"AM READY." - The Advanced Base Brigade, Woodrow Wilson, and Vera Cruz
"AM READY."
THE ADVANCED BASE BRIGADE, WOODROW WILSON, AND VERA CRUZ
John S. Naylor – February 15, 2026
INTRODUCTION
The U.S. landing and occupation of the Mexican port of Vera Cruz[2] in April 1914 is often lumped in as one of the “small wars” or “banana wars” framed by U.S. foreign policy in Latin America in the 20th century. It’s also overlooked because it was a minor operation in comparison to the size and gravity of the Great War. While directionally accurate, this description fails to consider how it demonstrated a fundamental change in the capabilities of U.S. naval power, and as such was a milestone in the history of the Marine Corps. For the first time in its history, the Marine Corps had two regiments of Marines formed in advance of an emergency, trained as units, and fully equipped for expeditionary service.
However, the Marines who landed at Vera Cruz landed with more sophisticated capabilities and competencies than on any simple expedition. While at the core these men were trained as infantry, proficient with infantry arms, and in infantry tactics, they were also trained to execute a new naval mission, which required them to become experts in the fields of engineering, communications, and logistics, as part of a landing operation. For a decade and a half, the service had been organizing and training itself to move robust formations of Marines and their weaponry, on short notice, in support of expanded naval operations, and to deploy these units from ship-to-shore with greater “efficiency”. And while deploying “landing parties” had traditionally been a key to U.S. naval diplomacy, the Navy had not developed its landing-party doctrine and capabilities at the same pace as the Marines. The landing at Veracruz demonstrated this variance. We’ll see that the Marine Corps that landed at Veracruz in 1914 was not the Marine Corps that landed at Guantanamo in 1898.
Additionally, while the Vera Cruz landing was conducted prior to publication of a definitive, modern, “amphibious doctrine”, kernels of what would evolve into amphibious doctrine are evident in the execution: deliberate planning of ship-to-shore movement; planned naval gunfire support; an organized transfer of command from shipboard to land; rehearsals; flexible communications; deliberate movement to the crisis and a rapid buildup of combat power. The landing at Vera Cruz was no simple expedition.
Increased foreign investments in Mexico during the reign of Porfirio Díaz created a yawning disparity between the wealthy hacendado class, the rural masses that worked their land, and in the villages of the countryside. As U.S. investments contributed greatly to the relative prosperity, popular revolution was a threat to “American interests”. This type of unrest had historically provided a pretext for the United States to intervene in the affairs of sovereign neighbors in the Caribbean and Latin America. So the U.S. response to the Mexican Revolution in the spring of 1914 was not out of the norms. What may not be expected in a review of events were the turns made by Woodrow Wilson’s Mexican policy. One, which established an enduring legacy of U.S. presidential administrations seeking “regime change” in foreign governments, and two, disregarding “American interests” in the pursuit of the president’s personal preference. This approach to the Mexican General and Presidente, Victoriano Huerta, displayed Wilson’s betrayal of his obligation to American citizens living and working in Mexico.
In understanding the landing, seizure, and occupation of Vera Cruz, it’s worth examining the history of the Mexican Revolution up to that date, the history of the Marine Corps at the turn of the century, and Woodrow Wilson’s Mexico policy.
THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION
For three decades under Porfirio Díaz, the de facto president-for-life, Mexico enjoyed economic growth and stability while existing under the thinnest veneer of democracy. During his seven terms, from the late 1880s until 1911, Díaz centralized power in his position through favoritism and fear. Targets of foreign investments, particularly American investments, thrived as common Mexican citizens were pushed off their lands. The owners of vast haciendas — the hacendado class — and land speculators profited from the transfer of property rights that enabled growth in exportable agriculture and mining, fueled by significant railroad development.
Porfirio Diaz
“American interests” were popularly touted anytime the U.S. introduced military force on foreign shores in the 19th and early 20thcenturies. With the closure of the American West, U.S. investors and entrepreneurs looked to foreign markets in which to develop additional capital. The Mexican railroads had been a major recipient of investment focus and development; Mexican railroads were a perfect customer for American steel and coal, and the development of this infrastructure opened the entire country up to investment from American and European investors. Politically chaotic, Mexico was growing into an important economic power by 1914; amid a transformation from being a country accustomed to consuming American goods, services, investment, and technology, Mexico became an important source for American industry in terms of minerals, agricultural products, and most importantly, oil. The railroads, essential to commerce and communications in such a vast country, were an excellent example of changing circumstances; once fueled by coal mined in the U.S., the discovery of oil allowed Mexican rail to run on domestic fuel, creating a level of independence that may have been concerning to “American interests”.
Concerned about his viability in an election he rigged in 1910, Díaz had his popular competitor, Francisco Madero, jailed. Madero escaped a rather permissive imprisonment, finding his way to Texas, where he declared the rigged election a sham, and called for a Mexican revolution. Madero’s revolution received a jump start when Francisco “Pancho” Villa allied his Chihuahuan group with Pascual Orozco’s bandit rebel forces. At the same time, Porfirio Díaz squandered the political support of the hacendado class. The revolutionary slogan, Tierra y Libertad (land and liberty) promised the rural poor an escape from veritable indentured servitude.[3]In his Texas exile, Madero found little backing from any Americans, as the relative stability of the Díaz regime provided healthy returns for investors. Back in Mexico, Díaz faced the quandary of any centralized government threatened by rebellion in the provinces; he could hold the cities and towns, but the rebels held the countryside. In 1911, after rebel forces led by Emiliano Zapata soundly trounced Federalist forces at Cuautla in hand-to-hand and house-to-house fighting, Madero succeeded in ousting Díaz, who departed for a European exile aboard the German steamship YPIRANGA.
However, Díaz’ ouster didn’t assure peace for the Mexican people, as various regional warlords turned their forces against one another. Madero used his general, Victoriano Huerta, to keep dissent in check. As Madero did not reform the agrarian policies of Díaz, he faced a hostile Francisco “Pancho” Villa’s forces in the northern provinces and Emiliano Zapata’s forces in the south. And so, Mexico City became the battleground for the revolution in February of 1913.
Adding to the Mexican president’s woes, the American ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson, a William Howard Taft appointee, who had a pathological dislike for Madero, actively plotted with Mexican generals, including Huerta, for his ouster. When President Madero discovered the General had betrayed him, he had Huerta arrested. In a face-to-face meeting Huerta pledged his undying loyalty to Madero, swearing on the cross around his neck. Days later Huerta reversed himself and staged a coup, over dinner in a Mexico City restaurant. Huerta murdered Madero two days later, and his coup brought to a close Mexico’s “Ten Tragic Days” of February 1913. Henry Lane Wilson, representing the United States government, refused to intervene on Madero’s behalf.
Victoriano Huerta
With Madero’s death, the Mexican Revolution entered a new stage. The new Presidente, General Victoriano Huerta, attempted to maintain power in the face of established Constitutionalist rebel groups. When Woodrow Wilson, whose world outlook can be summed up in his statement “I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men!” took office in March of 1913, he recalled Henry Lane Wilson from Mexico. Having no trust in the diplomats of the U.S. State Department and believing himself the best judge of what the people of Mexico needed in their government, Woodrow Wilson personally took over running American diplomacy with its southern neighbor.
With his Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryant, who held zero foreign policy experience, Wilson largely ignored the professional diplomats of the State Department experienced in American-Mexico policy. Wilson viewed Huerta as a butcher, and wanted him to step down from the presidency, opening Mexico up to a more democratic form of government. With this aim, Wilson sent the former governor of Minnesota, John Lind, to Mexico City to speak with the dictator. Huerta refused to see Lind — who was anti-Catholic and spoke no Spanish — because the United States refused to recognize Huerta as the legitimate leader of Mexico. Relations between the two countries continued to fail as Huerta began arresting and executing members of the Mexican congress.
Yet Huerta remained on good footing with Americans settled in Mexico, and more importantly, American investors. But as the Mexican Revolution continued, “American interests” came under threat as fighting between the Constitutionalists and Huerta’s Federalists neared the port cities of Tampico and Veracruz. Curiously, Woodrow Wilson expressed ambivalence towards American citizens and American property at risk in Mexico. An established obligation of the Executive Branch is the equal protection of U.S. citizens whether they are located in the states, or abroad.[4]
VERA CRUZ – GATEWAY TO MEXICO
The events of April 1914 do little to explain the historical significance of the city and port of Veracruz. Located on the eastern coast of Mexico at 19°N, it’s two hundred and fifty miles east of the capital and has been the gateway to central Mexico for foreign invaders since Hernán de Cortés founded the city in the 16th century; Veracruz remained the most important port in New Spain until the departure of the Spanish in 1825.[5] In 1838 France seized the city during a brief war with the fledgling republic over reparations for damages done to French property in Mexico City. In March of 1847, during the Mexican-American War, General Winfield Scott led an invasion force of 8,600 men ashore at Veracruz.[6] Following a bloodless landing, Scott’s forces surrounded the city and bombarded the port’s fortress, the Castle of San Juan de Ulúa, for twenty days, pausing only to allow passage of Spanish, Prussian, British, and French diplomats out of the city. Scott’s losses were slight, 13 killed and 55 wounded, Mexico lost several hundred killed with thousands of wounded; afterwards he commanded a benevolent administration of the city, which would remain important to the campaign and to his logistics, as he marched on Mexico City.[7]
Spain, England, and France used Veracruz to enter Mexico in 1861, seeking recompense for a mounting Mexican debt; the French occupied the south of the country, and established the Austrian Archduke Maximillian as head of the Mexican Empire. Following a revolution and Maximillian’s execution in 1867, Mexico suffered from constant turmoil, successive dictators, and ongoing national debt; the port of Veracruz fell into decline as Mexican relations with European powers deteriorated over the debt. However, with the turn of the 20th century, Mexico was a state in transformation; with the infrastructure of railways already in place courtesy of American and European investors, industrialization and technology created additional foreign investments in iron and steel, textiles, lead and copper mines, and most importantly, oil. By the time of the revolution, American companies owned three quarters of the mining operations, and half of the oil facilities.[8] Much of the new economic activity surrounded Veracruz and three hundred miles to the north, the port city of Tampico. As oil was discovered, and foreign powers chose to invest in the markets and infrastructure of the state of Tamaulipas, Mexico became the world’s second largest exporter of oil, behind the United States, and the oil flowed through Tampico on its way to foreign markets.
AMPHIBIAN EVOLUTION
When the Marines landed at Guantanamo, it would be two more decades before U.S. military doctrine referred to anything as “amphibious operations”; however, popular culture did recognize Marines as being “amphibious”.[9][10] And while this recognition accepts the nature of service — at sea and on land — it fails to account for the complexity involved in landing a force on foreign shore to secure an objective. Embarking a formation of Marines, or naval infantry, aboard ship in a manner that will allow for efficient disembarkation, organized ship to shore movement, and a landing on in hostile waters increase the degree of difficulty in military operations. In 1914, the Navy and Marine Corps were in the midst of developing the principles for conducting successful landing operations through the establishment and development of the Advanced Base Force.
When it was clear that the U.S. was going to war with Spain in 1898, Navy leadership recognized that to conduct an effective cordon and blockade of Cuba it would need an advanced base proximate to its patrol routes and blockading forces. Just days before the U.S. declared war, the Secretary of the Navy directed the Marine Corps to form two battalions at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Colonel Commandant Charles Heywood, USMC, reported that gathering the Marines from all the barracks of the east coast did “greatly deplete the strength of the shore stations of the Corps, leaving most of them in charge of noncommissioned officers, and in some instances with a strength of only six or seven men.”[11] Up until 1898, Congress had authorized the Corps 76 officers and 3073 Marines but had only granted the service appropriations supporting 2,600 men. Nowhere did the service have any garrisoned units staffed and at the ready for deployment; when the country needed an expeditionary force on short notice, the routine became stripping the barracks of officers and men, and sending them to a common embarkation point, where they would introduce themselves to each other and their officers. Once gathered and organized, individual and small unit drill, as proscribed by the current drill manual, was standard procedure, as was outfitting them with hand-tools and tentage.
In April of 1898 Lieutenant Colonel Robert Huntington, USMC, under the direction of the Navy Department, could only muster a battalion 23 officers and 623 men in six companies. After assembly at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, “Huntington’s Battalion” sailed for Key West aboard a converted merchant steamship, USS PANTHER; on the beach at Key West they spent a month familiarizing themselves with brand new rifles, new officers, small unit drill, and life under canvas. When it became apparent that the Spanish fleet was trapped at Santiago, on Cuba’s southern coast, the Navy determined they needed a secure harbor closer than Key West. Guantanamo, sixty miles east of Santiago, was identified as ideal for this role; in early June, Huntington’s Marines re-embarked aboard PANTHER, sailing for Cuba. At a rendezvous with Admiral Sampson off Santiago, Huntington received orders to land and establish a defense at Fisherman’s Point on Guantanamo Bay.
The Marines’ landing, on June 10, was largely administrative. Offloading equipment and supplies took precedence over the tactical situation; PANTHER’s commander made it a point to not allow his sailors to help in the offload and proposed keeping part of the Marines’ ammunition in his holds to act as ballast. Tents were erected on the hilltop in orderly rows, and Cuban huts burned for hygienic purposes. The camp was set up using the Admiral’s guidance for mitigating tropical disease ashore. Late on the day following the landing, the Spanish commenced firing on the camp from the scrub brush surrounding the hill. In the following hours Spanish fire killed five Marines and the Navy surgeon and wounded eleven. Two days later Huntington’s Battalion and sixty Cuban rebels counter-attacked the Spanish camp at Cuzco Well, driving them from the windward point. Shortly thereafter, ships of the fleet began coaling under the watch of Marines ashore, experiencing no interference from the Spanish.
In ensuing years, the General Board of the Navy[12] permanently detailed the Marines to this new mission, expanding the Corps’ ad hoc landing responsibilities (the term “amphibious” wouldn’t be coined in the lexicon of military operations for another decade) to a much greater sophistication and extent than previously practiced. The Board assigned this mission to the yet-to-be-named-or-established “Advanced Base Force”, which would be tasked with seizing a protected anchorage, and landing naval artillery — 5-inch deck guns — along with defensive naval mines, searchlights, communications, and engineering equipment, to establish a temporary defense where the fleet could “re-coal, refit, revictual, transfer the wounded and make ready…”[13] and conduct ongoing operations far from American shores.
It cannot be overemphasized what a specialized role the Advanced Base mission was. 5-inch guns — designed to be fired from fixed mounts aboard warships — were unbolted from a ship’s deck, hoisted over the side into a whaleboat, which was towed to shore, where the four-ton gun would be lifted and hoisted by hand from the boat on a beach, then skidded across the beach and terrain before being manhandled up a hill to the best vantage point for anti-ship gunnery. Landing with the gun would be all the required cribbing, tackle, aiming apparatus, a deck mount, and a large, thick timber platform. Once landed, the Advance Base Force would have to be self-sustaining, as their logistics train would be sailing with the battle fleet when not in harbor. In some ways the ABF was more like the Defense Battalions emplaced at Wake or Midway at the beginning of the Pacific war, but in its development, the Marines were required to develop the abilities to land, cross a beach, and engage the enemy in a sustained fight.
Naval reformers had been opining on the role of Marines within the Department of the Navy for a decade, some recommending the Marines be removed from their shipboard guard duty and formed into land-based regiments ready to deploy on short notice.[14] The seizure of Guantanamo Bay was the proof of concept for this operational evolution. With time, the General Board determined this force would be a brigade of two regiments. The first, called the Fixed Defense Regiment, would land the arms and equipment and establish the temporary defenses; the second, called the Mobile Defense Regiment, would be a more traditional regiment of infantry capable of repulsing any overland attack or should the enemy attempt a landing across a beach.[15] These units would be much larger, and more capable than Huntington’s Battalion. This new focus was bound to transform the service from being composed of small security detachments aboard ships and the guard force and in Navy yards, into a much larger organization owning garrisoned infantry units stationed in the new American territories and protectorates. Providing a landing force capable of establishing and defending forward bases in support of fleet operations. combined with the tactical and operational corporate knowledge developed fighting in the Philippines, China, and Nicaragua, and in numerous landing operations in Panama, Haiti, Santo Domingo, Cuba, Honduras, meant the Marines were evolving into a confident, competent, service, set aside from their Navy brethren and the Army.
LANDING PARTIES AND EXPEDITIONS
A primary mission of the peacetime Navy of the 19th century was the protection of “American interests” “over the seas”. This defense was largely left to ships’ captains dispatched to the four corners of the earth. The Navy maintained a tradition of keeping ships of the various squadrons in regions where American commerce had established itself and responding quickly to unrest in foreign ports. “American Interests” of the 19th century, beyond the trade in mercantile goods and raw materials, included U.S. businesses introducing technological advancements and capital investments in the guise of railroads and in the extractive industries. When civil unrest demonstrated itself in foreign countries, you could expect the U.S. Navy, as well as the navies of all the leading powers, to provide a presence, “showing the flag”. Sometimes just the appearance of warships in the harbors or off the shore of conflicted states was enough to quell civil disturbances. When it wasn’t, ships’ captains might land sailors and Marines to protect U.S. consulates, missions, businesses, property, missionaries, and citizens. These landing parties would typically be commanded by a Navy officer, leading sections composed of Bluejackets — sailors usually from the deck or gunnery divisions — and Marines from the ships’ security detachments. In U.S. experience, the better part of landing parties would typically be composed of sailors, but a casual reading of contemporaneous Marine reporting might dissuade you of that fact. If the fleet couldn’t provide the manpower to take control of a situation ashore, the president might require the Navy Department or the War Department to raise an expedition of Marines or soldiers for service over the seas; these expeditions could be straight land-based units transported aboard merchant vessels, or vessels purchased for the emergency, with no expectations of making a tactical landing. Examples of these expeditions can be found in the Army deployment to the Philippines or Porto Rico in the summer of 1898.
Following the Civil War, ships’ captains executed landing operations fairly frequently. The Royal Navy and U.S. Navy landed parties at Alexandria in 1882 to protect their consuls and the European Quarter from a popular uprising; Marines and sailors from three separate warships composed the U.S. contingent. During 1885 in the Columbian province of Panama, Marines and blue jackets of the fleet landed on several occasions, protecting American property and evacuating American civilians from the turmoil created by an evergreen Panamanian rebellion. Due to the turmoil that threatened the American-owned Panama Railroad — which connected the Atlantic and Pacific across the peninsula in the decades before the canal — the Secretary of the Navy tasked Colonel Commandant Charles G. McCawley, USMC, with forming two battalions of Marines at Norfolk Navy Yard, for an expedition to protect the railroad. Forming this brigade removed half of the Marines guarding the Navy yards, prison ships, and receiving ships on the east coast, and left only eleven officers in place from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Norfolk, Virginia.[16] As Marine expeditions were usually transported by the Navy, and landed under Navy command, they were regarded as an extension of the naval landing party and critiqued as such by Navy officers such as Bowman McCalla. In that these units were assembled in ad hoc manner, and their day-to-day routine was not landing on a foreign shore, the Navy and Marines found themselves attempting recreate past successes from whole cloth each time.
The naval landing parties were organized per regulations.[17] A battleship’s gun divisions would form rifle companies, composed of two platoons each. Three or four rifle companies and one of artillery — armed with a 3-inch landing gun and Colt-Browning machine guns — would compose a battleship’s battalion of over 300-Bluejackets. Cruisers would muster battalions of two companies each. When only one or two ships sent landing parties ashore, their Marine security detachments would form an additional separate company for the ships’ battalions.
As naval infantry, the Bluejackets were equipped much like the Marines, augmented with cutlasses when available. By 1914 Bluejackets were armed with M1903 Springfield rifles, Colt-Browning machine guns, Benet-Mecier light machine guns, and 3-inch field pieces. Both the Navy and Marines practiced a standard manual of arms and small unit drill. In 1886 Lieutenant Howard K. Gilman, USMC, wrote The Naval Brigade and Operations Ashore, borrowing heavily from Upton’s drill for infantry and then-current Naval Regulations.[18] Small unit drill was a foundation of officer training at Annapolis, and was the basis for movement and control of naval units ashore. In Fullam’s 1912 manual, it’s noted that changes in drill orders were made to accommodate reduced space available to move formations aboard ships. Even on ships lacking a Marine detachment, the 19th century Navy was fully prepared to assemble and deploy naval infantry ashore to protect “American Interests”.
THE CHALLENGE FOR THE ADVANCED BASE FORCE
After a decade of development, the General Board was anticipating more from of the Advanced Base Force than merely being a reinforced landing party. The ABF was seen as integral to the operational requirements of the New Navy and its ability to conduct operations away from friendly shores. It figured prominently in fleet exercises between 1901 and 1914. Marines of the ABF built many of the temporary fortifications on Subic Bay in the Philippines after the Japanese war scare. As Navy war planning took into account the threat they posed in the Pacific, and by Germany in the Caribbean, the General Board deemed the ABF a key to naval power.
In the March 1911 edition of the United States Naval Institute’s Proceedings magazine, Major Henry C. Davis, USMC, expressed his concerns regarding the lack of concrete results from ABF training to date. Among his proposals to correct a sclerotic development were permanently assigning Marines to the unit, more at-sea training, periodic deployments for exercises, better landing craft, focus on naval gunfire support, and exposure to foreign militaries. He reiterated the importance of the ABF, and reminded the audience of the recent establishment of an Advanced Base School which would provide theoretical training for Marines in new technology and armaments. The service established the school at New London in 1910 and worked towards making the instructors and Marines assigned to it a cadre for the Fixed Defense Regiment. The following year the school and cadre were moved to League Island at Philadelphia, to be closer to the supply depot for the force, and because it had become a central point of embarkation for many Marine expeditions. Major Davis’s article showed a recognition within the Marine Corps that if it was going to master the Advanced Base mission, it would have to redouble its efforts towards aggressive training.
Unfortunately for the Marine Corps, and proponents of the ABF, the operational tempo of the sea services aligned focus towards expeditionary commitments. Marines found themselves protecting American interests on an increasingly larger scale in the first decade of the century; securing the Panama Canal Zone from 1903 until its completion; joining the Army in the Second Occupation of Cuba in 1906; landings in Nicaragua in 1910; returning to Cuba again in 1912; and returning to Nicaragua again in 1912. Forming expeditionary battalions, and regiments for these commitments diverted men from training for the Advanced Base mission, despite the continued Marine Corps manpower expansion to 351 officers and 9921 enlisted by 1914.[19]
In 1913, naval reformers, led by William Fullam, pointed to the shortcomings of the Advanced Base Force, blaming Marine Corps leadership and accused the service of shirking its responsibilities. Fullam, the Navy’s aide for inspections, had been pushing his agenda of removing Marines from shipboard duty since 1890, with the stated goal of forming permanently garrisoned regiments of Marines ashore, equipped, trained, and ready for deployment on short notice. In 1912 Fullam revised The Landing Force and Small-Arm Instructions, United States Navy; this manual outlined the responsibilities of the naval landing party, aside from any role the Marines would play, and covered material such as uniforms, equipment, first aid, tent pitching, riot control, and conduct of the march. Considering himself an expert on the conduct of landing party drill, he crafted a scathing report of the ABF and delivered it to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. A significant remedy he proposed to correct the failures of the Marine Corps was that he be given the responsibility of leading the ABF, neutering the commandant of Marines and his officers, who were still smarting from the attempted apparent dissolution of the Corps foreshadowed by Theodore Roosevelt’s Executive Order 969 in 1908. The General Board disputed Fullam’s report and promised the Secretary of the Navy that Marines would fulfill the requirements in the upcoming Fleet Exercises at Culebra in January and February of 1914. The board composed a list of objectives for the exercise, above and beyond mere infantry proficiency:
1. Stowing material on transports;
2. Landing material from transport to the beach;
3. Transporting the material from the beach to various sites;
4. Preparation of battery sites and mounting of guns;
5. Establishment of fire control and observation points;
6. Planting of mines;
7. Defense of mine fields;
8. Establishment and use of searchlight stations;
9. Exercise with guns, including target practice;
10. Covering the site selected against attack from the land, including transportation necessary for supply and handling material.[20]
This list exhibits the ongoing Navy interest in developing useful Marine Corps doctrine that would support fleet operations through landings establishing forward bases; the competencies practiced in accomplishing these points would be proof that the Marines were capable of complex movements from ship to shore, and could master tactical and logistical complexity at a regimental level.
The Culebra Exercise in Puerto Rico had been planned for months. In November 1913 the two regiments prepared for embarkation; the Mobile Defense Regiment assembled in traditional service fashion, composed of Marines taken from the various barracks at navy yards, and departed Philadelphia on November 27, 1913, aboard USS PRAIRIE, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel John A. Lejeune, USMC. The unit was bound for the fleet exercises, or the Mexican emergency at Tampico if need be. The Fixed Defense Regiment, composed of the cadre from the Advanced Base School, departed Philadelphia on January 3, 1914, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Charles G. Long, USMC.
Just as Huntington’s Battalion had spent a month working up for the Cuban expedition by spending a month on the beach at Key West, the Mobile Defense Regiment, under Lejeune, spent a month at the defunct Navy Station at Pensacola, drilling and developing unit cohesion. Long’s Fixed Defense Regiment practiced its craft closer to Philadelphia, making landings on the shores of the Delaware River.
When the exercise kicked off in January 1914 the Fixed Defense Regiment landed on the southern end of Culebra, and set the defense in the allotted six days. Naval guns, searchlights, sea-mines, machine guns, engineered obstacles, field pieces, machine guns, and even a pair of observation biplanes created a defense above a safe anchorage for the fleet. Seventeen-hundred Marines who’d trained together for weeks and months were prepared to defend the island against a similarly armed, if not as well-trained, landing force composed of the Bluejacket landing battalions of the Atlantic Fleet.
On January 21, the exercise opposition-force arrived at Culebra intent on taking the island. According to the judges umpiring the exercise, including the sometimes-opprobrious Captain William S. Sims, USN, the Marines of Colonel Barnett’s Advanced Base Brigade successfully turned back the attack of the opposing force. If not effusive with his praise of the Advanced Base Marines, Sims’ only significant critique was with that of the tools the Marines were issued to construct their field fortifications; he did compliment them on their morale, fitness, professionalism, and capabilities.[21]
Colonel George Barnett, who commanded the Brigade before his promotion to commandant, commented thus:
“I believe that advance base work is the most important duty for which marines can be trained, not only because of the possible necessity which may arise for actually seizing and holding an advance base, but also because the training obtained in preparing for this duty is of inestimable value to the corps in the ordinary expeditionary duty which it is so often called upon to perform.”[22]
So, by all accounts, with a crisis brewing in Mexico, the Marines had two fully trained regiments deployed in the Caribbean, outfitted, and experienced in organized landings; and a number of their members had recent combat experience in Nicaragua, and some had combat experience going back to Guantanamo, the Boxer Rebellion, and the Philippines. In the adoption of the new advanced base mission, experienced Marines found themselves composing new landing-doctrine on the fly, as they worked through it. Following the exercise, all guns, searchlights, mines, communications gear, tackle, cribbing, picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, tentage, and organizational equipment were torn down and re-embarked aboard the brigade’s transports. The Marines of both regiments re-embarked, with Lejeune’s mobile unit aboard USS PRAIRIE, and Long’s fixed unit aboard HANCOCK. By February 9, 1914 the regiments arrived in New Orleans and Pensacola.
At the same time, the brigade commander, Colonel George Barnett had been notified that President Woodrow Wilson selected him to fill the position of Major General Commandant of the Marines. Barnett chose Colonel Lejeune to be his assistant; Lejeune agreed to the staff position, on the conditions that he be first be allowed to command the Advanced Base Brigade during any anticipated intervention in Mexico. Unlike previous exercises and expeditions, the involved units were not disbanded immediately or returned to their originating barracks. Plans had been for the Fixed Defense Regiment to return to the Advanced Base School at League Island to continue developing their competencies and training new Marines. The Mobile Defense Regiment was to be dispersed, but the Mexican emergency led Barnett to reassign the unit to Lieutenant Colonel Wendell Neville, USMC. Neville was a veteran of the Guantanamo landing, the Boxer Expedition, the Philippines, Cuba, Panama, and Nicaragua; with orders to remain at the ready should the emergency in Mexico worsen, the USS PRAIRIE took the regiment to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. [23] Shortly after, as Lejeune took command of the brigade, Neville and the Mobile Defense Regiment set sail to join the fleet off the Mexican coast.
THE MEXICAN EMERGENCY
“Revolutions are notoriously bad for business. Foreign investments had already suffered substantial damage and greater destruction appeared imminent. Madero had been dead less than a week when a group calling themselves Constitutionalists rebelled against Huerta. As the fighting became general, oil tanks were set ablaze, trains commandeered, herds of cattle stolen, and rich haciendas ruined; on isolated occasions, foreign nationals were killed. Longingly, the investors remembered the days of Díaz, when, as the saying went, Mexico was the safest country in the world—for everyone except the Mexicans.”[24]
President Madero’s usurper, General Victoriano Huerta, who came to power in a coup backed by the American ambassador Henry L. Wilson, earned the ire of the new American president Wilson in the fall of 1913 when he began executing and jailing his opposition in the Mexican Congress. Shortly afterwards, when it appeared that the British were ingratiating themselves with Huerta by recognizing his government, Wilson appealed to the British to renounce Huerta, hoping they would recall their ambassador to Mexico in protest, as he had removed Henry Lane Wilson.
In November of 1913 American newspapers reported that Rear Admiral Frank Fletcher, commanding the Atlantic Fleet’s Fifth Division, had been dispatched aboard USS RHODE ISLAND to Tampico, Mexico, where he would join the NEBRASKA and MICHIGAN, already offshore. Rebel Constitutionalist forces were threatening to destroy oil tanks and pipelines owned by American and British corporations in Federalist held territory.[25] Yet Huerta remained on good footing with Americans settled in Mexico, and more importantly, American investors.
While the U.S. avowed neutrality in the Mexican rebellion, Wilson opened the southern border to export arms to Constitutionalist rebels. The U.S. entered an international arms bazaar in profiting from the revolution, as even the Japanese were supplying ammunition to the federalists army.[26] When Wilson mobilized 20,000 troops and stationed them on the border to prevent violence in the northern Mexican states from spilling over into the U.S., President Huerta advetised the act to energize Mexican sentiments against the Yanquis.
By the beginning of 1914, President Huerta was beset from all directions; the revolution had forced fabric mills and ore mines shuttered in a recession; the value of the Mexican peso had fallen off in relation to the dollar; inflation was crippling the domestic economy. Huerta couldn’t afford to pay his army; any money coming in from increased taxes, tariffs, and duties went to service existing debt. The U.S. first refused to recognize him as the leader of Mexico, then lifted the arms embargo on his enemies, selling arms to Venustiano Carranza’s Constitutionalists.[27] Zapata’s rebel forces in the south were nearing Mexico City. Villa’s rebel forces in the north were gaining ground, pinning federal forces to the coast near Tampico where warships of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet had gathered to protect American interests ashore.
THE FLEET
In April of 1914, Rear Admiral Charles J. Badger, USN, commanded the United States Navy Atlantic Fleet from his flagship, the dreadnought USS ARKANSAS. Based at the Norfolk Navy Yard at Hampton Roads, ships of his fleet included USS VERMONT, NEW JERSEY, and NEW HAMPSHIRE. USS SOUTH CAROLINA was at Port-au-Prince, Haiti; MICHIGAN and LOUISIANA were in harbor at Philadelphia and Brooklyn respectively. Off the east coast of Mexico, near Tampico at the Pánuco River, Rear Admiral Henry T. Mayo’s Fourth Division of the Atlantic Fleet sat at anchor. His ships included the flagship USS DOLPHIN, USS MINNESOTA, and CONNECTICUT, along with the cruisers DES MOINES and CHESTER. Three hundred miles to the south, off the coast at Vera Cruz, Rear Admiral Frank F. Fletcher commanded all U.S. Naval Forces off the coast of Mexico. Ships at Vera Cruz included the flagship USS RHODE ISLAND, USS FLORIDA, and UTAH, joined by USS PRAIRIE, fresh off the Advanced Base Force exercises at Culebra, Porto Rico.[28] The PRAIRIE, a merchant steamer purchased for the war with Spain in 1898, carried Lieutenant Colonel Wendell C. Neville and Marines of the Second Regiment;[29] as well as Marines from two battleships, a force of 600 officers and men. In New Orleans, Colonel John Lejeune, and the Headquarters Element of the Advanced Base Brigade, along with the 830 Marines of the First Provisional Regiment[30] stood by with USS HANCOCK. In Texas City, the United States Army was mustering the U.S. 5th Brigade (Reinforced) of the Second Division, under the command of Brigadier General Frederick Funston, USA.
At Tampico, the Mexican Federalist gunboats ZARAGOZA and VERA CRUZ patrolled the river, shelling rebel Constitutionalist forces outside the city. Federalist troops had been pushed from the countryside into the suburbs and the industrial core near the river. In Vera Cruz, General Gustavo Maass commanded 600 Federalist troops, of the 18th and 19th Regiments, garrisoned in barracks less than a mile from the wharves. The Federalists showed their alarm over an American invasion by training as much of the populace to be a volunteer army as they could; in an emergency Maass planned on issuing hundreds of rifles to civilians in the city, and conscripting dozens of prisoners from the fortress prison of San Juan de Ulua as conscripted militia.
In April 1914 Tampico found itself literally under the guns of Federalist gunboats firing from the river over the city on Constitutionalist positions on the city outskirts. Compared to Veracruz, Tampico was a new city — an oil city that was the terminus for pipelines from the interior. The focal point of a rich oil region, the city was six miles up the shallow Pánuco River from the beach and had been a minor trading village just years before. Between the city and coastline, on either side of the river, lay the refineries built in the first decade of the century by Standard Oil and dozens of other major oil companies. A city of 30,000, Tampico was home to more American than anywhere but Mexico City. On April 7, Constitutionalist rebels crept up on the Iturbide Bridge, on the rail line that linked Tampico with Victoria.[31] In response, a Federalist gunboat fired on suspected rebel positions, setting an oil tank alight, and panicking foreign workers in the city.
Anticipating an evacuation of non-combatant foreign workers employed by companies in Mexico, the navies of the great powers gathered off the coast. Fletcher, aboard USS RHODE ISLAND went to Veracruz in October of 1913.[32] Rear Admiral Henry T. Mayo, was dispatched to Tampico aboard CONNECTICUT. Once there, he transferred his flag to the DOLPHIN — a smaller dispatch gunboat launched in 1884, and a veteran of the war with Spain. Mayo chose DOLPHIN because it drew less water and was able to navigate the river and sandbars into the shallow Pánuco River.
Awaiting the signal to evacuate expat oil workers, the warships of Germany, France, Spain, and Great Britain sat at anchor beyond the sand bar at the entrance of the river. Rear Admiral Mayo allowed his launch to be put into use shuttling civilians out to the warships; the fighting crept so near to the city that Mayo and the State Department representative requested an additional troop ship to evacuate American citizens. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan and President Wilson turned the request down, believing it was the responsibility of the expats to find their own way to safety and that the warships of the Atlantic Fleet would have to suffice.
Tensions rose a notch on April 8, 1914, when a Marine carrying dispatches from the consul to the fleet got turned around near the Iturbidé Bridge, and was detained for a few minutes by Federalist soldiers. On April 9, 1914, sailors took Mayo’s launch to a German warehouse on the river which had a supply of petrol available for the DOLPHIN’s launches. Federalist soldiers in the area, spooked by the proximity of rebel forces, and nearby shelling, were under orders to defend the Iturbidé Bridge. Seeing men in uniform handling stores near the bridge, they seized nine men of the DOLPHIN’s working party and held them for less than an hour.[33]
Rear Admiral Mayo, perhaps looking for a fight, took great umbrage, claiming that because the sailors were aboard a craft flying the national ensign when they were taken, they had been taken from sovereign U.S. territory. On April 11, 1914 , Mexican soldiers accosted yet another American sailor for a few minutes, mistaking him for a deserter the Navy had posted “Wanted” notices on; the officer of the deck aboard USS MINNESOTA thought the incident so unremarkable, he didn’t even make an entry in the deck log.[34] Also, a Mexican telegraph embargo held up a coded U.S. State Department message to DC for an hour. The cumulative accrual of these incidents became proof in the mind of Woodrow Wilson that Huerta and Mexican forces were disrespecting the United States.
In the annals of geopolitics, the detention of American servicemen by Huerta’s Army, under a flag or not, may seem arbitrary and erratic, but it’s worth considering the context on the ground in Tampico. Mexico was in the third year of rebellion. Rebel forces were in the suburbs. Oil tanks and pipelines were on fire. And the sailors and Marine were detained in the vicinity of an important rail bridge, which is noteworthy in itself; Pancho Villa, whose forces were on the outskirts of the city, was known to exploit the rails in his battle with Federalist forces. Travel by rail allowed Villa to move large units over great distances rapidly, and when he wasn’t using the rails to move troops, he was using trains as mobile explosive devices — packing them with explosives and sending them hurtling towards enemy rail blockades. The Iturbidé Bridge was of significant military value. It probably didn’t help that Villa’s forces wore khaki uniforms, much like those worn by Marinos norteamericanos. Rear Admiral Mayo was the one who turned these minor security incidents into diplomatic affrontery for his sensibilities and the Wilson administration.
In keeping with the tenets of naval diplomacy of the early 20th century, Rear Admiral Mayo, commanding the U.S. squadron off the coast of Mexico at Tampico, made himself responsible for the demands of the Mexican government in recompense for the slights to the American flag and repeated aggression against U.S. sailors. Acting without guidance from either the Secretary of the Navy, or Secretary of State, Mayo demanded a formal written apology to the United States for the incident of the 9th, including punishment for the Mexican officer involved. He also demanded that Mexico fly the American flag in a prominent position and provide it a 21-gun salute. Mayo hadn’t even clear this demand with his immediate superior, Admiral Fletcher at Veracruz, however, when appraised of the incidents, Fletcher concurred with Mayo’s demand and posited that should Mexico fail to render the salute, the U.S. might seize a Federalist gunboat on Rio Pánuco. International law prohibited Mayo from shelling Tampico, as the city was not the site of defensive fortifications or artillery.
In this era, U.S. Navy ships’ captains were accustomed to conducting their own brand of diplomacy in foreign ports, with nominal input from local U.S. consul or chargé d’affairs. But the introduction of telegram, and the even more novel radio-telegram, began to bring leadership in Washington closer to the situation. Sometimes, as when tensions rose in Mexico, state department officials became reluctant to use commercial telegraph trunk lines under the control of Mexican entities. The U.S. Navy was able to provide telegraphy over the radio airwaves, but their service was limited by atmospheric constraints that restricted distance and time of day during which transmissions could be sent and received. These constraints forced Mayo to send radio messages from Tampico to Veracruz, where Rear Admiral Fletcher’s flagship could send a stronger signal to Key West, where the Navy network of radio stations could reach Washington DC.
So, despite this clunky communications system, Secretary of State Willam Jennings Bryan notified President Woodrow Wilson, then golfing in West Virginia, just hours after the incident occurred on the 9th.[35] On the 10th, Wilson replied to Bryan’s telegram, and approved punishment of the gravest sort, and returned to his golf. Secretary Bryan was unable to clarify the decision for the state department consul by telegram; in the absence of dissent from Washington, Rear Admiral Mayo made arrangements to further ratchet up pressure on the Mexican army. Mayo moved USS DES MOINES closer to shore and cleared her decks for action.[36] It’s possible that a more active Secretary of State might have been able to reduce the heat on the situation in Tampico, but Secretary Bryan, who had no foreign policy experience, remained passive through the crisis. Bryan took his cues from Rear Admiral Mayo’s communications and was merely a messenger for President Wilson.
Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels conferred with Rear Admiral Fletcher about Mayo’s capabilities as Mayo was meeting with his staff and senior officers, crafting landing plans for a taking Tampico. Rear Admiral Mayo assembled a plan to take Tampico; sailors from DOLPHIN would take customs house and commercial wharf, and DES MOINES and CHESTER would sink the Federalist gunboats. The battleships MINNESOTA and CONNECTICUT, and the cruiser SAN FRANCISCO, would offload sailors and Marines from beyond the sandbar offshore. Ships’ launches would tow longboats upriver. The shallowness of Rio Pánuco posed a challenge for planners. It restricted how close the battleships could get to the city; should a landing party have to cross the beach, sailors and Marines would be forced to wade the last 100 yards in waist deep water because of sandbars. Additionally, low scrub brush and sand dunes ashore provided adequate concealment and cover for defending Federalist forces.
As they had in the lead up to war with Spain, the American fourth estate placed the crisis in Mexico front and center in the news; reports from the White House, and reports from headquarters nearer to Mexico kept Americans abreast of the mood of the president, his cabinet officers, and fleet officers. The papers reported 800 Marines aboard USS HANCOCK departing New Orleans, and that Admiral Badger, Commander-in-Chief of Mexican operations, departing Hampton Roads with the balance of the Atlantic Fleet, all bound for Tampico. And journalists were not shy about creative embellishment in reporting regarding the initial incidents, claiming the detained sailors were “forced to march through the streets of Tampico, jeered by Mexicans…”, when there are no indications the public ever even observed the incidents.[37]
Following the successful fleet and advanced base exercises at Culebra in January, Marines of the Advanced Base Brigade kept their eyes on the news out of Mexico concerning the revolution and the thousands of Americans working there. On Easter Sunday, April 12, at New Orleans, Colonel Lejeune and Marines of the fixed regiment[38] were ordered to vacate HANCOCK, along with all their equipment; the ship was slated to sail for Tampico empty, to evacuate American civilians. A day later, on the 13th, Secretary Daniels changed his mind, ordering Lejeune and the Marines at New Orleans to re-embark aboard HANCOCK and sail for Tampico. When Woodrow Wilson returned to the White House on the 13th, he told the press that “the salute will be fired…”. At Veracruz, Rear Admiral Fletcher, his ships’ commanders, and Lieutenant Colonel Neville assembled a plan for seizing the port facilities and city of Veracruz.
Making a landing in a port facility sounds straight-forward, but the ships of Fletcher’s section would not be tying up at the wharves; Bluejackets and Marines of the Landing Brigade would be shuttled ashore in whaleboats towed by ships’ launches. The plan required a sequence for loading the boats, and where the boats would discharge the sailors and Marines. As much as the plan was for making an uncontested landing, quick firing guns were installed on launches, and the gunners on CHESTER and PRAIRIE would be informed what units they’d be covering during the landing, and potential targets in the harbor they should watch.
On Tuesday the 14th, Rear Admiral Mayo conferred with his Royal Navy counterpart in Mexican waters, Rear Admiral Sir Christopher Craddock, who’d been protecting the interests of the Crown in Tampico since February of 1913. UK oil companies had invested heavily in Mexico, as oil had quickly established itself in an international market. Craddock had visited British evacuees in Texas recently and shared many of the same challenges as Mayo. In Washington President Wilson met with Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan and his envoy to Mexico, Governor John Lind; meeting with the full cabinet, Wilson repeated his administration’s stance — Mexico would fire the salute as Rear Admiral Mayo had demanded, or face a punitive expedition. Under orders from Secretary of the Navy Daniels, Rear Admiral Fletcher departed Hampton Roads with the balance of the Atlantic Fleet, bound for Tampico.
In 1914, the United States still had a functioning Congress. On April 15, Wilson summoned the ranking members of Congress’ foreign relations committees to the White House to brief them on the various Mexican insults and his administration’s response. Democrats supported the president along party lines, and Republicans had been hawkish on Mexico for years; Wilson had a compliant audience. As dispatches were traded on the 15th and 16th with the envoys and Mexican representatives, the tone of the language coming out of the White House reinforced the threat that the fleet would remain off the Mexican coast until Huerta left office. However, Rear Admiral Frank Fletcher, commanding naval forces in Mexican waters off Vera Cruz believed that the local Mexican commanders had responded appropriately, by relieving the officer who detained the sailors, and apologizing for the incident.
When Lejeune and the fixed regiment arrived at Tampico on April 18th, the Colonel went into conference with Rear Admiral Mayo aboard USS DOLPHIN, to solidify plans for the evacuation of non-combatants. Given the shallow nature of the Pánuco River, and sandbars at the mouth, stormy weather would make handling small craft dangerous, as Tampico was six miles up the river. Evacuating civilians from the conflict zones was not a new mission for the Navy, but any attempts at Tampico would be within range of Mexican guns, or meant an overland march and possibly contested beach landing.
The American public, a decade removed from the scandals over atrocities that happened during the insurrection in the Philippines, largely supported Wilson’s policy towards Mexico. And since there really was no action Huerta could take to satisfy Woodrow Wilson, short of removing himself from office, the White House played out its hand in the press. To appease Wilson, Huerta did offer to take part in a simultaneous 21-gun salute made by Mexican and American guns, effectively making the U.S. recognize his regime. President Wilson refused; newspapers reported that Admiral Badger’s Atlantic Fleet was still sailing for the Mexican coast. It’s clear Wilson perceived “studied contempt” towards the United States in the Mexican actions, and that he regarded Huerta as a butcher. Wilson publicly expressed his desires that a more democratic government should replace Huerta, but what pretext could push him to act directly against the General?
As he shuttled between West Virginia and DC, Wilson and his advisors worked on plans to take and hold the customs houses at both Tampico and Vera Cruz.[39] Duties and fees provided Huerta with the cash he needed to operate his government and fight rebel forces. Holding these ports, while conducting a blockade of Mexico, would place maximum leverage on the dictator. Also, Wilson predicted the Mexican people, exhausted after four years of revolution, would welcome American troops with open arms.
On April 18, Lejeune and the Marines from New Orleans arrived at Tampico. On the 19th, the American consul in Mexico, William Canada, advised the White House that the German merchant steamer YPIRINGA, carrying a shipment of arms, would be docking at Veracruz at some point on the 21st; the manifest for the shipment would prove to include twenty machine guns, numerous rifles, and millions of rounds of pistol, carbine, and rifle ammunition which might keep Huerta in his fight against Constitutionalist rebels, or with American servicemen. With the confirmation of the shipment aboard YPIRINGA, Woodrow Wilson’s concerns over the insults to the United States vanished into thin air. The State Department representative in Tampico reacted quickly to the shift in focus to Vera Cruz. In a formal complaint to Washington, he pointed out that abandoning Tampico meant that 1,000 Americans working in a city already roiled by revolution would be at risk of increased anti-American animus. The State Department in Washington chose not to respond.
APRIL 20, 1914
Nailing down the sequence of events and communications before the landing at Vera Cruz is a difficult task. With multiple headquarters afloat — Badger’s, Fletcher’s, and Mayo’s — direction from both State and Navy Departments, direct intervention by the White House, delays caused by sketchy and often times delayed radio communications, and the three time zones’ difference between the east coast of Mexico and Washington, DC, a web of confusion forms for anyone attempting to follow along. In short, the White House ordered Rear Admiral Mayo to abandon rescue operations at Tampico, and send his warships to Vera Cruz, where the U.S. would land and take the port. Mayo negotiated to keep DOLPHIN at Tampico to continue with the relief.
On Capitol Hill, the president met with Congressional leaders at 2pm; newspapers reported that Wilson had asked Congress for approval in making a landing or landings in Mexico. Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge objected to Wilson’s position, pointing out that in singling out General Huerta for removal, Wilson was throwing his support behind Pancho Villa, and putting Americans in Mexico at risk. Wilson’s response showed that he wasn’t going into Mexico to protect Americans, and that if the expats felt threatened by the revolution, they could leave on their own accord.[40]
The newspapers also reported that a German flagged steamer was carrying munitions to Vera Cruz and that seizing the ship on the high seas would exacerbate tensions with Germany.[41]
At 3pm Wilson addressed both chambers of Congress, exaggerating the significance and severity of insults Mexico committed against the United States. The House quickly passed Wilson’s preferred version of the resolution for action; the Senate chose to debate the matter. Republicans supported intervention but wanted it to be clear that the U.S. was intervening to protect American interests (my italics). The Senate debate lasted until past midnight. When the body adjourned, the intent was to take the matter up in the morning.
Rear Admiral Badger didn’t receive the message that Mayo was to move to Vera Cruz until after midnight. He did receive the order to divert the balance of the Atlantic Fleet, sailing from Hampton Roads, to Vera Cruz. At Veracruz, Rear Admiral Fletcher learned that the Federalist released prisoners from the harbor fortress of San Juan de Ulúa and armed them to defend the city. Navy Secretary Daniels authorized Fletcher to use the previously seized Ward Liner MEXICO, to evacuate refugees at Veracruz.
After 4pm, Rear Admiral Fletcher received notice that is boss, Rear Admiral Badger, would be joining him at Vera Cruz. Not knowing that all of Mayo’s ships were on the way also, Fletcher asked for USS SAN FRANCISCO to be transferred to his location. At 9pm Fletcher received word that YPIRINGA would be docking mid-morning the next day, hours after Secretary Daniels transmitted it. Fletcher ordered Commander H.I. Cone, USN, commanding USS UTAH, to stop YPIRINGA 10-miles out from the harbor. After 10pm, Rear Admiral Badger requested Fletcher meet him at Tampico, three hundred miles away from the scheduled landing at Vera Cruz. After a period, he changed his mind.
APRIL 21, 1914
The tenets of successful amphibious panning are commanders’ involvement and guidance and unity of effort. The nature of amphibious operations gives rise to planning procedures that are both intricate and unique.[42]
The command-and-control situation between the White House, and the flag commands off the coast of Mexico on the morning of April 21st continued to be frantic. Wilson’s shifting objectives, units still enroute to the landing, the three time zones, and the sketchy radio-telegraph networks continued to provide friction to the effort. At 2am on the 21st, the American consul in Mexico, William W. Canada, sent Washington a telegram confirming the German steamer YPIRINGA, loaded with machine guns and ammunition for Huerta’s Federalist army, was due in harbor at 1030, but, somehow, Fletcher was to delay any action until the Senate has completed its debate and voted to act.
In a four-way phone call, in the middle of the night, President Wilson, Secretary of State Bryan, Secretary of the Navy Daniels, and Wilson’s assistant Tumulty conferred over the impending arrival of YPIRINGA and the munitions shipment. As everything coming into Vera Cruz and Mexico would have to go through the Customs House, Wilson decided he had no options available but to seize the port. Wilson made the call, “Take Vera Cruz at once.”
At 0800, Rear Admiral Fletcher received the message “Seize Custom House. Do not permit war supplies to reach Huerta or any other party”. It’s no surprise that when he received the message to land, Fletcher was in conference with his Naval Brigade Commander, Captain William R. Rush of USS FLORIDA, Lieutenant Colonel Wendell C. Neville, USMC, commanding the mobile regiment aboard PRAIRIE, and PRAIRIE’s CO, Commander Herman O. Stickney, USN. In receipt of the order to land, Rear Admiral Fletcher did his best to delay the landing, because he wanted the German steamer YPIRINGA in hand before he made the landing; the seizure of the weapons-cargo was his top priority.
On top of multiple commands and sketchy, delayed communications, Fletcher was concerned that an actual atmospheric storm was brewing. With the battleships unable to enter the harbor,[43] the Marines and Bluejackets would be making the landing in ships’ whaleboats towed by launches. Fully laden boats on choppy water risked foundering before reaching any pier. In that Fletcher knew his landing force of 1,200 was up against 600 Federalist soldiers defending the city, fighting the weather too would increase the degree of difficulty for the operation.
By 9am, Fletcher ultimately decided to go. He gave the order for UTAH to leave the harbor, and for Neville to ready his Marines. He also notified the State Department representative, Consul Canada, that U.S. forces were landing. At 0955, Fletcher modified Secretary of the Navy Daniels’ orders for Rear Admiral Mayo to remove all his ships from Tampico to support the landing at Veracruz; Fletcher acknowledged that the American civilians’ lot at Tampico was at risk, and leaving part of Mayo’s squadron there was a good hedge against violence in the oil city.
At 0930 Fletcher’s messenger reached the U.S. Consulate and advised Consul Canada to make an offer for evacuation to all European expats aboard the steamer MEXICO. He also notified European navy ships in the harbor of the impending attack by the U.S. and gave the chiefs of the customs house and local police forewarning. Fletcher sent a messenger to the commander of the fort not to fire torpedoes at the U.S. ships offloading in the harbor. At the same time, Mexican harbor officials ordered one of the merchant steamships acting as an evacuation ship to cast off from Pier 4, where YPIRINGA was set to dock and offload cargo directly to quayside railcars. At 0955, Rear Admiral Fletcher replied to Rear Admiral Mayo’s request to keep ships at Tampico to protect Americans who hadn’t been evacuated. Fletcher instructed Mayo to keep the battleship CONNECTICUT, dispatch ship DOLPHIN, cruiser DES MOINES, collier/transport CYCLOPS, and hospital ship SOLACE near to Tampico for any eventualities, and informed Mayo that his own section would be landing at Vera Cruz without Mayo’s.
At 1030 on April 21st, aboard PRAIRIE, Lieutenant Colonel Wendell C. Neville signaled to Rear Admiral Fletcher “AM READY.”
In receipt of this notification, Fletcher ordered Captain Rush to land the brigade. At 1112, as the boats carrying Marines and Bluejackets were lowered into the harbor’s waters, Consul Canada telephoned General Gustavo Maass, the military commandant of Veracruz, to advise him that American sailors and Marines were landing, and to ask him to assist in keeping the civilian population under control. General Maass did not take the news well.
The landing party loaded the ships boats, large whaleboats that were towed in tandem by a motor launch. The launches towed the sailors and Marines to Pier Four, the large central pier that dominated the northern end of the harbor, directly across from Fort San Juan de Ulua. Running out onto the pier were railway tracks so ships could offload directly to rail cars. At the pier the sailors and Marines scrambled up the concrete pier or climbed stairways leading down to the water. PRAIRIE and CHESTER were positioned north and south of the basin, so they could provide gunfire support across the greater part of the harbor. The south side of the basin was a pedestrian promenade; three quarters of the way from Pier Four to the Promenade was the fiscal wharf, which served the Customs House. Maass immediately called Mexico City, asking for orders, then moved to the military barracks on Plaza Zamora.[44]At the barracks, he issued orders to his two battalion commanders to send 100 soldiers to Pier 4 and the customs house to “repel the invasion”, defend the barracks, and release the prisoners at the military prison — La Galera — to join in the defense. He also opened the armory to arm the citizenry of Vera Cruz. When the armory was emptied, 450 prisoners and citizens were armed with bolt action rifles, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. The Revolution had not yet reached Vera Cruz as it had Tampico; Federalist forces in the city had not yet been fully mobilized. Minutes after Maass dispatched soldiers and citizens to defend their city, the army in Mexico City ordered him to withdraw from Vera Cruz altogether, and to relocate to a small town on the rail line at Tejería, ten miles from the city center.
The first whaleboat transporting Marines from ship to shore docked at Pier 4 at 1120; Pier 4 was the large commercial pier dominating the harbor, and linked shipping to rail service in an out of the harbor. It was reported that Huerta’s army had engines and rail cars at the ready to accept YPIRINGA’s cargo. Neville’s Marines, from PRAIRIE, and Rush’s Bluejackets, from FLORIDA, moved into the city blocks fronting the harbor. Neville’s 502 Marines were an amalgamation of the Marine detachments from both UTAH and FLORIDA, attached to the Mobile Defense Regiment of the Advanced Base Brigade from aboard PRAIRIE. As the Marines landed, Captain Rush led the 205 Bluejackets from FLORIDA ashore. Neville’s Marines pushed directly inland eight blocks, taking the rail yard on their right, then paralleling the railroad tracks inland. As officers and noncoms shouted orders on the otherwise quiet city street, the residents and business owners of the city barred their front doors, and closed the shutters on their shops.
While Maass couldn’t recall the men he’d sent towards Pier 4, he was able to withdraw remaining troops from the barracks, leaving 5,000 rounds of ammunition behind, and successfully moved the functioning railway engines and railcars from their sidings near the pier, and spirited them away from the advancing Marines.
THE LANDING PARTY
“Each ship and squadron shall have a permanently organized landing-force, composed of infantry and artillery. The proportion of infantry to artillery will necessarily vary with the nature of the service to be performed.”[45]
The Navy’s landing party manual laid out the organization, composition and tactics to be used by the ships’ landing battalions. The boats of Fletcher’s landing force set off in sequence, as the number of tugs, ship’s launches, was limited, and they were towing a number of whaleboats in trail.[46] The foundational unit of any U.S. Navy landing party was the section; one officer, three petty officers, and twenty-four sailors taken from the same gun-division from a ship formed each section, trained both as infantry, and in handling artillery. Two sections would compose a company; two or more companies would form the ship’s battalion; multiple ships’ battalions would form a regiment, and multiple regiments a brigade. Marine security sections from each of the ships would form their own companies, which could form separate battalions, or find themselves attached to other Marine expeditionary units. Unlike the Marines, the sailors of the sections had primary shipboard responsibilities on the ships’ guns; the Marines primary shipboard responsibilities were security of the ship. Manning ships’ guns was the Marines’ secondary responsibility, but between assignments aboard the ships of the fleet, Marines could be stationed in locations like Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, or the Philippines where they would hone field craft and small unit tactics. The “Boat-Book”[47] would provide doctrine for fitting out, manning, and operating the whale boats and launches that would provide ship-to-shore transport. It was up to the battalion commander to create the landing plan for a ship, in coordination with other ships of the fleet. Ships’ battalions and regiments would be staffed with individuals serving the roles of adjutant, commissary, and surgeon. Regiment staffs would be organized similarly, with the addition of Signal-officers, quartermasters, and intelligence officers. Ad hoc assignments would be made to provide the landing force “pioneers, signalmen, messmen, ammunition- and ordnance- party, gun-cotton party, and ambulance-party.” Beach masters would handle the boats at the objective and provide security for the landing site in the absence of the landing party. The greater part of the landing manual was dedicated to small unit drill, taken directly from the Infantry Drill-Regulations, U.S. Army, 1911.
The Marines and sailors were armed with the ‘United States Magazine Rifle Model 1903’ — popularly known as the ‘Springfield ought-three’ — manufactured at either the Rock Island Arsenal, or the Springfield Arsenal. The rifle fired the .30 caliber Model 1906 bullet of a Spitzer design, hence the nomenclature ‘.30-06’. Adopted by the Army in 1903, the Marines had been testing the ’03 since 1904, and the Navy adopted the rifle for fleet service in 1910, replacing the Model 1892 Krag-Jørgensen in .30-40. Marines and sailors wore the M1910 Cartridge Belt, which had ten pockets attached, which each held two five-round clips for the rifle. The Marines wore khaki uniforms; long sleeve button front shirts, khaki trousers, brown leather shoes, tan canvas leggings, and a olive drab felt campaign cover, which looked much like the Army’s Montana peaked field cover. FLORIDA’s Bluejackets wore their blue navy uniforms — affectionately known by some as “cracker jacks” — only marginally less visible than their all-white uniforms against the dun streets of Vera Cruz — with their lower legs wrapped in tan canvas leggings, and their ammunition and equipment on a canvas cartridge belt with suspenders. The Mexican Federalist forces wore khaki uniforms too, but the only thing defining civilian combatants from non-combatants would be the rifles they carried.
The Naval Brigade brought heavier weapons along too. Both the Marines and sailors deployed machine guns; the light machine gun carried by both services was the Hotchkiss M1909 Benét-Merciér machine gun in .30-06. The heavier, and more stable machine gun on the U.S. side was the M1895 Colt-Browning Machine Gun — later known as the ‘potato digger’, because of the operating lever that swung below the barrel, digging dirt up at the front of the gun if set up too close to a berm in front of it — chambered in 6mm Lee-Navy.[48] The tables of organization for both the Marines and Navy called for ‘artillery’ within the landing parties, which was a 3-inch field gun slung low on a wheeled carriage.[49] The Marines had three companies of artillery with them in the Mobile Defense Regiment aboard PRAIRIE, the 1st, the 9th, and the 13th.[50] Without organic drayage, the gun crews had two choices whenever they landed anywhere, either haul the gun by hand, or secure horses, mules, or donkeys, locally. Providing close in heavy support during the landing, quick-firing 1-pounder guns were mounted on the decks of the motor launches towing the Marines and sailors making the landing.
As Neville’s Marines secured the Terminal Station, rail yard, and roundhouse, they established their perimeter to the west at Avenia Guerrero, to the north at the rail yard, and to the south tying in with FLORIDA’s Bluejackets along Calle Emperán. In the railyard, the engine and railcars tasked with carrying YPIRINGA’s cargo were missing; Maass’ men had successfully spirited the rolling stock away in the path of the Americans. The Marines’ other objectives included the cable office, which they secured by 11:45, after asking for directions from the desk at the American Consulate. As the morning turned into afternoon, Neville had over 700 Marines spread over fourteen square blocks of the city.
Advancing along the waterfront slightly to the south, Florida’s sailors turned and marched into the city, behind the warehouses on the wharf. They moved in columns of two, intent on seizing the Customs House, their main objective. This initial entry into the city was only several blocks wide, extending inland from the pier. Captain Rush set up his headquarters in the Hotel Terminal, and his signalmen set up shop on the rooftop, wig-wagging their first message to Rear Admiral Fletcher at 1150.
As the Americans moved up city streets to secure their objectives, armed citizens and soldiers of Vera Cruz took up positions on the rooftops, in windows, and in doorways, at the ready. At 1157, Aurelio Monffort, a Vera Cruz policeman, fired the first shot taken at the advancing sailors at the intersection of Morelos and Miguel Lerdo.[51] FLORIDA’s sailors and Neville’s Marines were suddenly under fire, albeit not perfectly aimed, from all directions. From street level to rooftops, Veracruzanos and Federalist soldiers fired in a volume great enough to halt the Americans’ advance. Sailors and Marines were surprised to be taking fire from buildings they had already passed on their way to their objectives; it didn’t take them long to learn the hard lesson that cleared buildings still require security; failure to secure cleared building means the enemy could flank them, and attack from the rear.
Under fire, the Navy lieutenants and ensigns commanding Florida’s companies gathered their wits, and assessed what they were up against; sending sailors forward in smaller groups, they asked for volunteers in locations where the fire was heavier. As they resumed their movement, the sailors and Marines returned fire with rifle and machine gun. As the Americans suffered casualties, and calls for Navy Corpsmen were shouted.[52] Captain Rush was shot in the calf, and two of Florida’s sailors were killed. After taking out Federalist machine guns, and climbing through windows, Florida’s sailors seized the Customs House and Customs Warehouse. After setting up their two Colt machine guns, FLORIDA’s sailors fired from tripods upwards, towards where snipers were observed in windows and on the rooftops. Mexican snipers fired from the Juarez Light (the lighthouse one block west of the Customs House), Captain Rush ordered his one landing gun to take the snipers out; six rounds of 3-inch ammunition silenced snipers in the light. As the fighting continued, FLORIDA’s sailors and Neville’s Marines moved their wounded and dead to a sheltered location on Pier Four. Captain Rush reported his killed and wounded to Rear Admiral Fletcher; Fletcher radioed Rear Admiral Mayo, ordering him to send the hospital ship SOLACE to Vera Cruz to handle his wounded. Lieutenant Colonel Neville’s Marines set up their Colt-Browning machine guns firing down the main streets running from north to south, providing support for advancing Marines. After advancing two blocks to the south, the Marines received the order from Captain Rush to fall back.
At 1230, Captain Rush sent a message to Rear Admiral Fletcher. Rush estimated the landing force was facing 1000 Mexican troops, and asked that the reserve force, UTAH’s battalion, be landed to assist. Fletcher in turn ordered UTAH to release YPIRINGA, as it was clear she wouldn’t attempt docking in Vera Cruz. At 1312, UTAH’s boats moved into the harbor, bringing the 390-man reserve. When Fletcher ordered the Naval Brigade to land and take the Customs House and rail siding, not all his forces had yet arrived in the assembly area. Rear Admiral Mayo’s force, including Lejeune’s First Regiment, were still on their way from Tampico, and Rear Admiral Badger’s force, sailing from the United States was still hundreds of miles away at sea. The buildup of the landing force ashore was a rolling one.
At 1300 the cadets and staff of the Naval Academy, located to the south of the basin of the harbor, started firing on Americans disembarking from boats. The beachmaster, who controlled the launches and ships’ boats in the harbor, Chief Boatswain John McCloy, ordered the sailors aboard the craft to start firing on the naval academy using the mounted one-pounder guns. The bosun had been awarded the Medal of Honor in 1900 at Tien Tsin. In directing fire from the exposed boats, and distracting Mexican fire, the Boxer Rebellion veteran designated the enemy’s positions. USS PRAIRIE fired on those positions at the with its 3-inch guns, knocking out the academy’s larger guns. With the academy’s guns out of commission, evacuation of wounded on Pier Four continued.
Atop the Hotel Terminal, Captain Rush’s signalmen attracted an inordinate amount of Mexican fire. Private Daniel Hagerty, one of the Marines sent to the roof to provide security for the signalmen, was killed, and Electrician Third Class Edward A. Gisburne was wounded attempting to pull him to safety. Gisburn’s knee was shattered. In the finest tradition of the naval service, the signalmen remained on the rooftop through the fighting, providing a link between the landing force and the fleet. By 1340, UTAH’s boats landed at Pier Four, discharging four companies of Bluejackets and four machine guns. The landing force reserve plugged weak points in the Americans’ positions. After taking the new customs warehouse, sailors piled bales and barrels of cargo on carts, creating barricades at street intersections. Mexican sniper fire continued to take a toll on unwary Bluejackets. Mexican sailors aboard the steamer SONORA, tied up at the wharf, opened fire on the Americans, creating a crossfire. Bluejackets returned fire on the steamer; after capturing the SONORA’s captain, who’d been stranded on shore, the Bluejackets convinced the Mexican sailors to surrender their arms.[53]
As it had 300 miles to the north, in Tampico, presence of American civilians complicated decisions for the landing force; although many had taken the State Department’s advice to evacuate to the merchant ships MEXICO and ESPERANZA in Vera Cruz harbor, pockets of expat gringos remained holed-up in the hotels of Vera Cruz. Officers directing supporting fire from PRAIRIE and CHESTER didn’t want to hit buildings where American women may be sheltering. Fortunately, gunnery had been frequently practiced in the fleet; in the months leading up to deployment to Mexico, gunners and aimers had gotten their practice in, on ranges at Guantanamo and Culebra.
As shadows lengthened, and more sailors and Marines landed, Mexican sniping continued to harass, wound, and kill, but not with the gusto of the morning hours. The landing force pushed further into the city and began to consolidate their positions; they built additional barricades and cleared any buildings they had inadvertantly passed. If before the landing they had been undertrained in urban combat, they learned their lessons on the double that afternoon. With the stated objectives accomplished — the interruption of the delivery of YPIRINGA’s cargo of armaments; taking and holding the Customs House; and taking and holding the cable office — Rear Admiral Fletcher needed to address the bigger question:
What next?
After moving his flag closer to the action, aboard USS PRAIRIE, Rear Admiral Fletcher dispatched a message to the White House, recounting mission success — YPIRINGA was prevented from entering the harbor at 1400 — and the landing force’s losses. He also reported four sailors and Marines killed in action during the landing, and an additional twenty wounded.
The news of American deaths was a blow to the university president-cum-commander in chief.
Either Wilson hadn’t asked about, or his advisors hadn’t told him, of the potential of casualties. Whether Wilson considered there would be Mexican deaths isn’t clear either. As Fletcher consolidated his positions near the wharves, he dispatched a messenger to get in touch with Vera Cruz’ mayor and General Maass. After not hearing back from the messenger, he sent a second. The second reached the mayor after climbing through a second-floor window, but the mayor told him to talk to the chief of police. After having dodged sniper fire, and fearing for his life, the second messenger retired. The first messenger was later identified as one of Vera Cruz’s dead.
With darkness approaching, Rear Admiral Fletcher elected to consolidate his position; advancing into battle in an unfamiliar city, after dark held no advantages. He had sixty officers and eleven-hundred sailors of the 1st Seamen Regiment on shore, in addition to the thirty officers and seven hundred Marines of the Second Provisional Regiment. In and about the railyard, Neville’s men consolidated their perimeter surrounding the rail yard and tying in with Bluejackets closer to the wharves. UTAH’s sailors hunkered down in the Customs House and Warehouse; FLORIDA’s sailors were split between the Post Office, and serving as a reserve located on Pier Four.[54] As soon as it was dark out, Fletcher’s ships in harbor trained their searchlights on shore, providing the sailors and Marines with semi-illumination all night long. Mexicans trying to escape the fort in the harbor, by walking along the breakwater were turned back by searchlight and rifle fire.
Sleeping in watches, in the dirt and sand, and in hallways, rooms and warehouses, must have been a novel experience for many of the Bluejackets; for the Marines who’d had multiple tours of expeditionary duty and the Culebra exercise under their belts, not so much. Elsewhere in the city, the prisoners freed to defend the city enjoyed their freedom, maybe a little bit too much. With the lack of supervision, the former prisoners looted alcohol, got drunk, and took liberties with Veracruzanos who hadn’t been able to evacuate.
DAY ONE SUMMARY
“An amphibious assault requires the swift buildup of combat power ashore; from an initial zero capability to a fully coordinated striking power as the attack progresses toward AF objectives.”[55]
The imperative of the arrival of the German YPIRINGA and her cargo of arms forced Wilson to order Rear Admiral Fletcher to launch the landing without all promised assets. Fortunately, General Huerta chose discretion over valor. Overnight, with Marines and sailors ashore holding fast, further reinforcements arrived. USS SAN FRANCISCO anchored and landed her battalion of Bluejackets at 0100 on April 22; her sailors moved into the line in the dark and began reinforcing street barricades with stores from the Customs Warehouse. At 0005, USS CHESTER made port, and her 137 Bluejackets and 88 Marines were on Pier Four by 0300. Smedley Butler led his battalion of Panama Marines, most recently deployed to Nicaragua, ashore to augment Lieutenant Colonel Neville’s regiment. USS ARKANSAS, Rear Admiral Badger’s flagship, arrived at the outer harbor at 0200, at the head of a squadron composed of NEW HAMPSHIRE, SOUTH CAROLINA, VERMONT, and NEW JERSEY; Badger’s squadron had left Hampton Roads, Virginia, on the 14th of April.
Rear Admiral Badger was senior to Rear Admiral Fletcher, but deferred command to his junior, who’d been on site at Vera Cruz for weeks, and had a better sense of events ashore. So, with the arrival of the balance of the Atlantic Fleet, and the ships from Rear Admiral Mayo’s section from Tampico, 1200 Bluejackets, and 300 Marines landed in the hours before dawn on the 22nd. Some were still in the process of landing when operations resumed at 0745.
APRIL 22, 1914
The American line of advance was from the north, in the railyard and along the wharf at Pier Four, south and west through the city towards the Naval Academy, barracks, hospital, and new market. On the left, nearer the harbor’s waters, sailors from UTAH led, while Neville’s Marines were on the right, planning to make a right turn to the outskirts of town, where they would establish a perimeter in the sand hills. In addition to UTAH’s sailors, the Second Naval Landing Regiment was led by the NEW HAMPSHIRE battalion, who had missed the fighting the day before; NEW HAMPSHIRE’s skipper, Captain Edwin A. Anderson, USN, led his battalion from the front, marching them in formation from the Promenade past the Naval Academy bound for Calle Francisco Canal. As they took a “column, right” onto Calle Francisco, numerous Mexican rifles, machine guns, and one-pounder guns opened-up on Anderson’s formation. The volume of fire surprised and stopped the sailors immediately. They turned and raced for the safety of the Promenade. SOUTH CAROLINA’s battalion, following in trace, found itself nearly run over by the retreating Bluejackets. Some sailors did return fire, with rifle and machine gun, and litter bearers displayed great courage as they did their best to get their wounded and dead shipmates out of the crossfire.
As sailors straggled back to the expanse of the promenade, CHESTER and SAN FRANCISCO opened up on the Naval Academy with 5-inch gun fire. A group of NEW HAMPSHIRE sailors took shelter in a building across the street from one of the targeted buildings. As the ships pounded the buildings with dozens of rounds, rifle fire from shore peppered the sailors manning the guns aboard ship. Fire from shore is always a hazard to ships providing naval gunfire support, but how often is it close enough to be rifle fire? Under the cover of the ships’ guns, Anderson regrouped his battalion, and the Second Regiment returned to the advance towards the naval academy, this time in extended formation, occupying buildings and clearing as they advanced.
Further inland, Neville’s Marines, augmented by overnight arrivals, also came under fire. Major Smedley Butler’s Marines — fresh from service off the coast of Nicaragua — formed the 3rd Battalion of Neville’s regiment and extended the protection on the western and northern flanks. In their second day of street fighting, the Marines exhibited knowledge gained from hard lessons; dashing across open areas was avoided if the Marines could go from house to house in the densely packed neighborhoods through the wall of the houses themselves. They rapidly became proficient in clearing rooms and buildings in a systematic fashion, avoiding both stray and directed gunfire. On the 21st, the Marines lost three killed, on the 22nd they suffered none.
As the Marines and the Second Seaman Regiment pushed south and west through the city blocks, follow-on units continued to marshal and move from Pier Four and the Promenade towards the fighting. Joining Bluejackets from NEW HAMPSHIRE, sailors from VERMONT, SOUTH CAROLINA, and NEW JERSEY advanced on a disorganized, decentralized, but deadly enemy. The sailors’ unfamiliarity with land combat created hazards. As sailors from MINNESOTA moved forward, thinking they were engaged with Mexican troops, they initiated a firefight with sailors from one of NEW HAMPSHIRE’S outposts. Navy ensigns and lieutenants struggled to maintain fire discipline in their units. Sailors continued to receive harassing rifle fire from foreign and Mexican ships in the harbor. But their sheer numbers, as well as better coordination at the small unit level in fire and movement, and improved coordination between sailors and their supporting arms, caused dwindling Mexican resistance to fade. By the end of the day, only individual snipers popped up in the windows and doorways of Vera Cruz.
After waiting for weeks in New Orleans for the word, Colonel John Lejeune, his brigade headquarters, and the First (Fixed Defense) Regiment made Tampico aboard USS HANCOCK. Upon arrival, the word changed again, and HANCOCK was directed to Vera Cruz to take part in the landing force. Catching up with the rest of the fleet the harbor on the morning of April 22, they witnessed NEW HAMPSHIRE’s sailors marching directly into the fire coming from the naval academy. After conferring with Rear Admiral Badger, and Rear Admiral Fletcher, Lejeune gathered his headquarters and made for shore.
In his autobiography, Lejeune recounts his arrival at 1100, and in good humor shares the story of how in stepping from the boat to the pier wound up nearly drowning in the harbor’s waters; the man most responsible for the development of Marine Corps amphibious capabilities in the 20th century nearly became the victim of a boating accident. After officers of his staff pulled him from between boat and pier, Lejeune assumed command of all Marines ashore. The First (Fixed Defense) Regiment relieved Neville’s Second (Mobile Defense) Regiment in the house-to-house clearing, and search for weapons.
Elsewhere, Bluejackets took the Municipal Palace and fought snipers to take prominent hotels in the city. In the hotels, some American women sheltering from the fighting had gone to work tending to the Mexican wounded. Navy litter-bearers and corpsmen transported their wounded from the streets to Pier Four, where a triage was set up. From there, wounded civilians, sailors and Marines were transferred to shipboard infirmaries and the hospital ship SOLACE, just arrived from Tampico.[56] As Mexican opposition faded into the outskirts of the city, they left many of their dead behind, as well as abandoned rifles and ammunition in their sniping positions. Where the sailors ran into heavy opposition, they employed field guns and machine guns to suppress Mexican fire; in driving off Veracruzanos they ran into the ethical quandary of many counterinsurgencies, what to do when facing off against women and children who’d taken up arms? In small wars, determining who the enemy is becomes the first question posed; which ones were snipers and which ones were Mexican mothers defending their families?
Map of harbor locations
NEW HAMPSHIRE’s Captain Anderson and his sailors occupied the Mexican barracks and headquarters on the southern edge of town. Bluejackets occupied the Waters – Pierce refinery, and Navy officers stationed their men in pickets south along the railway. By the afternoon of the 22nd, the Navy had completely accomplished Woodrow Wilson’s objectives of seizing the Customs House and preventing YPIRINGA’s shipment of arms from reaching Huerta’s Army. Shutting down the source of General Huerta’s revenue, and denying him weapons and ammunition, would contribute to his fall.
With the Mexican city secure, the question before Woodrow Wilson remained, “what next?”
His advisors were of different minds. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan wished to avoid an expanded war with Mexico. Secretary of War Lindley Garrison wanted to send more troops to Mexico. Wilson could muster no support from anti-Huerta Mexicans in Washington, due to his blatant violation of Mexican sovereignty. Fortunately for Wilson, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile stepped forward to mediate a solution.[57]
NAVY OCCUPATION APRIL 22nd TO THE 30th
On the afternoon of the 22nd, the invasion of Vera Cruz transitioned from a landing operation to a defense, and an occupation. Landing field pieces and machine guns were set up in defensive positions, fighting holes, and then trenches, were dug in the sandy soil surrounding the city, and Navy and Marine officers shouldered the responsibilities of policing the city. The local government, and military regime, were absent. As days turned into weeks, it became clear that local officials would not assist the Americans in running the city; the threat of retribution from Huerta’s regime promised punishment for anyone who worked for the invaders. So, city administration fell into the Navy’s lap, until the Army arrived. As dead Veracruzanos had lain where they’d fallen, Captain Rush directed the dead collected and interred; funeral pyres consumed many of the deceased, or they were buried in mass graves. Navy doctors’ estimates probably cannot capture the total number of Mexican dead — it looked to be between 200 and 300 killed, and a similar number of wounded — but American casualties could be counted. Between the 21st and 23rd, there were 17-dead and 63-wounded.
Mexicans rounded up in the search and cordon of the city were herded to the Municipal Palace, and were put to work on fatigue detail, cleaning the city. Fletcher’s landing force quickly adopted the rhythm of an army of occupation; bugle calls, formations, meals, drill, area police, patrolling, and keeping the peace. Bluejacket and Marine alike were kept busy while the White House and General Huerta figured out what the next act would entail. Rear Admiral Fletcher encouraged Vera Cruz businesses to open for business; cantinas and hotels opened quickly, but other establishments held off until it became clear the Americans policed themselves. Official reports of the occupation don’t show much looting occurred, and when it did, courts martial dealt with the accused.
Hindsight shows us that organized Mexican resistance mostly disappeared on the 21st, but neither the sailors and Marines ashore knew that, nor the admirals. Rear Admiral Fletcher requested relief by the Army for the administration of the occupation; the Bluejackets of the landing force were needed at their stations back aboard ship — preventative maintenance wasn’t going to perform itself. In the first nights of the occupation sailors and Marines in the perimeter braced for a counterattack from Federalist forces; trenches were constructed, barbed wire strung, revetments dug, communications wire laid, patrols established, passwords issued, fields of fire cleared, and latrines dug. For Marines of the Advanced Base Brigade, these were all familiar tasks. The defense of Vera Cruz differed from the defense of Culebra in that no naval guns were deployed ashore. Instead of staring out to sea awaiting the enemy fleet, Lejeune’s force found themselves staring into the scrub brush, marshes, and sand dunes of the central Mexican coastline.
With word that the fleet had taken Vera Cruz, American civilians in Tampico expected the focus to return to their situation. Instead of making Americans in Mexico safer, the invasion of Vera Cruz increased their risk. In cities across Mexico, anti-American protests called for the eviction of the Marines and sailors in the port city and country wide. Americans in Tampico sheltered in place in American hotels, as mobs of Mexicans sought out “gringos” for retribution. However, Rear Admiral Mayo at Tampico refused to use U.S. Navy vessels to enter the Pánuco to rescue American expats. Besides the hazards of sandbars and shallow water of Rio Pánuco, any U.S. flagged vessel approaching Tampico by water would have attracted attention from Federalist forces on the shores. Instead, he turned to the Royal Navy, the French, and the Germans, to lead a convoy of small craft to run from Gulf waters to the city to pick up desperate Americans. On the afternoon and evening of the 21st, the small craft flotilla of the European navies transported American and European citizens escaping the unrest. Evacuated Americans were not prepared for evacuation to Texas, thinking they’d only be away from Tampico until the rioting ended. On May 1, the New York Times reported that while USS DES MOINES had remained at Tampico, the SS ANTILLA was fired upon by Constitutionalist rebels, U.S. citizens continued to be evacuated.
U.S. Navy Corpsman with wounded Federalist soldier, Vera Cruz 1914
Reporting in American newspapers on the 23rd provided good details on the fighting, including that YPIRINGA was carrying arms for Huerta. The rebel leader Carranza’s letter to the Wilson administration was published, stating that while Huerta was an usurper of the Mexican presidency, Constitutionalist forces could not endorse such a blatant violation to Mexican sovereignty that the invasion of Vera Cruz represented. Secretary of State Bryan published a response, excusing the seizure of the Vera Cruz Customs House as reparations for the arrest of American sailors at Tampico two weeks prior.[58]
On April 24th, knowing that the Army en route from the Texas gulf coast, Rear Admiral Fletcher declared martial law in Vera Cruz.
AVIATION
In1911, Lieutenant Theodore G. Ellyson, USN, attended Curtiss’ flight school, and Curtiss’ test pilot, Eugene Ely made the first takeoff from a Navy ship, the USS BIRMINGHAM. The following year, the Navy purchased two Curtiss and one Wright aircraft with the princely Congressional appropriation of $25,000. The service began training pilots to fly at Annapolis and San Diego, rebuilding their aircraft, as required, after not infrequent crashes. Two Marines, Lieutenants Afred A. Cunningham and Bernard L. Smith, were assigned to the small flight detachment, as the Corps envisioned the aeroplane a useful tool for the Advanced Base Force, in spotting an enemy fleet further out at sea. The Marines training with the Navy at Annapolis moved to League Island in the fall of 1913, to train with the Advanced Base Force, prior to the Culebra exercises. As the Navy fliers and their planes moved to a new home at Pensacola, the two Marine flyers and 10 mechanics travelled to Porto Rico aboard USS HANCOCK. During the January exercise, the two Marine Curtiss’ flew 52 missions, demonstrating their utility; as the fleet made its mock attack on the base, one of the Marines’ aircraft orbited one of the battleships, out of range of small arms at 5000-feet.
Following the exercises, the Marines rejoined the Navy flyers at Pensacola. The Mexican emergency caused Lieutenant Smith to deploy to Tampico with a Navy detachment of two planes aboard USS BIRMINGHAM; as no landing was made at Tampico, the Marines flew no missions during the emergency or occupation. A Navy flight detachment aboard USS MISSISSIPPI sailed for Vera Cruz on the 21ST and arrived three days later. When MISSISSIPPI arrived, Lieutenant Patrick N.L. Bellinger, USN, was directed to Colonel Lejeune, commanding Marines ashore, to discuss the the possibility of Mexican sea mines in the harbor that could damage shipping. Bellinger took off as soon as his Curtiss hydroplane was dropped into the choppy waters of the harbor but didn’t manage to sight any mines. The Navy flight detachment set up on a beach near the harbor and began flying missions in support of the Marines. Armed only with revolvers, the Navy flyers flew daily reconnaissance missions in support of the Marines and the Army through May 25th. And while the Federalist forces did fire rifles and machine guns at the Curtiss’s in the air, and the aircraft were holed, no major casualties resulted. This early deployment of naval aviation to a conflict zone set the tone for service’s first decade, with frail biplanes providing “the eyes of the fleet”. Culebra provided the Marines their first real-world experience in coordinating air and ground operations, which they built on with Navy aircrew flying reconnaissance missions at Vera Cruz.
So, Vera Cruz was not your run of the mill landing party.
THE ARMY ARRIVES
In January 1914, After Woodrow Wilson addressed the Senate on his Mexico policy, the State Department notified the War Department to prepare for an expedition to protect American lives and property in Mexico. The Secretary of War ordered General Frederick Funston to prepare four regiments of infantry, and a battalion of engineers, to form the Fifth Brigade. After adding a battalion of artillery, the brigade sailed from Galveston for Vera Cruz aboard the army transports SUMNER, McCLELLAN, KILPATRICK, and MEADE on the 24th of April. On the 26th Funston received orders to relieve the Naval Brigade. As additional Army units on leased transports and Navy warships sailed; President Wilson ordered the Marine Brigade, transferred from Navy command to the Army. While Colonel Lejeune still commanded the brigade, for a bit, he reported to Funston’s command. Assignment of Marine units to the Army had been a presidential prerogative since the 1834 legislation, “An Act for the Better Organization of the United States Marine Corps”, and would figure in future deployments.
Despite the end of hostilities, and Woodrow Wilson’s newly found revulsion to ordering servicemen into combat, the Department of the Navy continued to funnel reinforcements to Vera Cruz. A Third Regiment of Marines was formed at League Island, and embarked aboard USS MORRO CASTLE on the 23rd. On the west coast, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Pendleton, USMC, formed the Fourth Regiment at Bremerton and Mare Island, and they embarked aboard SOUTH DAKOTA, WEST VIRGINIA, and the collier JUPITER. This regiment sat off the western coast of Mexico until July 3, when it landed at San Diego, and went into camp there.
On the evening of April 27, the transports carrying the Army arrived from Texas. Earlier in the day, sailors and Marines raised the American flag over Vera Cruz in a formal ceremony. On April 30, the Navy turned the occupation of Vera Cruz over to the Army. The sailors of the landing brigade returned to their shipboard duty, as did the numerous Marines who’d been attached to the Advanced Base Regiments from their shipboard security duties. Command of the Marines ashore passed from Colonel to Colonel as Colonels of greater seniority arrived on the scene.[59] For the week that the Navy controlled the city, they ran a military government through a Provost Marshal, initiating the campaign of cleanliness.
Frederick Funston formed a military government run by his Provost Marshal, Colonel Edward Plummer of the 28th Regiment, and declared martial law on May 2nd. The Army controlled all aspects of governance, except for the post office — a postmaster from the states parachuted in — and the customs house and port, which remained under the administration of Commander Herman O. Stickney, USN, who’d most recently commanded USS PRAIRIE. What the Army could not control was the supply of food for the city. At the beginning of the occupation, the only farmers who could sell in the city were those inside the established American perimeter.[60]
General Funston’s brigade, and the Marine brigade, then under the command of Colonel Littleton Waller,[61] USMC, did the best they could to maintain the peace, and make improvements to the city, while remaining on the watch for a Mexican counterattack. The occupation through the summer and fall was largely uneventful, with the sole exception of a panicked report that the Mexicans had surrounded a Marine unit at the city waterworks at El Tejar. Lejeune received permission to mobilize the reserve battalion of his regiment, which deployed to the waterworks 9-miles down the railroad. As Marines arrived on scene, in railcars and on double-timing on foot Colonel Lejeune and Major Butler determined that a single Mexican soldier under a white flag had walked into the Marine position, demanding the Americans’ surrender. After setting out patrols, they determined that the Mexican army was elsewhere. The panic was a false alert but would provide fodder for Butler years later, allowing him to disparage John H. Russell, who commanded the Second Battalion of the Third Regiment at Vera Cruz, when Russell was selected Commandant over Butler.[62]
Any notion of a march on Mexico City faded quickly with Woodrow Wilson’s diminishing appetite for conquest. Such an offensive had been in the planning portfolio prior to the incidents at Tampico; part of Smedley Butler’s notorious spy mission to the capitol city in January revolved about an audacious plan to load a thousand Marines on the train at Vera Cruz, and make what modern tactician might call a “thunder run” on Mexico City. The plan was largely dependent on a relationship with a rebel leadership the administration had not talked to, empathetic railroad workers who were expat Americans, the good will of the Mexican people and a compliant Congress. Fortunately for all, further development of this “goose chase” never materialized.[63]
Part of the uneventful nature of the occupation probably had to do with recent Army experience in running other foreign countries; in 1898 the Army occupied the Philippines following the defeat of the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay. Also, the Army temporarily occupied Cuba through 1902. The “benevolent assimilation” of the Philippines descended into the worst type of counter-insurgency warfare, fueling a negative public perception of U.S. policies overseas. However, one positive result of these occupations was the work of the Army Medical Corps; the medical service was largely responsible for the near-eradication of mosquito-borne diseases in their ministry of the first Cuban occupation and supporting the Army Corps of Engineers herculean efforts in digging the Panama Canal. The second occupation of Cuba, also called the “Cuban Pacification”, was the most recent experience for the Army. Vice President William Howard Taft brokered a “conservation of American interests” (not an intervention) by American forces, both Army and Marine, who stayed in Cuba until the crisis waned in 1908.[64] In Vera Cruz, as in the Philippines, and in Cuba, the Army put the civilian populations to work cleaning their cities and towns, eradicating vectors and all standing water, clearing trash and refuse, sanitizing village and city markets, building roads and schools, and contributing to the general health of the portion of the population willing to assist the new colonizers.
As the U.S. Army set to cleaning up Vera Cruz, Mexican President Huerta accepted mediation of the crisis through the ministries of negotiators from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. These “ABC” ministers convened The Niagara Conference in Ontario in May, to broker an agreement between the U.S. and Mexico. Unfortunately for negotiators, the parties showed up for talks with mismatched expectations; Huerta was seeking a peace between Mexico and the United States, and Wilson merely wanted Huerta deposed. Wilson’s efforts to restrict Huerta’s income from duties at the port of Vera Cruz and preventing the immediate delivery of YPIRINGA’s shipment of arms had had results. Huerta suffered a calamitous defeat at the hands of Pancho Villa at Zacatecas, after failing to muster anti-American sentiments and unity.[65] On July 15, Huerta resigned from office and went into exile. Of the Constitutionalist rebel leaders, neither Carranza nor Pancho Villa, would recognize the other as the new leader of Mexico.[66] The revolution in Mexico would continue for six more years.
Hoping for free and fair elections for Mexico, Woodrow Wilson negotiated with Venustiano Carranza to return control of Vera Cruz to Mexico. In exchange for the return, Wilson asked that no retribution be exacted upon Veracruzanos who worked to keep the city viable during the occupation. By November, Carranza was at war with other Constitutionalist factions, had lost Mexico City, and was desperate for the revenue from the Customs House at Vera Cruz; he agreed to grant amnesty for those who worked with the Americans. On November 23, 1914, in an orderly fashion, American forces boarded transports in Vera Cruz harbor and departed.
FORCE RECAPITUALATION
It might be argued that the landing of a brigade of Marines in Mexico in 1914 wasn’t as novel as made here. Indeed, in 1906, a Brigade of Marines had been deployed on short notice to “conserve American interests in Cuba. However, this brigade was formed in the traditional ad hoc manner; 400 Marines from League Island and 400 from Norfolk forming two battalions, and third, fourth, and fifth battalions “collected from the various posts of the Corps”. The commandant prided himself on being able to assemble these Marines within 36 hours, but noted they were held up in deploying, waiting for shipping. This brigade was not like the Advanced Base Brigade which had been established for years and ready for deployment before shipping off for Culebra in 1913. And while the Marines of the Fixed Defense Regiment were trained in more technical aspects of the advanced base mission — including electrical circuits, submarine mines, naval guns, signals, searchlights, and building emplacements — all Marines had been trained as infantry from the beginning and had been serving together for months and years.
The Marines of the Advanced Base Brigade included another layer of support in their structure. As they evolved into permanently formed, self-contained regiments, they required within their ranks quartermasters, cooks, bandsmen, quartermasters, transportation packers, surgeons, corpsmen, paymasters, commissary clericals, and orderlies. Compared to the ad hoc battalion that landed at Guantanamo in 1898, which had a bare-bones staff,[67] consisting of a battalion executive officer, and an adjutant directing all administrative functions in support of six 100-man companies, the Advanced Base Force resembled more modern Marine units, deploying within a Navy amphibious group. The Advanced Base Brigade fostered capabilities and competencies not available to the ad hoc battalions, regiments, and brigades the Corps fielded in the 19th century.
USMC Artillery, Vera Cruz 1914
Others have noted that the Marines who landed at Vera Cruz had no real experience in urban fighting. This may be prima facie correct, but Neville’s Regiment was fully trained in making landings as a function of being part of the Advanced Base Brigade and had many campaign veterans amongst its ranks. Neville himself was a veteran of the landing at Guantanamo and served in numerous operations in intervening years, and his cohort in the officer ranks, including Hiram Bearss, Smedley Butler, Frederick Wise, Pete Ellis, and Logan Feland had proven themselves under arms for a decade. One of his Sergeants, Dan Daly, who joined just after the war with Spain, had fought on the streets of Pekin, in China — where he was awarded a Medal of Honor — and in the Philippines. Sergeant Major John Quick, who raised the flag over Vera Cruz, had been awarded the Medal of Honor for his bravery at the Battle for Cuzco Wells. Other Marines had served in hotspots like the Colombian province of Panama, and then the state of Panama; they’d served as part of the Army of Pacification in Cuba, during the most recent revolution; these Marines landed at Honduras and fought in the Nicaraguan towns of Barranca, Masaya, and Leon. If they hadn’t gained experience clearing buildings since their time in Pekin or in the Philippines, they had numerous land campaigns, and daily experience training Marines to work together in small units.
To be fair, in many instances Navy Bluejackets had landed alongside the Marines on these campaigns; since the turn of the century Bluejackets had made dozens of landings, almost always under their own officers. However, none of these landing was as complicated or intense as the opposed landing at Vera Cruz. As the “new Navy” had become more technically oriented, Bluejackets were less accustomed to operating under arms in the field, and under the command of experienced small unit leaders. Drilling aboard ship, or on the pier in a navy yard, were no substitute for patrolling trails and villages under hostile circumstances.
Others have argued that after the battle, the Marine Corps predisposition for self-promotion created the mystique that Marines believed themselves “better fighters” than the sailors. This shouldn’t be discounted as at least two recent scholarly works show how the Marine Corps professionally burnished its image through advertising and recruiting efforts during the years leading up to the Great War.[68] While the intent was a conscious effort to set the Marines aside from the Army and the Navy to facilitate recruiting, the casualty statistics accrued during the short fight at Vera Cruz, as well as contemporaneous anecdotal evidence from participants and witnesses, leads me to believe that the Marines’ training and experience better prepared them for the fight. The only casualty on the 23rd of April was shot at 0545 by a Navy patrol. Navy officers and Marines alike commented on the lack of fire discipline of many Bluejackets; the ability of a unit to follow orders while firing can mean the difference between life and death for adjacent units. So the Marines displayed battlefield discipline, not because of any innate superiority, but because of muscle memory developed over extended deployments ashore in sometimes adversarial situations. Tactical habits acquired in repeated movements to objective mattered, and even if the Marines lacked actual house-to-house and door-to-door fighting experience; they at least understood fire discipline, the use of cover, the importance of communications, and the moral imperative of watching out for one another.
One topic often brought up in association with the landing at Veracruz is the number of Medals of Honor awarded to Marines and sailors for conduct during the short battle. The number of awards is far greater than one would expect given current award criteria; nine Marines — all officers — and forty-six Navy officers and sailors were awarded the device for actions at Veracruz. Suffice it to say, the award of this nation’s greatest military honor in the spring of 1914 was generous; prior to Veracruz, officers in the naval services were not eligible for any medals for heroism; instead, officers were “brevetted” — advanced on the list of seniority — and made eligible for advanced (relative) promotion. As no other awards for valor had been available for Navy and Marine Corps officers to that date, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels may have been playing “catch-up” to the number of awards granted to by the Department of War since the war with Spain.
Marine officer and his men prepared to land 1914
CLOSING STATEMENT
In their seizure of Vera Cruz, the Naval Brigade quickly accomplished its objectives and controlled the entire city within two days; the success of the brigade was at the cost of 17 sailors killed, and 63 wounded. In making the landing, the Navy showed coordination between ship and shore; units went ashore in sequence and per schedule; as new units arrived they were funneled through the command offshore, before reporting to the brigade commander ashore; naval gunfire supported the movement of sailors ashore, providing essential covering fire as they moved on the naval academy; wounded and killed were processed through a single triage before transport to the various ships of the fleet and the hospital ship SOLACE; and the fleet commander maintained communications with his higher commands at the Navy Department, who communicated with State and the White House. Vera Cruz was no common expeditionary landing, in part because of the increased sophistication that the Advanced Base Force mission brought to the Marine Corps.
Some may judge the Advanced Base Force by its lack of combat history, the Navy never called for a landing in the Caribbean to counter a European navy threatening the Panama Canal, and by 1941 other strategic choices had been made by a joint Army – Navy command structure in the Pacific. Yet the practice and doctrine developed by the Marine unit that landed at Vera Cruz was instrumental in the establishment of a truly "amphibious" service; the Advanced Base Force was responsible for this evolution, and was present.
You may also expect that with the scope and gravity of the Great War, that the ABF would have been totally abandoned as hostilities broke out in western Europe. Quite the opposite; Commandant Barnett continued to staff the ABF during the war, at the same time that the Marine Corps was engaged in constabulary service in the Caribbean, and fighting in France. Admiral William Sims, a part-time foil to the Marine Corps, and commanding U.S. Navy forces in Europe during the war, drafted plans to use the ABF to secure a base on the Adriatic so that the fleet could combat enemy submarines in the Mediterranean. The British allies, fresh off the debacle of Gallipoli vetoed such an endeavor, and landing operations remained in the realm of smaller efforts and training exercises for years. Following the war, when Lejeune was promoted to Commandant, the ABF was re-branded as Expeditionary Forces on the east and west coasts. This continued for a decade, until the Fleet Marine Force was created in the 1930s. However the Marine Defense Battalions of the Pacific War drew on doctrine, developed by the ABF; in the year before the war the Navy and the Marines established island bases defended by forces armed with naval guns in temporary revetments. These bases were judged essential to the Navy’s planned efforts to retake the Pacific on its anticipated march across the Pacific towards a conquest of the Japanese home islands. Additionally, a liberal examination of 1st Marines and 2nd Marines unit history reflect lineage linking these regiments to the 2nd and 1st Regiments of the Advanced Base Brigade.[69] Today, we see the Marine Corps returning to its naval roots, establishing new doctrine to support Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations. It’s not too much of a stretch to see a thread connecting all these evolutions.
Yet the landing and occupation of Vera Cruz has become an obscure topic, for reasons already outlined. A more serious reading of the history shows that it was not only of outsized significance in U.S. Latin America policy, but essential to the development of what would become known as U.S. amphibious doctrine in ensuing decades.
[1] Jack Sweetman. The Landing at Veracruz: 1914. United States Naval Institute, Annapolis. 1968. p.57.Signal from LtCol Wendell C. Neville, USMC, to RAdm Frank Fletcher, USN, at 1030 on the morning of 21 April 1914, kicking off the landing at Veracruz, Mexico.
[2] Today’s English spelling is “Veracruz”. Publications from 1914 referred to the city on the Gulf of Mexico as “Vera Cruz”.
[3] Frank McLynn. Villa and Zapata – A History of the Mexican Revolution. Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York. 2000. Kindle Edition.
[4] https://law.justia.com/constitution/us/article-2/43-protection-of-american-rights-of-person-and-property-abroad.html
[5] Wikipedia.
[6] Congress declared war on Mexico in May of 1846 after Mexican forces attacked an American patrol, over a land dispute involving the border of the newly annexed state of Texas. Timothy D. Johnson. Winfield Scott – The Quest for Military Glory. University Press of Kansas. 1998. p. 149.
[7] Johnson, Winfield Scott.
[8] McLynn, Villa and Zapata
[9] Camden Daily Courier. Friday, April 3, 1914.
[10] Heather Venable. How The Few Became The Proud: Crafting The Marine Corps Mystique, 1874-1918. Naval Institute Press. 2019.
[11] Commandant Report to the Secretary of the Navy. 1898.
[12] The General Board of the Navy was formed in the wake of the war with Spain, in 1900. Led by Admiral Dewey of Manila Bay fame, this board of senior officers conducted studies, and provided recommendations to the Secretary of the Navy on force composition, deployment of forces, adoption of technology, and the role of the Marine Corps. Strictly advisory, it was nowhere near being part of the chain of command between the Secretary of the Navy and squadron or fleet commanders.
[13] Major Dion Williams, USMC. “THE NAVAL ADVANCED BASE”; lecture at the Naval War College 1912. Williams was a leading proponent of the Advanced Base Force mission and created what little doctrine that was put down on paper prior to the Great War.
[14] William F. Fullam. “The System of Naval Training and Discipline Required to Promote Efficiency and Attract Americans”. Proceedings. Vol. 16/4/55. October 1890.
[15] Students at the Naval War College, members of the General Board, and analysts at the Office of Naval Intelligence spent time and energy dissecting the Japanese campaign against the Russians at Port Arthur in 1905, both in the overland attack, and in the use of advanced bases for the Japanese fleet.
[16] Report of the Secretary of the Navy, 1885. Jack Shulimson. The Marine Corps Search for a Mission, 1880-1898. University Press of Kansas. 1993.
[17] “The Landing-Force and Small-Arms Instructions, United States Navy, 1912” Revised Under the Direction of the Navy Department by Captain W.F. Fullam, U.S. Navy. Naval Institute, Annapolis, MD.
[18] H.K. Gilman. The Naval Brigade and Operations Ashore – A hand-book for Field Service: Prepared From Official and Standard Authorities. Government Printing Office. 1886.
[19] Robert Debs Heinl, Jr. Soldiers of the Sea: The United States Marine Corps, 1775-1962. United States Naval Institute. Annapolis. 1962.
[20] Progress and Purpose
[21] Leo J. Daugherty III. Pioneers of Amphibious Warfare, 1898-1945. Profiles of Fourteen American Military Strategists. McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Jefferson. 2009. Kindle Edition.
[22] Commandant’s Report to the Secretary of the Navy, 1914.
[23] The Journal and Tribune, Knoxville, TN. February 13, 1914.
[24] Jack Sweetman. The Landing at Veracruz: 1914. United States Naval Institute, Annapolis. 1968. p.11.
[25] Evening Times-Republican, Marshalltown, IA. November 24, 1913.
[26] McLynn. Villa and Zapata. Japan is an interesting player in this emergency. The U.S. had viewed Japan as a threat to its holdings in the Pacific, and feared Japan would use its relationship with Mexico to build a forward naval station on the western coast, within a days’ steaming from U.S. ports.
[27] Mark Edmund Clark. Exemplary Service: The U.S. Army in Vera Cruz, 1914. Army History, No. 18 (Spring 1991).
[28] “The Second Regiment, consisting of 14 officers and 329 men, was embarked on the PRAIRIE at Pensacola March 5, and arrived at Vera Cruz on March 9; of said regiment 16 officers and 516 men remained at Pensacola until April 21, when they were embarked on USS MISSISSIPPI, and arrived at Vera Cruz on April 24. The First Regiment, consisting of 24 officers and 810 men, left New Orleans for Tampico on the HANCOCK April 15, 1914, and remained there until the were landed at Vera Cruz on April 22, 1914. The Third Regiment, consisting of 33 officers and 861 enlisted men, was assembled at Philadelphia and embarked on the MORRO CASTLE, chartered vessel, sailing April 23, 1914, and landing at Vera Cruz April 30, 1914. In addition to the foregoing regiments, which were mobilized from those serving ashore in this country, a battalion consisting of 20 officers and 632 enlisted men was assembled from the ships of the North Atlantic Fleet and landed at vera Cruz on April 21, 1914.” – Commandant’s report to the Secretary of the Navy, 1914.
[29] For the purposes of the operation, it seems the Mobile Defense Regiment was renamed, or additionally named the Second Regiment as it shifted responsibilities at Vera Cruz.
[30] Formerly the Fixed Defense Regiment.
[31] Robert E. Quirk. An Affair of Honor, Woodrow Wilson and the Occupation of Veracruz. W.W. Norton & Company. 1962. p.16.
[32] Fletcher, it seems, was preparing for any eventuality when it came to U.S. action in Mexico. In January 1914, he sent Major Smedley Butler ashore in Vera Cruz in civilian clothes, to identify Mexican Army facilities and defenses between Vera Cruz and Mexico City. Smedley Butler and Lowel Thomas. Old Gimlet Eye – The Adventures of Smedley D. Butler. Kismet Publishing, Kindle Edition. 1933.
[33] Jack Sweetman. The Landing at Veracruz: 1914. United States Naval Institute, Annapolis. 1968.
[34] Quirk. An Affair of Honor. p.55.
[35] Quirk, p. 32.
[36] Quirk. p. 43.
[37] Los Angeles Times. April 13, 1914.
[38] Twenty-four officers, and 810 men, composed the regiment for the Culebra exercises, according to the Commandant’s Report of 1914.
[39] Wilson’s wife Ellen suffered from Bright’s Disease, a kidney neuropathy treated in the waters of White Sulphur Springs. Quirk, p. 69.
[40] Quirk. p. 75.
[41] Stevens Point Journal. April 20, 1914.
[42] “Planning” Joint Publication 3-02, Amphibious Operations, 18 July 2014.
[43] In the weeks prior to the landing, Americans who visited the fort at San Juan de Ulúa spotted a land-based torpedo launcher and torpedoes apparently ready for action. I’m sure the vision of an American battleship on fire or sunk in Vera Cruz harbor during the landing would cause a fleet admiral nightmares.
[44] Sweetman. The Landing at Veracruz. p.59.
[45] The Landing-Force and Small-Arms Instructions, United States Navy, 1912. Revised under the direction of the Navy Department by Captain W.F. Fullam, U.S. Navy.
[46] “Scheduled Waves (Waterborne). Once H-hour is confirmed by the CATF, scheduled waterborne waves are landed according to plan. The first scheduled wave is dispatche by the CCCO, with other waves being lauched by the various PCOs in coordination with the CCO.” Joint Publication 3-02, Amphibious Operations, 18 July 2014. Joint Chiefs of Staff.
[47] The Boat Book of the United States Navy – 1920.Navy manual on fitting out, manning, and sailing ships’ boats.
[48] The M1895 was rechambered in .30-06 in 1914, but I don’t think any of them made it into U.S. naval service until a later point in time. The Lee round was a hold-over from when the Navy and Marine Corps fielded the M1895 Lee Navy Rifle in 6mm. They bought the Colt-Browning in the same caliber for the sake of supply commonality.
[49] Resources name the gun the ‘3-inch Rapid Fire Landing Gun’ and the ‘3-inch Rapid Fire Field Gun’, and I need to work on which was which, and images.
[50] https://www.fieldartillery.org/field-artillery-history
[51] Sweetman. Vera Cruz. p. 71.
[52] The Navy rating for Corpsman was introduced during the summer of 1898, during the war with Spain.
[53] Sweetman. p.84
[54] Sweetman. p.93.
[55] Joint Publication 3-02, Amphibious Operations. 18 July, 2014.
[56] “Noted on the Wounded at Vera Cruz” U.S. Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. Internet Archive.
[57] James M. Lindsay. “TWE Remembers: The U.S. Invasion of Veracruz, Mexico” Council on Foreign Relations. April 21, 2014.
[58] The Springfield Daily Republican. Springfield, MA. April 23, 1914.
[59] Lejeune, The Reminiscences of a Marine. Kindle edition.
[60] “Funston Selects Advisors”. New York Times. May 3, 1914.
[61] Waller had been commanding the Mare Island barracks (?), but when hostilities began, was moved to Vera Cruz to command the Marine brigade. He arrived on May xx.
[62] Hans Schmidt. Maverick Marine: General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History. University Press of Kentucky. Kindle edition. 1987.
[63] Schmidt. Ibid.
[64] Ralph Eldin Minger. “William H. Taft and the United States Intervention in Cuba in 1906”. Hispanic American Historical Review. February 1961.
[65] Frank McLynn. Villa and Zapata, a History of the Mexican Revolution. Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York. 2000. Kindle edition.
[66] Quirk, p.157.
[67] The battalion staff only numbered ten, including a surgeon and assistant, two apothecaries (serving as corpsmen) and a pair of Marines responsible for the colors, and the headquarter’s security.
[68] Heather Venable, How the Few Became the Proud – Crafting the Marine Corps Mystique, 1874-1918. Naval Institute Press, Annapolis. 2019. Kindle edition, and Mark Ryland Folse, The Globe and Anchor Men – U.S. Marines and American Manhood in the Great War Era. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence. 2024. Kindle edition.
[69] “A Brief History of the First Marines”, and “A Brief History of the Second Marines”, Historical Branch G-3 Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, Washington, D.C.
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