"History is lived forwards, but is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was like to know the beginning only.”
C.V. Wedgwood1
The legend goeth thusly.
In 1921, Earl Hancock Ellis, a clever major of American Marines, wrote Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia, a memorandum that described the sequential seizure of small islands in the Central Pacific in the course of a future naval war against Japan. Knowing that such a war lay upon the horizon, the leadership of the Marine Corps embraced this vision, and, in the two decades that followed, used this blueprint to transform itself into an optimized force that would, in the course of the Second World War, execute the famous ‘island hopping’ campaign.
Elements of this story speak truth. Major Ellis did, indeed, display a degree of ingenuity that exceeded the norm. Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia did, in fact, propose landing operations that bore an uncanny resemblance to those that took place on islands, atolls, and archipelagoes of the Pacific Ocean in the years between 1942 and 1945.
When, however, we tell this tale in isolation, we miss a central feature of the story. Rather than taking the form of a straight line, the path that connected the plan of 1921 with the reality of the 1940s ran through a rabbit warren of competing demands upon the time, trouble, and talents of United States Marines. These included ‘foreign internal development’ missions on both sides of the island of Santo Domingo, a small (but shooting) war in Nicaragua, and guarding the mails, as well as preparation for cooperation with the Army in a wide variety of international emergencies and the National Guard in domestic disturbances.
In keeping with this cornucopia of contingencies, the various courses offered by the Marine Corps Schools bundled work in the realm of ‘small wars’ with those that dealt with ‘landing operations’. Thus, when James Carson Breckinridge, told students at Quantico about the landing of the 15th Marines in the Dominican Republic, he felt no need distinguish between the two categories. (This event took place in February of 1919, in the port city of San Pedro de Macorís.)2
As late as November of 1940, the Marine Corps Gazette published an essay that presumed the possibility of active service in the Caribbean, South Pacific, Aleutians, Greenland, and Iceland, as well as the Atlantic seaboard of Canada; landings on a wide variety of islands and coasts, both remote and well-populated; and operations against both ‘first-rate’ adversaries and ‘third-rate’ powers.3 A few weeks later, Headquarters, US Marine Corps, collected and reprinted, under the title of Small Wars Manual, a series of five-year old pamphlets that codified lessons learned in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and, especially, Nicaragua.4
Now, one might argue that, when interwar Marines did things other than refine the art of seizing Pacific Islands, those activities served a subsidiary role. That is, performance of secondary tasks and preparation for other contingencies kept the lights on while the ‘real Marine Corps’ prepared for the main event. However, as many Substack authors can attest, there comes a time when a collection of side-hustles becomes a career.
Moreover, as clever as they might have been, American Marines of the ‘20s and ‘30s of the last century lacked Cassandra’s gift. They could imagine that, at some point in the future, the United States and Japan might go to war against each other. At the same time, however, they could also envision an immediate future in which the cold war begun in 1905 continued for several decades.
With that in mind, I encourage my fellow Marines to take a prospective view of the history of our beloved Corps. That is, rather than looking back at the way things turned out, we should step back in time, put ourselves in the shoes of our predecessors, and look forward.
My favorite way of doing this makes use of the bound volumes, found on the shelves of many libraries, that preserve the back issues of The Marine Corps Gazette, Leatherneck, and the Proceedings of the Naval Institute. If you work your way forward through these tomes (or their digital equivalents), you will see the beginnings of many things that came to pass. You will also discover a much larger number of things – whether possibilities, predictions, or programs – that failed to see the light of day.
If you do this often enough, you will inoculate yourself against the presumption that the history of the Marine Corps can be reduced to single-minded focus on the fulfillment of highly peculiar visions.
For Further Reading
C.V. Wedgwood William the Silent: William of Nassau, Prince of Orange 1533-1584 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1949), page 35
For an overview of this operation, see Stephen M. Fuller and Graham A. Cosmas Marines in the Dominican Republic 1916-1924 (Washington: US Marine Corps, 1974)
F.P. Henderson ‘Toward a Better Landing Force’ Marine Corps Gazette (November 1940) pages 14 and 90-95
Small Wars Manual (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940)
Good morning Marine! Well Christmas came early and it came in the guise of this amazingly timely post. Shall we live our history forward, well we have no choice, we are rocketing through history and the road is a little murky, until we look back. I am waiting for Dr. Emmett”Doc” Brown of “Back to the Future” to come hurtling through the door at HQMC any minute. “Yo General Smith! Hop in my Delorean we are meeting Dr. Peabody and Sherman and heading for a trip to reality land!” We don’t have too many choices. It seems someone saw the Marine Corps and told the authors of the latest NSS, that they were safe to promulgate it, there is a small Corps of lunatics out there that have your backs. Just review Title X and set your Marines, (they instinctively know the right way) on course and ask the Navy to toss the LSM to the trash bin and get busy just getting the Corps the ships for the ARG/MEU and prepositioning for brush fires like Haiti and earthquakes in Turkey (they have them a lot) and toss in some cold weather gear, and some new modern form of armor to support the infantry. It is all right there in front of us, we know because we have seen it. Like the chorus in a Greek play, we hear the words of warning, voices of Ellis, LeJeune, OP Smith, Gray, Boyd, Wyly and hmmmm Gudmundsson, heed the words, look forward but remember where you came from, mistakes have been made, nothing we have not seen before and can’t handle. Now where is that P-38, my Beef and Rocks need opening.
Indeed so. The “inexorable tide of events” does not appear inexorable, or even visible, when you are in the midst of it! As Robert Heinlein once said, “You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!”