The Emergence of American Amphibious Warfare, 1898–1945. David S. Nasca
ship, but the Marines also had to deal with the laborious task of moving supplies and artillery ashore onto an island hostile to an American occupation.20
In each case, ground and naval forces planned and worked together to implement small-scale landings involving the U.S. Army or U.S. Marine Corps, with the occasional participation of Filipino auxiliary troops. However, Filipino guerrillas used ambushes as well as hit-and-run tactics to attack American military forces. In addition, the use of pits and mantraps was not uncommon in order to add to the frustration and misery of the Americans. By avoiding the strength of the U.S. military and nibbling along the edges and weak points of the occupational force, American soldiers were either forced to fight the Filipino rebels from a position of weakness or put them in morally compromising positions that undermined support for the U.S. occupation. The American military tried to avoid the advantages that the Filipino guerrilla enjoyed by instead sticking to the coast and employing gunboats to move, land, and support U.S. military forces. By cutting insurgency support from the ocean, the United States forced the Filipino rebels to attack the American military in fortified positions along the coast while also creating conditions where insurgents were vulnerable either to naval gunfire or an amphibious landing from a powerful American force.21
This approach ultimately broke the backbone of the insurgency and led to the incorporation of the insurgency’s top leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, into the establishment of an American territorial government to administer the Philippines. When the Philippine insurgency was finally suppressed, the United States continued to deploy its ground and naval forces in support of small-scale amphibious operations in the Philippines, while also utilizing a series of counterinsurgency operations against the last Filipino insurgent hold outs. This course of action proved to be long and expensive, and it plagued both the American political and military leadership from 1899 to 1903. Senator Frisbie Hoar, a prominent United States politician and senator from Massachusetts, remarked critically:
You [President Roosevelt] have wasted six hundred millions of treasure. You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives—the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit…. I believe—nay, I know—that in general our officers are humane. But in some cases they have carried on your warfare with a mixture of American ingenuity and Castilian cruelty.22
The Americans put the Philippine-American War on hold when the Boxer Rebellion threatened the Foreign Quarter in Beijing in June 1900. While these rebel forces had existed years prior as a secret society against westernization, they quickly picked up credibility and strength due to the Chinese population’s growing dissatisfaction with the military, political, and economic strength of China, as well as the unfair economic and diplomatic advantages that the foreign powers enjoyed at the expense of the Chinese. Things came to a head when the Boxers’ growing appeal to the Chinese population and the encouragement of the Chinese monarchy, Empress Cixi, incited the Boxers to kill and drive all foreigners out of China. In addition, the Boxers also mistakenly believed that their spiritual powers, developed through physical exercises and martial arts, made them immune to small arms and artillery fire.23
When tensions between foreigners and the Boxers finally broke out into full-scale warfare, the overwhelming numerical strength of the Boxers, combined with a supportive Chinese government, forced the foreigners to seek protection at the Peking Legation Quarter where they were under siege for fifty-five days. While the major powers took measures to strengthen their respective legation garrisons in Peking and sent quick reaction forces to Tientsin, no one was ready for the size and intensity of the Boxer Rebellion. Due to the support of Empress Cixi, the Boxers quickly seized the initiative from the foreign powers and quickly came close to destroying all foreign military garrisons and massacring the resident foreign population. The situation in China was so severe that it temporarily brought all the world’s major powers together to crush the Boxer Rebellion. The international fleet that was hastily assembled and sent to seize the Taku Forts that protected the entrance of China’s Yellow River was a complicated operation. Having to overcome linguistic and operational differences in the deployment of an army composed from over a half dozen nations, the great powers strained their military resources in a common effort to break China’s coastal defenses near Peking with a massive amphibious assault. Despite nationalistic rivalries and differences among the coalition forces, the international fleet managed to successfully coordinate their naval gunfire support and carefully land their troops to attack and defeat the Chinese garrison in the Taku Forts. The ability for the international force to successfully accomplish its mission and open the way for the relief of the Peking Legation Quarter in Peking was ironically based on the collective amphibious experiences of the participating powers. Having been involved in several amphibious operations in Venezuela, the Upper Nile, the Philippines, Manchuria, Panama, North Africa, and the Balkans, these same armies now worked in a tenuous alliance.24 Both the Peking Legation Quarter and the Tientsin garrisons held out against the Boxers and Empress Cixi’s imperial armies, which actively supported the Boxers. While fierce fighting raged in Peking and Tientsin, a second relief force was organized, and soon a large naval and ground force composed of eight nations approached the Taku Forts by the Peiho River near Tientsin. During this time, both Secretary of the Navy Long and the Adjutant General’s Office in Washington, DC, sent telegraph messages requesting that more ground and naval forces be sent to take part in the international relief force in China. General Arthur MacArthur, Military Governor of the Philippines, voiced his concerns when he responded via telegraph to his superiors in Washington: “Force in Philippines has been disseminated to limitation of safety; concentration slow to avoid evacuation of territory now occupied, which would be extremely unfortunate.”25 Despite the shortage of ground and naval forces left in the Philippines, additional reinforcements were sent to China to supplement the relief force. The situation in China was desperate, and the international community feared that the foreign garrisons in Peking and Tientsin would be overwhelmed and massacred. Facing the Boxers and the Chinese Imperial Army, the Eight-Nation Alliance managed to coordinate its naval gun support to neutralize the guns of the Taku Forts and allow the multinational landing force to conduct an amphibious assault in order to seize control of the forts and open the entrance of Peiho River. Once the Chinese garrison was driven out of the fortifications, the Eight-Nation Alliance landed the rest of its ground forces unmolested and pushed into the interior to relieve Admiral Seymour’s forces, which were trapped in Tientsin. While American and alliance forces fought their way through Tientsin, First Lieutenant Smedley Butler described the assault against Tientsin in detail:
Chinese bombs were exploding about us, and Chinese snipers on both sides of the river [in Tientsin] were pouring a steady stream of bullets in our direction. The sky flashed with fiery zigzags. Our artillery was also keeping up a heavy bombardment [on the city]. The British were hammering at the stone wall with the guns they used to defend Ladysmith in South Africa during the Boer War. It took many men to drag around these clumsy guns mounted on boiler plate wheels. But they did real damage with their shells. We cheered every time one of their projectiles crashed in the native city.26
After bitter fighting to take the city and relieving Admiral Seymour’s trapped forces, the multinational force began a second relief expedition in Peking. With about eighteen thousand men, the relief force fought its way through a series of battles until the combined force of Boxers and the Chinese Imperial Army was crushed and driven from the city. However, the occupation of Peking and certain areas in China by the various foreign powers created a power vacuum that potentially set conditions for the possible collapse of the Qing Dynasty and civil war. Fortunately, peace was concluded with the major powers in which China not only had to pay an extraordinarily heavy indemnity, but was also required to exile all surviving Boxers from China.
Despite talks of possibly dividing China into permanent spheres of influence, the United States decided to stick to the Open Door Policy of 1898, in which all nations enjoyed equal access to the China market. America’s involvement until 1898 was more or less that of a bystander nation; however, the U.S. military’s growing capabilities, especially in regard to power projection through amphibious warfare, finally gave the Americans creditability as a world power. America’s ability to project hard power into the Asia-Pacific as a result of the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War, and now the Boxer Rebellion allowed