corps butted heads with each other on the mission, composition of the force, and how best to respond to the political threat to their survival.  


Despite consistent ambivalence towards the Corps, many Naval leaders understood the need for a force that could work with the fleet to secure advanced bases, where the Navy could refuel and refit, was intrinsic to the mission of the New Navy, but it wasn’t always evident that force was the United States Marine Corps.  Understanding the barriers the Marine Corps overcame, both external and self-imposed, in cementing their role going forward helps to explain the transformation made in these two decades.  


The purpose of this blog is to examine the conditions that made the Marine Corps necessary to the Navy, and the events that proved that need out.  We’ll examine the politics of the development of the Marine Corps, running in parallel to those affecting the Navy.  Available reports from the period, as well as biographies and narrative histories of Navy and Marine leaders will be broad in nature.  In many ways the history of the Marine Corps of the era is a sub segment of the history of the Navy.  


And, because the era is largely difficult to relate to, we’ll touch on topics easier to relate to.  We’ll look at the equipment, uniforms, duties, weapons, duty stations, tactics and staff of the Marine Corps, and how it became increasingly sophisticated and muscular as it adapted to newer missions. These details are essential to developing much of the context surrounding the actions, and provide color to the sepia tones of the era.  


Feedback will be appreciated.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ENTERING THE GILDED AGE: U.S. NAVY AND MARINES 1867 - 1876

Image
The decade following the Civil War witnessed a rudderless Navy.    Bereft of appropriations, subject to the vagaries of partisan politics, lacking in public support, and itself myopic regarding technological advancement, the service suffered atrophy both in practice, and in innovations lost.    But amidst this drift and atrophy, a kernel of resilience and innovation grew.      The Marine Corps suffered no less than the Navy did.    A much smaller service, with a simple mission to support the Navy, Marine leadership lacked in the imagination it had exercised openly only a decade earlier. Both in its Civil War leadership, and in the leadership of the following decade, the service failed to impress individuals in the Navy Department and in the Congress.    The failure to make itself essential to the Union, and the Navy, meant the Marine Corps periodically had to fight for its very existence.   In this essay we’ll examine the decli...
Read more

The Amphibious Assault on Fort George – May 27, 1813

Image
The Amphibious Assault on Fort George – May 27, 1813 (Niagara Historical Society and Museum) An amphibious assault requires the rapid buildup of combat power ashore, from an initial zero capability to full coordinated striking power as the attack progresses toward AF objectives. In the amphibious assault, combat power is progressively phased ashore. The assault is the most difficult type of amphibious operation and one of the most difficult of all military operations due to its complexity. - JOINT PUBLICATION 3-02, AMPHIBIOUS OPERATIONS, 18 JULY 2014   Because the Niagara River was an essential conduit for logistics and communications for both Britain and the fledgling United States, military actions on the Niagara Frontier dominated events of the War of 1812. Control of the Niagara River allowed for both the growth of the fledgling United States, and the continued presence of Great Britain in North America. The Niagara was the gateway from Lake Ontario and Lower Canada to Lake Eri...
Read more

2nd Lt. John P. Bobo, USMC - Medal of Honor Award for action on 30 March, 1967

Image
Medal of Honor citations include an account of a period of a battle, whether over the span of weeks, or in a single action.  What the citation doesn’t tell us is who the recipient was prior to battle, where they came from, and how they and their unit found themselves to be in that location in that specific moment.  John Bobo’s citation is an example of this.  I’d like to flesh out who he was, and the circumstances that led to his award.     I Corps was the northern-most military district in South Vietnam.  Third Marine Amphibious Force (III MAF) was responsible for Marine operations in the area, just south of the DMZ that had separated North from South Vietnam since July of 1954.  North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Viet Cong (VC) units opposed to the Republic of Vietnam in the south crossed the DMZ periodically to attack U.S. and Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) outposts and trucking on Highway 9, which ran from the coa...
Read more