Review: Empire Marine - General Littleton W.T. Waller and the Growth of American Imperialism, 1856-1926 by Vernon L. Williams
Review:
EMPIRE MARINE – General Littleton W.T. Waller and the Growth of American Imperialism, 1856-1926
Vernon L. Williams. Fort Worth, Texas: TCU Press, 2024.
Maps. Photos. Charts. Chronology. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 270 pages.
Outside the annals of Marine Corps history, Littleton Waller Tazewell Waller doesn’t garner much attention. Icons, such as John Lejeune, Smedley Butler, and Dan Daly, receive the lion’s share of the attention for doctrinal innovation, leadership, and heroism. Waller is relegated to the shadows, despite nearly forty years of service during the formative years of the 20th century Marine Corps. Vernon Williams’ biography of Waller, EMPIRE MARINE, may help to correct this. Williams lays out the events of Waller’s life in standard fashion, using personal and Marine Corps correspondence and photos, maps, charts, official accounts, and courts martial testimony.
Waller was born in 1856 to a Virginia family descended from governors and representatives. His upper-class, Southern, upbringing, interrupted by the war which affected his family’s fortune, reflected the mores and attitudes of the antebellum South. Unable to afford higher education, and rejected by the Army for his height, and after a stint in the Norfolk Light Artillery Blues, Waller earned his Marine commission through family political ties in June of 1880. After a year training in DC, and in Norfolk under Civil War veteran Captain Henry Clay Cochrane, USMC, Waller was assigned to the Marine detachment aboard USS LANCASTER, under Cochrane.
LANCASTER’S Mediterranean cruise of 1881 is noted in the annals of Marine Corps history for the landing at Alexandria in the summer of 1882, securing the U.S. consulate there amidst nationalist riots in the Anglo-French controlled city. Marines were only ashore for a week, but the action secured Waller’s reputation as a man of action. Aboard LANCASTER, and then USS POWHATAN, the Marines visited numerous European ports, including Lisbon, where Waller met Clara Wynne, the daughter of an American expat.
(Waller biography here, commission to Spanish War, Boxer Rebellion and Philippines, EO 969 through end of service. His position as a relic of the past, an outsider of the Naval Academy cohort.)
Following his first tour of sea-duty, and a wedding in New York city, Waller set up his new wife in Norfolk with his family and took a post at the Marine Barracks at the Navy Yard there. In 1887 he returned to sea, serving aboard USS IROQUOIS on the west coast; after shaping the Marine detachment in the spirit of his mentor Cochrane, Waller returned to the east aboard USS PENSACOLA, which was bound for a period in the navy yard at Norfolk. Remaining on sea-duty aboard USS KEARSARGE and TALLAPOOSA, Waller and his ship-mates cruised the east coast of South America, and were on hand for the July 1889 revolution in Buenos Aires, where they landed to protect American interests ashore, echoing Waller’s experience at Alexandria.
Following his sea-duty, Waller assumed a post at the Marine barracks at Norfolk While there he managed to study law, and was admitted to the Virginia Bar in November of 1895. Serving as a member of the Judge Advocate General department, or ‘JAG’, Waller took up the prosecution of Pay Clerk David B. Sayre. After the court martial, and several rounds of appeals in federal courts, the novice, but self-assured Waller argued the case of the United States before the United States Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court accepted Waller’s arguments in Johnson v. Sayre, but Waller wouldn’t make the law his livelihood, but for periodic assignments within the Marine Corps to various courts martial in ensuing years. Later in 1895 he served aboard his first ship, LANCASTER, with the Atlantic Fleet. After a short tour there, the Marine Corps assigned him to USS NEWARK, promoted him to Captain (after 17 years as a lieutenant) then transferred him to the pride of the fleet, BB-1 USS INDIANA, just then brought into service.[1]
As war with Spain loomed, INDIANA cruised the east coast, fixing deficiencies delivered with her from the yard. Once war was declared, INDIANA cut her teeth shelling Spanish positions in Puerto Rico and Cuba, and escorted General Shafter’s V Army Corps convoy from Tampa to Santiago de Cuba. INDIANA played a vital role in the destruction of his Cevera’s Armada as it attempted to break out from Santiago, where Waller received recognition for heroism under fire from the INDIANA’s captain. However, in the years just following the Spanish War, notoriety would join fame in the burgeoning reputation of Littleton Waller.
In 1898 and 1899, as the Navy secured overseas bases in the Pacific in Hawai’i, Guam, and the Philippines, it required Marines to provide security for her bases. As a result, the Corps grew from 76 officers and 2600 men in 1896, to 201 officers, and 6062 Marines in 1899.[2] At the end of 1899, the newly promoted Major Waller formed a battalion of Marines at League Island, Philadelphia, for service at the former Spanish colony of Guam. As Waller was crossing the Pacific with his unit, the naval governor of Guam put a delay on that plan, as Guam didn’t have the resources to support another several hundred Marines. Events in Pekin, where Chinese nationalists, the Boxers, were attacking European and American interests, forced the U.S. to send the only troops forward-deployed and available, those in the Philippines and the Asiatic Squadron, in response.
In May of 1900 Marines and Bluejackets from OREGON and NEWARK under the command of Captain John Twiggs Myers, USMC, landed at Taku and made their way to Pekin, where they joined soldiers and sailors of six other nations in defending the international legation from the Boxers. In the Philippines Waller was selected to assemble a relief force that would march on Tientsin and Pekin to relieve the American legation.
Williams most ably recounts the march from the sea to Pekin, the intense fighting experienced along the way, the difficult conditions posed by the Chinese summer, and the challenges working within an international coalition in a foreign country posed for Waller and his Marines. Williams’ excellent use of maps and photographs brings an immediacy to the tale of the relief column. He also coveys the novelty of how forward based Marines could be used in conjunction with, and under the command of, U.S. Army forces overseas.
Waller’s experience as a Marine officer under Army command fatefully continued when the relief force returned to the Philippines from the successful relief of Pekin. If it was in China where Waller gained fame, it was on the Filipino archipelago of Samar where he earned his notoriety. This notoriety was well deserved, both for a ruthless pacification campaign, and an ill-advised, disastrously led march across the width of the island of Samar.
Well chronicled, but oft overlooked, the initial U.S. occupation of the Philippines was rife with atrocities and violations of human rights. The “benevolent” administration of these island colonies was punctuated with toe-to-toe fights between American soldiers, sailors, and Marines and the Filipino rebels, taking an uncountable toll on the civilian population. Not the first pacification or counter insurgency fight fought by the U.S., the battle for the Philippines became a prototype for 20th century counterinsurgencies. Extrajudicial punishment, violation of human rights, and the use of reconcentration of the population made it difficult for Filipinos to differentiate between their former Spanish oppressors, and their then-current American ones. Williams ably covers the background and lays the groundwork for the Marines’ fight for the island of Samar, led by Major Littleton Waller.
The Marines’ fight for Samar started in retribution for an ambush of soldiers of the Army’s 9th Regiment, attacked in bivouac on a Sunday morning—Filipino rebels killed fifty-four soldiers in their cots and at breakfast. Admiral Fred Rodgers, commanding all naval forces in the islands, transferred a battalion of Marines to the command of BGen Jacob H. Smith, USA, commanding the brigade tasked with suppressing the insurgency on Samar.
Williams takes the time and care to detail the conversations between Waller and Smith, adding nuance to statements that would eventually wind up in court testimony. The defense afforded Waller in the documentation of these conversations do not in any way absolve Waller of the actions he took on Samar in the fall and winter of 1901. Waller’s command savaged the local population in the aim of flushing out and destroying Filipino rebels. Using contemporary reports, and excellent maps, Williams ably depicts both the high point of Waller’s campaign—the Battle for Sohoton Cliffs, and the depths—his disastrous, ill-advised, vanity project, the ‘March Across Samar’.
Sohoton Cliffs was a successful riverine operation against Filipino encampments atop 200-foot limestone cliffs, against seemingly insurmountable odds. The climb and ensuing fight earned Hiram Iddings Bears and David Porter each the Medal of Honor. Conversely, Waller’s March across Samar was an abject failure; ostensibly an effort to find a route for the telegraph across the island, and to map an apocryphal trail from east to west, Waller had been advised not to take his Marines into the deepest jungle of Samar. During the march up rivers and through the densest jungle, Waller resorted to dividing his command, which resulted in TEN Marines being left to die along the trail.
But it was events in the immediate wake of Waller’s March that led to his court martial; Waller, debilitated by weeks in the jungle, in a fit of fever, ordered the execution of eleven Filipinos in his party suspected of being rebels. His eventual exoneration at trial rested on the parsing of his civil authority as a Marine officer serving under the U.S. Army The resulting conviction of his boss, BGen Jacob Smith, did little to dispel the notoriety Waller garnered in his ‘March’.
Once cleared of charges, an enfeebled Waller recovered on stateside recruiting duty, from where he was dispatched to participate in, and lead, the major Marine Corps deployments of that decade; the occupation of the Panama Canal Zone in 1903, securing Cuba for the Army of Cuban Pacification in 1906. He also provided testimony before Congress over the assignment of Marine Security Detachments aboard the ships of the Navy 1909. Between these skirmishes, Waller continued in assignments to barracks in Navy Yards, drilling Marines who increasingly found themselves assigned to the role of colonial policeman.
In 1910, Colonel Waller was one of a small number of Marines under consideration to fill the soon-to-be vacant post of Major General Commandant of the Marine Corps. Williams paints the ugly tableau of promotion at the highest level of the service, which pitted Waller against George P. Biddle, a competent, if uninspiring staff officer from Headquarters. Republican Pennsylvania politicians, Representative Thomas Butler and Senator Boies Penrose, both flexed their influence on the decision President Taft made, rejecting Waller.
The commandancy opened again in 1914, and Waller was this time backed by Democratic Virginia politicians for the post. However, political machinations involving Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels and President Woodrow Wilson led to Waller’s second rejection. Wilson was looking to turn the page on the imperial infamy of the U.S. in the Philippines; memory of Waller’s actions on Samar and court martial remained.
Through all this exposition, Williams paints Waller as the old bush-fighter who alienated the political crowd in the Navy Department and Executive Branch, and explains the expediency behind the selection of both William P. Biddle, and George Barnett for the post of Major General Commandant instead. Despite being cleared of formal charges in the wake of Samar, the brutality, murders, and dereliction of his service continued to taint Waller’s career and most likely his long-term legacy.
While engaged in the politicking for the commandancy, Waller continued in his service at the Norfolk barracks, and in deployments to Cuba, before his transfer to Mare Island on the west coast. Once fighting kicked off in Veracruz, Waller was ordered to his next duty station, League Island, at Philadelphia. Upon arrival on the east coast Waller sailed aboard the newly commissioned USS NEW YORK for the Gulf of Mexico. Too late for the fighting there, Waller replaced Lejeune commanding Marines ashore and remained in command until the fall of 1914
Williams provides an excellent account of the disorder growing in Haiti at the same time. In July of 1915 the Second Regiment of his First Brigade of Marines stationed at League Island, under Major Eli K. Cole, was ordered to Haiti to quell the disturbances that threatened ‘American Interests’ ashore. As Cole landed at Port-au-Prince, the Navy Department asked for more Marines, resulting in the mobilization of Waller and the remainder of his Brigade. This crisis would keep Marines in Haiti for another two decades.
As Waller landed, and established a military government in Haiti in 1915, he engaged in an acrimonious political competition with the Navy commander of the region, and in disparaging the Haitian population. Knowing this would most likely be his last deployment before retirement, and with no chance of attaining the commandancy, Waller reinforced his image of being contrary and mercurial in disparaging subordinates, and peers, verbally and in correspondence. As Waller sought to consolidate the Marines’ colonial rule over the people of Haiti, Williams posits that Waller’s animosity towards the Navy had its roots in his relationships with contemporary Marine officers who used their status as Naval Academy graduates to good effect as they climbed the ladder of rank within the Corps.
In 1916 Waller reported to Congress on the occupation of Haiti and lobbied for a Brigadier General’s star. Waller spent the remainder of his career stateside, in Philadelphia, as Williams states ‘pushing paper’. Retiring in 1920, Waller did report to Congress once again, when Marines were accused of extrajudicial execution of Haitians well after his tour on the island concluded. Waller spent his retirement working on his farm and conducting business in Virginia and Pennsylvania. He passed away in 1926 after suffering a series of strokes and developing pneumonia. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full Marine Corps honors.
Williams’ approach is not unlike that taken by biographers of Waller’s contemporaries; every available mote of character and emotion is drawn-out and extrapolated from available sources, and because any surviving witnesses passed away decades ago, the reader is left with a competent, if not two-dimensional portrayal of Waller the man, and Marine. As Waller was a child of Virginia aristocracy, family papers remain to document his legacy and that of his kin. Along with family photos, this material fills out the description of Waller’s early life, and the start of his career. Family photos provide balance to the standard photos of Waller in uniform, as well as de rigueur photos of parades and warships. Family letters document Waller’s episodic home life and paint a picture of the life of a Marine officer of the era.
Willams continues in the spirit of Jack Shulimson in his analysis of Marine officers at the end of the 19th century examining demographics and the influence graduation from the Naval Academy had on the officer ranks. Where Williams innovates is in the use of graphic tables to highlight the sea-change that commissioning Naval Academy graduates as Marine second lieutenants brought to the service. Waller’s commission coming before that of the spate of Marine Corps Naval Academy grads, and it set him aside from his peers, leaving a profound effect on Waller’s later career progression.
Williams ably describes the multitude of assignments Waller experienced, with an appropriate focus on the expeditionary actions of the age. Williams has sourced some excellent maps displaying movement and action in all the major engagements of Waller’s career. Would all military histories be so ably illustrated; long neglected and forgotten conflicts might be drawn from the shadows. Waller landed at Alexandria in 1882, fought aboard USS INDIANA during the Spanish War, at Tientsin and Peking during the Boxer Rebellion, at Samar during the Philippine War, landed at Panama and Veracruz, and led operations ashore in Cuba and Haiti before his retirement. His deployment history is a bingo card of Marine Corps expeditionary actions at the turn of the 20th century.
My small critique of Williams’ exposition is in a failure to mention the adoption of the Advanced Base Force mission as it was differentiated from the role as colonial police force in the first decades of the 20th century. Williams mentions that Waller commanded the First Brigade of Marines stationed at League Island in 1915 which was the pre-WWI culmination of Marine amphibious doctrine development. How the Marines came to have two ready regiments training in Philadelphia for amphibious missions is just as important as its role of colonial police.
And as a matter of style, I think Williams might have painted a more vivid picture of the abject horror of Waller’s march across Samar. Ten Marines were abandoned as the march spun out of control, and led in part to the ‘justice’ Waller meted out in the extrajudicial execution of Filipino porters.
Williams work, as much as any other, explains why Waller remains unheralded, despite leading U.S. forces in the relief of Peking. The gained notoriety in a public court martial for war crimes in the Philippines, as well as his inability to get along with peers shows how he made enemies inside the Marine Corps; his being a volatile drunk, and an outsider in officer circles, did little to contribute to the burnishing of his lasting reputation.
Vernon Williams’ EMPIRE MARINE, is an excellent read, and contributes greatly to the history of the Marine Corps at the turn of the last century.
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