The Emergence of American Amphibious Warfare, 1898–1945. David S. Nasca
amphibious capabilities. While Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy enjoyed having powerful navies, they also had the advantage of using either their homeland or colonies as a base of operations in landing ground forces against enemy states. France, Germany, and Italy were influenced in the employment of their ground forces based on their lack of need to focus on the development of amphibious capabilities. All three had lands, colonies, and outposts close enough to launch military campaigns to expand their colonial holdings, especially in Africa. France used Southern France, Algeria, and the French Congo to secure most of West Africa; Germany slowly secured key African coastal regions by incorporating the cooperation and support of tribes and settlements friendly to the German cause; Italy had geography on its side when the Ottoman Empire was unable to send enough military forces to protect Libya from invasion. Thomas Pakenham observes that the Scramble for Africa bewildered both Europeans and Africans in that within half a generation, the European powers occupied almost the entire continent by controlling nearly 10 million square miles of new territory and ruling over 110 million new subjects. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Scramble for Africa poisoned the diplomatic climate to the extent that no European power was satisfied with just their vast colonial conquests, but now wanted more land, markets, and resources.14
Despite each major power’s successes in colonial expansion, the international system was changing. Intensive imperial competition, combined with the political, social, and economic forces of modernization of the Second Industrial Revolution, was about to dramatically transform the world. The first decade of the twentieth century brought about rapid industrialization and, with it, a new form of confidence. Mankind was not only making extraordinary leaps in all fields of human knowledge, but was also creating extraordinary machines and constructing architectural wonders that were once considered impossible. To add to the growing achievements of human civilization of the new century, explorers around the world were conquering the final frontiers of the planet and slowly mapping the last corners of the Earth’s surface. However, these new advancements in technology and new conquests for the good of human civilization were not entirely positive when the global race for power and glory came to a head with the opening of World War I.15
As the United States entered the twentieth century, it encountered geopolitical obstacles that reinforced the need for developing technologies for amphibious warfare. The importance of amphibious warfare in the United States’ geopolitical strategy increased gradually during the next forty years, both through the practical experience of small wars and exercises and, more theoretically, in the war colleges. The balance of power established by Great Britain as a result of the Napoleonic Wars was changing, and the United States and the other major powers were utilizing geopolitical strategies and technologies to prepare for it.
During this time, the international system originally created by Great Britain based on the balance of power following the Napoleonic Wars was beginning to reach an impasse among the great powers. In fact, the wars, international crises, and unresolved diplomatic and territorial issues in Europe were slowly dividing the world into two armed camps based on two alliance systems: the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance. The polarization of Europe’s geopolitical system was the crucial element for the global war that broke out in 1914. The nature of the Austro-Serbian crisis should not have been the event to trigger a world war. The balance-of-power system created by Great Britain as a result of the Napoleonic Wars should have prevented a confrontation among the major powers and should have instead minimized conflicts while encouraging dialogue and conflict resolution. Between the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, despite intense nationalistic competition, saber rattling, and local wars between the major powers, peace was quickly restored. However, in 1914, the bipolar system created between the Allied and Central Powers structured the international environment from which crucial decisions were made.16
These alliances were activated on June 28, 1914, when a Serbian nationalist assassinated Austria-Hungary’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand. That August, World War I began, and as a result, the major powers of the world were pulled into the conflict. The societies of every belligerent country were mobilized and put on a total war footing, either siding with the Allied Powers (the former Triple Entente) or the Central Powers (once known as the Triple Alliance). Initially viewed as a war of maneuver, the conflict quickly became a war of attrition. Machine guns and quick-firing artillery made short work of the massive conscript armies of both sides. Locked in a stalemate, both the Allied and Central Powers turned to various technologies and tried to use them to change the strategic dynamics of the war in their favor. In 1917, the United States was also pulled into the conflict. Robert Bruce points out that during the global struggle between the two alliance systems, technological development dramatically accelerated: “The rule seemed to be: in war, no time; in peace, no rush. The European arms race in the early twentieth century, which might be called Cold War I, and the outbreak of the First World War sounded an alert in American military circles…. But this time American participation in the war was indeed too brief for R&D [Research and Development] to play a part in the victory.”17
Map 2. U.S. Amphibious Operations in East Asia (1898–1902)
Geopolitical Events in Amphibious Warfare in the Philippines and China
The beginning of the twentieth century saw extraordinary advances in science and technology that dramatically changed the makeup of the globe. As a result of the Second Industrial Revolution in the early 1900s, the world was making fundamental changes in economics, society, governance, and especially the military. These advances also ushered in a more dynamic environment in which the need to adapt to future expectations and challenges was becoming more important than ever. According to Tony Zinni, a former Marine general, any organization that hopes to survive and flourish must be adaptive; if it is not, the organization risks becoming irrelevant in this dynamic, competitive, adapt-or-die world.18 In the early 1900s, this drive to adapt and flourish influenced the United States to retain and further develop its amphibious capabilities. American political and military confidence encouraged a more aggressive gunboat diplomacy in which the United States used hard power to not only protect its interests, but also to deter potential enemy powers.
Amphibious warfare was the way of the future for the United States’ geopolitical strategy during the twentieth century. This emphasis on amphibious warfare was based on the United States’ smashing success in the Spanish-American War, and it continued to influence the American political and military leadership until the country’s entry into World War I. However, the United States continued to focus applying its nascent amphibious capabilities in both the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. In the Pacific, the United States focused its military efforts in the Philippine-American War, in which it became increasingly evident that the Filipinos did not care for a long-term American occupation. While the American military did send observers to watch Japanese amphibious operations during the Russo-Japanese War, it also continued to perform ad hoc amphibious operations to attack and pacify hostile islands, especially when the Philippine insurgency began to spread beyond the main island of Luzon to other remote, isolated islands. “The first years of American occupation of the Philippines were marked by full scale war,” writes Warren Zimmermann in his study of American involvement in the Philippines during the first decade of the twentieth century. “The shape of the Philippines, an archipelago of more than seven thousand islands stretching a thousand miles from north to south, complicated the task of the U.S. Army. Also, [Emilio] Aguinaldo’s [insurgent] forces at first outnumbered the Americans by about seventy-five thousand troops in the Philippines.”19
To continue to pressure the Philippine insurgency, small naval squadrons (usually composed of a few cruisers and gunboats) dropped off company- or battalion-sized elements on various Philippine islands to either flush out the insurgents or settle down as a long-term garrison post. First Lieutenant Smedley Butler’s experience as a U.S. Marine serving in the Philippines provides the context of the environment where men like him had to operate for years occupying the island of Olongapo using a native outrigger during a storm. The driving rain combined with the rough seas quickly drained the strength of Butler and his men. While they were not attacked by Filipino insurgents during their amphibious operation, not only did the weather