The Founding of the Fleet Marine Force
Battalion: An Organizational Study of United States Infantry
The estate of the late John Sayen has graciously given the Tactical Notebook permission to serialize his study of the organizational evolution of American infantry battalions. The author’s preface, as well as previously posted parts of this book, may be found via the following links:
As the decade of the 1930s dawned, the Marine Corps at last found itself in a position to shed its role as colonial constabulary. The Second Brigade had left the Dominican Republic in 1924. The Third Brigade (minus the two-battalion Fourth Regiment, left behind in Shanghai) returned from China in early 1929. In January 1933, the last Marines left Nicaragua. In August of 1934, they would be out of Haiti as well.
However this apparent reduction in Marine responsibilities caused the Hoover administration in 1932 to order the reduction of Marine troop strength by nearly a quarter. When added to the Marines’ remaining commitments, this would have made it impossible for them to form expeditionary forces and this would have endangered the Marines’ future as a separate organization. This may well have been the intention, as the then Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur, a strong advocate of the absorption of the Marines by the Army, appears to have been behind the move. However, the Marines had lost none of their old political survival skills and they mustered enough support on Capitol Hill to get Hoover’s order rescinded.
This domestic political crisis was still in progress when the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in 1932 provoked another “China Incident.” The resulting disturbances again required the United States to augment its garrison in the foreign concessions at Shanghai to a full brigade. This time, quite possibly in anticipation of the demise of the Marine Corps, the United States Army would furnish the necessary reinforcements for Shanghai in the form of the 31st Infantry from the Philippines, although the Marines did contribute 400 men to fill the Fourth Marines’ third battalion.
The 31st Infantry proved to be poorly trained and disciplined and to have little idea of what its neutrality protection mission was all about. It soon antagonized both the foreign community (led by the British) and the local Chinese. Although nothing was said officially, it appears that the incident caused the Army’s bid to assume the Marines’ peacekeeping and neutrality protection roles to lose a great deal of its momentum.
Nevertheless, despite its uneven progress Marine disengagement overseas began to allow a resumption of amphibious exercises and further progress on amphibious doctrine. A reinforced battalion operated in the Caribbean in December 1931 and 700 men under a regimental headquarters conducted joint landings with the Army in Hawaii a few months later. The Hawaiian exercises were a fiasco that served to highlight the Marines’ lack of the equipment and training needed to carry out their own doctrine, despite all the progress they had made during the 1920s.
In order to make further progress the then Commandant of the Marine Corps, Major General John H. Russell managed to persuade the Secretary of the Navy that the Marine Corps should have its own striking force. This force would operate as an integral part of the Fleet and which would replace the old East and West Coast Expeditionary Forces. Such a force would clearly be valuable in any war with Japan. The Navy did not wholeheartedly agree, there still being a strong body of opinion within that service that amphibious operations required no special expertise and could be performed well enough by the Army or even by the Navy itself. Nevertheless, in December 1933 the Secretary authorized the creation of a Fleet Marine Force. For its doctrinal basis the Marines published the subsequently well-known Tentative Manual for Landing Operations a few months later.
It soon proved easier to authorize this new force than to actually build it. In September 1933, the Commandant had organized the Seventh Marines to deal with troubles that had recently broken out in Cuba. The crisis subsided before the regiment could reach Cuba so in February 1934 the Commandant ordered it converted into the first three battalions of the FMF.
Under its original organizational concept the FMF was to consist of separate ground and air elements divided between East and West Coasts. The ground force would be built around six separate infantry battalions (numbered 1 through 6) of which two would only be maintained at cadre strength during peacetime. One of these battalions (from San Diego) participated in a landing exercise at San Clemente, California, as early as February 1934. Initially the battalions would have used a version of the 1929 organizational tables that would presumably have included some sort of organic service element since the battalions had no regimental service company to call upon. To get manpower for the FMF the Marines disbanded all their regiments except the Fourth. They had already stopped numbering their companies. “Semi permanent” Marine companies no longer freely moved between temporary battalions and regiments as they had before 1917 so companies no longer needed separate designations outside their parent organizations.
In August 1934, however, it was suggested that the FMF ground forces on the East and West Coast reorganize as brigades, each built around an infantry regiment that could expand to two regiments in wartime. The new regiments were designated the Fifth and Sixth Marines, in honor of their First World War predecessors. The Fifth would be established at Quantico in September as the nucleus of the First, or East Coast Brigade, while the Sixth would be reborn soon afterwards at San Diego for the Second, or West Coast Brigade. Each regiment would receive three of the new FMF infantry battalions plus a token headquarters consisting of a colonel, a lieutenant colonel, a captain (serving as adjutant and intelligence officer), a sergeant major, and a clerk.
Sources:
Memorandum from the Director, Division of Operations and Training to the Major General Commandant (14 August 1934) US National Archives, Record Group 127 Entry 18, Ellsdran File 2385-60.
Holland M. Smith and Percy Finch, Coral and Brass (Washington DC, Zenger Publishing Inc 1948)
Robert Debs Heinl, Jr. Soldiers of the Sea: The United States Marine Corps:1775-1962 (Baltimore: Nautical and Aviation Publishing, 1998)
As a student of history, I've always marveled at the Army thinking it can do everything, but then being unable to accomplish anything at all.
The Marines have a specific niche, and that's amphibious landings, and establishing a beachhead that the army can use to get ashore. Then the Marines can go further inland, kicking ass.
The Army got shafted in two directions at once, as part of it's forces became an air corp, which became an air force.