The Amphibious Shipping Challenge: Before There Were Amphibs
The Amphibious Shipping Challenge: Before There Were Amphibs
John S. Naylor - 1 September, 2025
USS PANTHER
In the August 2025 issue of Proceedings, Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Warren, USMC, makes an argument for working through the ongoing shortage of amphibious shipping in the Navy by deploying “Mini-MEUs” — deploying Marines aboard a mix of amphibs and surface warfare ships.[1] He posits that by spreading Marines amongst the ships of the Surface Warfare community, the two sea services could generate greater utility, despite not having a requisite number of amphibious warships available. My thoughts here are in no way a rebuttal to LtCol Warren’s thesis. My thoughts are more a historical framing of the amphibious shipping challenges facing the sea services at the turn of the previous century.
Since the end of the Cold War amphibious shipping has been a perennial bone of contention between the Marine Corps, the Department of the Navy, and Congress. The argument that “available shipping is insufficient for large-scale amphibious operations…” is oft-repeated by Marines and their advocates, reflecting a belief that the Corps is best utilized when it is forward deployed, providing a deterrence for bad actors, an ability to project power ashore, and provides the United States a means to respond to natural disasters and political turmoil at the far corners of the earth. Faced with the realities of finite resources and appropriations, and interservice politicking, the amphibious fleet has been long suffering. When even one large deck amphib fails to meet a yard maintenance schedule, an entire deployment of Marine Expeditionary Units can be put at risk.
At the dawn of modern American amphibious doctrine, shipping revealed itself as a genuine challenge for the Navy Department and its Marine Corps. Facing the novel challenge of how to get Marines and troops to foreign shores, without subtracting from the expansion of the capital fleet, forced naval leaders to continue with the standard means of transport, and adopt half-measures using purchased merchant steamships, until permanent solutions were conceived.
For the first century of its history, Marines were members of a ship’s company or stationed at Navy Yards. Aboard ship, Marines were separate from sailors in duties; providing security for the ship’s captain; standing fire-watch; walking tours and enforcing the ships’ rules and regulations, Marines lived as sailors did, putting up hammocks and bedding in the morning, cleaning their spaces, and messing as a group. With the transition to the “new navy” they traded in defending the ship as marksmen in the rigging for manning secondary guns on deck. When required, they participated in landing parties, protecting American interests on foreign shores.
In the navy yards Marines trained new recruits, guarded the gates, walked tours of the yard, performed fire watch, and guarded the prison and receiving ships. Annually they qualified on the rifle range, and participated in parades aboard the yard and in town. When called upon, they would form ad hoc companies for any expedition called for by the Secretary of the Navy. This process meant deployable Marines travelling by rail to whatever navy yard was the embarkation point for the expedition, and forming into companies under unfamiliar NCOs and officers. This of course meant that their home barracks were undermanned for protecting naval facilities.
Landing Parties:
19th century Navy ship captains were granted the grace of their own discretion, oftentimes acting with minimal direction from Washington, conducting the nation’s diplomacy alongside local American consuls in foreign ports. A ship’s Marine detachment would often be employed as a large, but leading, contingent within any landing party a ship’s commander might deem needed. These interventions ranged from something simple, as when a couple of dozen Marines from USS ALLIANCE landed in Colombia in January 1885 for two nights, to an extended, large-scale, punitive amphibious attack on Korean forts in June of 1871.
In Colombia, the Marines landed to protect the Panama Railroad Company’s property and reembarked when the situation quieted down the next day; in Korea a landing battalion, 508 strong, composed of 2 companies of Marines, 8 companies of Bluejackets, and a company of pioneers, landed on the mudflats of western Korea, after Koreans had fired on the gunboats USS PALOS and MONOCACY, which were charting the River Kang-Yan (Han River Estuary). The landing battalion, composed of crewmembers of USS COLORADO, ALASKA, and BENICIA, were supported by PALOS, and MONOCACY. All the steam launches and whaleboats of the squadron were used in an attack on the five forts defending the approaches to the Korean capital. After two nights and days of fighting, during which the Americans captured five Korean forts, killing two-hundred defenders, the landing battalion withdrew. American and Joseon diplomats returned to negotiating trade and navigation agreements, eventually signing a treaty a decade later.
Expeditionary Missions:
Since its inception, the Corps had sent larger formations, up to a brigade in size, to assist the Army in land campaigns, but more often assembled expeditions to protect American commercial and political interests over the seas. Two months after the overnight mission of ALLIANCE’s shipboard detachment in 1885, Panamanian insurgents attacked government facilities in Aspinwall; a battalion of Marines and Bluejackets from USS GALENA landed to protect the American Consulate, the Pacific Mail Company, and Panama Railroad.[2] Under the command of Lieutenant Charles A. Doyen, USMC, the force numbered 18 Marines and 108 Bluejackets.
Secretary of the Navy William C. Whitney recognized the importance of the Panama Railroad to American commerce transiting between the Caribbean and Pacific, and requested a Marine expedition deployed to protect it. Colonel Commandant Charles G. McCawley wrote,
“In April last two battalions, which were assembled from the various shore stations and the receiving and training ships, were suddenly transferred for important duty on the Isthmus of Panama.”
and
“All the shore stations were nearly stripped and left without adequate protection. The guards were withdrawn from numerous ships for the same purpose, resulting in much inconvenience to the service.”
This was a common reaction for a service short of manpower and lacking any shore station where, even if they had the manpower, they would be able to garrison an assembled, trained, and permanent expeditionary unit.
At Panama, an additional landing party from TENNESSEE landed, while commercial steamships CITY OF PARA and ACAPULCO sailed for Colon from the Brooklyn Navy Yard, carrying two battalions of Marines under the command of Major Charles Heywood. As the Marines arrived, Commander Bowman McCalla assumed command of the expeditionary brigade of 796 officers and men. The various landing parties still ashore returned to the ships at anchor. In short order, the presence of the brigade allowed Colombian forces to resume control of the province.
Following the return of the Marines to their duty stations, Commander McCalla drafted a critique of their performance, noting the amount of time they spent in barracks, recommending that they spend summer months deployed on maneuvers, and that the Navy purchase dedicated troop transports (italics added) to more easily deploy Marine battalions when needed. McCalla was essentially recommending the formation of a permanent and more capable Marine expeditionary force.[3] Commandant McCawley protested the critique, noting the chronic shortage of Marines available to man navy yard and shipboard security billets effectively.
McCalla’s recommendation returned to the fore in 1890, when Lieutenant William Freeland Fullam, USN, proposed in Proceedingsthat Marines be removed from shipboard security duty and form permanent battalions at various shore stations. Fullam’s repeated, public demands that the Navy remove Marines as security detachments from capital ships, threatened the core of their existence, but he too was proposing a role for the Corps that would be very familiar to anyone in the naval establishment of the Cold War. In any case, the Navy was not equipped to transport expeditionary brigades by any means other than cramming them onto fully complemented warships. The War of 1898 would change this.
The War of 1898:
In his article, Lieutenant Colonel Warren noted that Commandant General David Berger “encouraged exploring nontraditional shipping options…”. The war with Spain showcased an American Navy embracing this concept to the hilt. It seems that as the service built the “new navy” as funded by Congress, they realized that by focusing nearly exclusively on protected cruisers, and pre-dreadnought battleships, they may have left gaps in their naval power. They realized that it might be difficult to expand the size of the Navy rapidly, so sought the means to create a Navy reserve fleet. The Postal Shipping Act of 1891 subsidized steamship companies provided they purchase ships of certain specifications that could be converted into fast, unarmored, cruisers, capable of raiding on enemy merchantmen. By the time the war with Spain began, the Navy was able to commission 29 ships in this “reserve fleet”, arming them with guns ranging in size from 3-pounder to 5-inch naval rifles.
It was on a ship of this class, an unarmed cruiser converted from an ocean-going steamship, that Huntington’s 1st Battalion of Marines, set sail for Cuba in April 1898. USS PANTHER had been built as the SS VENEZUELA, for the Square-D Steamship Line in 1889 by William Cramp & Sons of Philadelphia. 324-foot long, with a beam of 40-feet, she displaced 4260 tons and drew 18-feet. Before hauling Marines, she hauled bananas from Central and South America to U.S. ports; after her purchase, the Brooklyn Navy Yard took ten days to outfit her for Huntington’s Marines, an ad hoc expeditionary unit assembled at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Unfortunately, PANTHER was only converted to berth 400, and there were 650 men in the battalion. Given the lack of facilities aboard, Marines spent much of their time in line for chow, eating in three shifts, three times a day. Poor relations with the ship’s captain, Commander George C. Reiter, USN, and XO meant that the rest of the time the Marines spent aboard ship was below decks, in cramped, unventilated conditions, on their way to the tropics. When the 1st Battalion arrived at Guantanamo, PANTHER’s crew did not assist in the off-load, and Reiter had to be ordered by Bowman McCalla, last seen in Panama, to offload ALL the Marines’ ammunition, as Reiter wanted to keep a portion of it on board to properly ballast PANTHER.
In less than a week of fighting the Navy and Marines secured Guantanamo Bay, and the surrounding terrain, to be a safe harbor and advanced base for a Navy prosecuting the blockade of the Spanish Armada. Rough around the edges, it was a combined-service operation with a clear command relationships, functional communications, effective logistics planning, and naval gunfire support.
If the expedition to Guantanamo highlighted a weakness in the ability of the Navy to adequately transport Marines; the Army’s experience in transporting troops from Tampa to Cuba, and San Francisco to the Philippines highlighted the difficulty at an order of magnitude.
To move Shafter’s V Army Corps from Tampa Bay to the southern coast of Cuba, the Army leased 43 merchant ships. As they were competing with the Navy to secure any available vessels this was not an easy task. Because the Army chose not to lease ships flying foreign flags, they purchased 14 more outright.[4] Granted that the Army had no experience moving an Army Corps overseas, the loading process at the Port of Tampa was a logistical nightmare. With only one rail line into the port the quartermasters were limited in the number of men, material, livestock, and weapons that could be efficiently loaded. When the last day to load arrived, there was a mad dash to get regular and volunteer units aboard. Army officers commandeered ships not assigned to their units, succumbing to “go fever”; cavalry units left their horses behind in the rush to join the war.
Once loaded, the hastily converted troop ships were floating ovens, as they were not adequately ventilated or plumbed for human and equine occupancy. Once loaded, the ships sat at anchor, awaiting a Navy escort around the east end of Cuba; they waited so long, they had to offload many of the horses, who were getting ill from the heat and cramped conditions. When Shafter’s flotilla arrived at Daiquiri and Siboney two months after the war started, they had no lighters or whaleboats, or sailors to operate them, to transfer soldiers and equipment ashore. The Army resorted to borrowing whaleboats and tugs from their Navy escort ships to land the landing force.
On the west coast, the challenge was in many ways much greater that in the Caribbean. Instead of a sea voyage of several hundred miles, Army Quartermasters were going to have to transport Major General Wesley Merritt’s VIII Army Corps 5,000 miles to Manila, with possible stops on the new territories of Hawai’i and Guam. The ships involved were much larger than the coastal steamships plying the routes between Tampa, Cuba, and Porto Rico, but the number of men embarked was greater too, exacerbating crew comfort and hygiene issues.
The Army’s landings in both the Philippines and Cuba were largely administrative, with the largest challenge physically transporting men and material onto undefended beaches to prosecute land campaigns. The Marines’ landing at Guantanamo differed in that in the days leading up to the landing on Fisherman’s Point, the Navy had bombarded Spanish positions in the landing area, and the Marines had landed an advanced party for reconnaissance and security. The Guantanamo landing was under the direction of the Navy task force commander, Bowman McCalla, with the commander of troops, Colonel Robert Huntington, USMC, reporting to him. When the Army’s V Corps and VIII Corps landed, they attempted to coordinate with the Navy, seeking naval gunfire support in the attacks on Santiago and Manila, hoping the Navy would take the lead in the fight. At Guantanamo, the Marines maintained signals with ships offshore, who provided naval gunfire continuously through the battle, and at night.
Following the war, the Army continued to view the amphibious aspect of fighting overseas as a transportation and Quartermaster issue, an obstacle to be overcome on the way to prosecuting a land campaign. This was despite its General Staff joining with the General Board of the Navy to form the Joint Army-Navy Board to develop future guidelines for interservice operations. The Navy on the other hand viewed Guantanamo as proof-of-concept evolution, laying the foundation for the development of the Advanced Base Force mission, and how best to use the expeditionary deployment of Marines in support of naval operations. In any case, the Navy determined that the Marine Corps was the more reliable partner in securing and defending advanced bases.
The Advanced Base Force:
The Advanced Base Force mission differed from the traditional landing party and expeditionary landing missions the Navy and Marine Corps had practiced for twelve decades. In the years immediately following the war with Spain, the ABF became the Marines’ raison d’être in the eyes of the General Board, and anyone else in the navy interested in defeating great power navies. In its roughest form, the Advanced Base Force was a brigade sized force composed of two regiments, the fixed defense and the mobile defense, that would take, and hold, a temporary base for a forward-deployed fleet.
The mission of the fixed defense unit was to rapidly set up a defense of a harbor where the fleet could coal its ships and “revictual” itself. This unit would be armed with Army coastal defense mines, automotive torpedoes, spotlights, communications equipment, and naval rifles — preferably 5-inch deck guns removed from the deck of the ship transporting them. The fixed unit would dig gun emplacements, magazines, and fortifications for itself, and assist in the construction of any facilities the Navy would require ashore. The mobile unit was formed more along the lines of traditional naval infantry, battalions able to land efficiently by boat, and take and defend the terrain surrounding the temporary fleet base, defending the base and the fixed unit from an enemy counterattack.
The evolution and experience of the Advanced Base Force drove the development of a meaningful amphibious doctrine for the Navy and Marines, answering questions about ship to shore movement, command relationships, naval gunfire support, beachhead logistics, and communications. And it highlighted the enduring need for dedicated transport shipping, and craft able to convey Marines from ship to shore. Essential to this doctrine too was a ship’s crew trained in deploying landing boats and handling them, and returning to ship. Lessons learned in the performance of this mission, in support of fleet operations, showed that the Navy needed amphibious shipping.
In the first decade of experimentation with the ABF, Marines travelled in ships like PANTHER; “banana boats” painted grey, with facilities and berthing retrofitted for embarked troops. Here are some of the other ships that were purchased for the war with Spain, but remained in service as Navy transports for the Marines before the Great War.
· USS PRAIRIE was purchased by the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Morgan Line. She was built in 1890 as EL SOL. 404-foot long, with a beam of 48-feet, she drew 20-feet and displaced 6620 tons.
· USS YANKEE was purchased by the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Morgan Line, formerly known as EL NORTE. 406-foot long, with a beam of 48-feet, she drew 21-feet and displaced 6225 tons.
· USS DIXIE was purchased by the Southern Pacific Railroad’s Morgan Line. She drew 20-feet, had a beam of 48-feet, displaced 6114 tons, and was 405-feet long. Built in 1893, she served as an escort cruiser for Army convoys during the war.
· USS RESOLUTE was initially thought to be the ship that would take Huntington’s Battalion to Cuba in 1898, but her refit took too long, as she was being fit with a distilling unit for potable water. 309-foot long, and a beam of 40-foot, she drew 18-feet and displaced 3900 tons. Built in 1894, the Navy purchased her from the Old Dominion Steamship Company.[5]
· USS JUSTIN was a steamship purchased in April 1898 for use as a collier supporting the Cuban Blockade. She coaled U.S. warships in the newly secured Guantanamo Bay. She was 287-feet long, had a beam of 39-feet, drew 19-foot, and displaced 1419 tons. She supported landing and transport operations in the Pacific, transporting Marines to Nicaragua in 1913.[6]
Capable of only carrying up to 700 men at a time, these ships transported battalions and parts of regiments on fleet exercises and expeditionary responses across the Caribbean for fifteen years, dropping in and out of commission dependent on the Navy’s need for yard time. Just as important in expeditionary transport were the capital ships of the Navy; battleships and cruisers were available to take on additional Marines when responding to crises overseas and remained the backbone of all fleet exercises.
And despite limited space, capital ships were essential to the transport of ABF units and materiel. As early as 1901, during the Atlantic Fleet summer exercises, Marines and ABF weapons, engineer equipment, and camp accoutrements travelled from Rhode Island to Nantucket, not a great distance, on the decks of USS KEARSARGE, ALABAMA, and MASSACHUSETTS, all of which donated deck guns and torpedo tubes to the mission, in addition to their Marine detachments. When the Marines landed on Nantucket, they set up the first protected harbor along the lines of the ABF mission since Guantanamo. Battleships would continue to transport ABF forces, from League Island to Culebra, (Philadelphia to Porto Rico) and expeditionary units to Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras, Santo Domingo, Cuba, and other hotspots in the noughts and teens.
In 1908, Commandant Elliot requests a dedicated naval transport to serve alongside USS DIXIE, and PANTHER, to carry expeditionary battalions and units of the Advanced Base Force. Carrying Marines over the seas on the decks of battleships is a less-than-optimal means of amphibious transport, as demonstrated in the deployment of Lieutenant Colonel Eli K. Cole and his expeditionary regiment to Panama in June of 1908.
“The trip has, in my opinion, demonstrated the undesirability of using battle ships for transports, not only on account of the cost, but of the discomforts to the men and difficulties in handling stores and the desirability of having transports on hand always ready to move expeditions of this sort at a moment’s notice.”
Cole and his unit deployed to Panama to join the forward stationed unit present to assist in providing security for national and local elections. Warships of the fleet crammed Marines into every available space, Marines slept on the decks of these ships, and shared facilities and mess areas with the ships’ crews. While this temporary situation allowed rapid deployment, it was done with the limited number of toilets aboard, limited mess areas, and the finite berthing available for a ship’s company.
The Eventual Solution – Dedicated Shipping:
The Great War has been depicted as the end of the Advanced Base Force mission until the Atlantic and Pacific Expeditionary Forces were designated in the 1920s. In truth, the Marine Corps continued to maintain the Advanced Base Force during the European war at League Island. Rapid expansion of the Corps allowed for continued deployment of expeditionary forces in Haiti, Santo Domingo, and Cuba. More importantly, the patron angel of the Marine Corps, the General Board of the Navy, proposed two dedicated, bespoke troop transports be built for the Navy to support Marine Corps expeditions and the Advanced Base Force mission.
After two decades of repeated recommendations, the Navy put pencil to paper in 1912 and designed a troop transport from keel up to support the Marines. USS HENDERSON would be 489-foot long, have a 60-foot beam, draw 20-foot, and displace 10,000 tons. Two ships in the class would be capable of carrying the entire ABF Brigade of two regiments. HENDERSON and her proposed sister would each carry 1,250 Marines in addition to her crew. She was designed to support two times what PANTHER did traveling to Guantanamo Bay in 1898, in a much more hygienic and efficient manner. For short periods of time, she’d be able to transport 2,000 troops. Her 5-inch guns, that could be used by ABF units ashore, were upgraded to those in use aboard the battleships, versus the 1900 models issued. She was designed to carry the requisite number of landing boats for her mission, including flat-bottomed boats for transport of oversized equipment. The Navy planned on a complement trained in the handling of cranes, davits, and small craft, ensuring embarkation and debarkation would be expeditious and efficient.
Coming Full Circle:
As with many doctrinal concepts, what’s old can be used again; the idea of deploying Marine units on surface warships to get them to the fight isn’t completely new. It may be a valid, expeditious use of available hulls, especially in special operations, and may provide deployed units a flexibility that large deck amphibs don’t. The Navy and Marine Corps did return to deploying landing forces aboard surface warfare ships before; in the late 1930s, battalions of the 5th Marines experimented with the use of landing light infantry units from converted destroyers using rubber boats. These former destroyers, the APDs, continued to operate during WWII and the Navy converted more than a hundred surface vessels into transports to support landing operations around the globe.
So, for a long time, the use of what might be termed “non-traditional shipping options” was standard procedure for sailors and Marines. Returning to this practice as a standard may be possible, but I think it would show that there may be greater problems in naval appropriations than there are in operational ingenuity and innovation.
[1] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2025/august/making-do-fewer-amphibs
[2] Harry Allanson Ellsworth. One Hundred Eighty Landings of United States Marines – The Official US Marine Corps History of Landings From 1800 to 1934. Marine Corps History Division, Washington DC. 1934. Kindle Edition.
[3] Jack Shulimson. The Marine Corps Search for a Mission: 1880-1898. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence. 1993. p. 61.
[4] https://www.spanamwar.com/transports.htm
[5] https://www.usnaux.shipscribe.com/AP/ap-resolute.html
[6] Most dimensions were found in wikipedia
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