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thedrifter
02-09-04, 01:51 PM
Lejeune and Denby: Forging a Marine Corps Doctrine

by Manley R. Irwin

The paths of two powerful men crossed in the early 1920s,
and their actions shaped the future of the Navy and Marine Corps.


Fate threw two individuals into a collaborative endeavor that was to last from 1921 to 1924. Together they redefined the direction and mission of the Marine Corps. The first individual was Marine Commandant MajGen John A. Lejeune—the second, Edwin Denby, Secretary of the Navy (SecNav) under the Harding/Coolidge administrations. The result of their collaboration was not readily apparent at the time, but by the end of the Pacific campaign of World War II, the doctrine of amphibious assault had refashioned not only the Marine Corps but the U.S. Navy as well.


John A. Lejeune was born, raised, and educated in Louisiana. He attended Louisiana State University, entered Annapolis, graduated in 1888, and was commissioned a Marine Corps second lieutenant that summer. Lejeune won commendations before, during, and after the Spanish-American War. He alternated between sea duty and desk assignments and by 1917 had attained the rank of brigadier general. Lejeune requsted a frontline assignment in France during World War I, took command of the 4th Marine Brigade, and was promoted to head the Army’s 2d Division composed of Army and Marine units. Lejeune distinguished himself at Belleau Wood, Mont Blanc, and the Argonne Forrest.


At Harding’s inauguration, Edwin Denby, SecNav designate, approached Lejeune and asked him to be Commandant of the Marine Corps. Lejeune accepted and was confirmed by the Senate that same afternoon. Lejeune was to serve in that post until 1929.


Edwin Denby, by contrast was a midwesterner. Born in Indiana and educated in Michigan, Denby earned a law degree at the University of Michigan and later represented Michigan’s First District in the U.S. House of Representatives. He served from 1906 until his defeat by Frank Doremis in 1910. Active in several business enterprises, Denby founded or cofounded the Hupp Motor Car Company, the Federal Motor Truck Company, the Denby Trucking Company, and the Detroit Bank of Commerce.


Denby was also a sailor and Marine. He enlisted in the Spanish-American War and served as a gunner’s mate on the USS Yosemite. At the age of 50 Denby enlisted as a Marine private in World War I, mustering out as major. During the 1920 Presidential campaign, Denby actively campaigned on behalf of Warren Harding and, although not Harding’s first choice as SecNav, accepted the post when it was offered to him.


Lejeune and Denby were to collaborate on a range of Marine and naval policies that included aviation, amphibious assault, reorganizing and positioning of the U.S. fleet, and weapons procurement and supply outsourcing.


Marine Naval Aviation
World War I witnessed giant strides in aviation technology and tactics. BGen Billy Mitchell, Army Air Service, was committed to “aviation unity” or merger, and Mitchell was nothing if not persuasive. By the time the Harding administration had taken office, some eight congressional bills had been filed calling for aviation merger in one form or another. Then, as if to underscore his point that aviation constituted the weapon of the future, Mitchell’s bombers sank a captured German battleship in the summer of 1921.


The Harding administration opposed an aviation merger, and Edwin Denby stood at the forefront of that opposition. The administration concluded that since Army and Navy pilots operated under entirely different environments, each Service should retain their own aviation arm. The administration did more than ban an aviation merger. The administration secured an institutional home for aviation within the naval establishment—a Bureau of Aeronautics. Edwin Denby assisted in drafting the appropriate legislation, testified on behalf of the bureau before naval affairs committees, and selected a former battleship captain, William Moffett, as the bureau’s first chief.

The Marines had more than an academic interest in the debate over aviation’s future. For one thing, the Marines defined a pilot as a Marine employing a different weapon, and Marine aviation was committed to ground air support. Mitchell, by contrast, was committed to strategic bombing. In aviation tactics, Lejeune and Mitchell stood at polar extremes.

Lejeune pushed for tactical training between pilots and Marine infantry. To that end Lejeune required an airfield near Quantico. The move necessitated congressional approval, and both Lejeune and Denby secured appropriations for land purchase and airfield conversion. Once completed, Lejeune was later able to report to the Secretary that a coordinated aviation unit was operational.


Before taking office, members of Harding’s own party began calling for a cessation of a naval arms race. Harding, now in office, invited the allies to attend an arms negotiation conference in Washington during November 1921. Completed in February the next year, the conferees agreed to the 10-year building holiday, and set battleship tonnage quotas of 5:5:3 applied to the United States, Britain, and Japan respectively. The participants also permitted the conversion of two battlecruisers into aircraft carriers, and Denby convinced Congress that a recycled USS Lexington (CV 2) and the USS Saratoga (CV 3) constituted a prudent economic investment.

Amphibious Assault
Lejeune, very much aware of the prospect of the Marine Corps’ demise through legislative “death,” sought to differentiate the Marine Corps from the Navy. He convinced Denby to establish separate Marine recruiting stations. Denby supported Lejeune but advised the Commandant to clear the move with the Bureau of the Budget, a new organization introduced by the Harding administration. Lejeune set up a meeting with Charles Dawes, budget head, and proposed to place Marine recruiting in government buildings, thus saving rental expenses. Dawes was so taken by the proposal that he awarded Lejeune a cigar, literally.


These endeavors, however, were peripheral to anticipating one’s adversary. LtCol Earl Ellis predicted before World War I that the United States and Japan would collide in the Pacific. U.S. strategy was burdened by two treaties, however. To solicit votes for a League of Nations, Woodrow Wilson permitted the Japanese to retain the former German islands of Micronesia, the Marshalls, Carolines, and Marianas. And to compensate for Japan’s inferior tonnage assignment, the United States promised not to fortify the Philippines or Guam in the Washington Agreement. To say that U.S. naval planners were upset would be an understatement. In their view the United States had ceded the western Pacific to the Japanese Navy.

What appeared an insurmountable obstacle to naval planners was perceived by John Lejeune as an opportunity. Embracing LtCol Ellis’ plan, Lejeune proposed to transit the Pacific in a step-by-step assault on enemy held island bases. Lejeune told the General Board that the naval agreement did not prohibit the formation of a mobile force tied to the U.S. fleet. The Marines would be that mobile force. Designated the Marine Corps Expeditionary Force, the mobile force would be semiautonomous, carrying its own artillery, supplies, landing craft, aviation support, and even the deployment of battleships.


Both Denby and Lejeune embarked upon the next step, congressional funding. Given a congressional bent on liquidating the cost of World War I, that exercise was not easy. The first hurdle was the Bureau of the Budget. The bureau recommended a $50 million slash in naval appropriations. That action prompted Denby to pen a letter to President Harding himself warning the President that the bureau threatened the existence of the Marine Expeditionary Force. Apparently the letter had some effect because Lejeune was able to establish an east and west coast expeditionary force.


Then in late 1921, Secretary Denby announced the formation of the Control Force, an entity created to assist Marine amphibious operations. Lejeune’s next step was to put combined operations to a test employing the Control Force and Marine Corps Expeditionary Force in Caribbean exercises. The exercises lasted from 1922 through 1924.


If the Marines anticipated a learning experience from the Caribbean maneuvers, they were not disappointed. One officer described it as sheer bedlam. Marine lighters landed on the wrong beach, troops got lost, supplies were misplaced, bureau lighters were ill-suited as landing craft, battleship prelanding support was erratic, wet radios where inoperative, and the role of a beach master was judged to be critical. The commander of the Control Force pointed out that Navy transports were too slow, that submarines constantly broke down, and that cargo loading required careful planning. Another officer suggested that an amphibious command ship loaded with radio gear would facilitate operational coordination. Combined operations would be a slow, frustrating learning process, and the Marines would often find themselves isolated and alone in its advocacy.

continued.......

thedrifter
02-09-04, 01:52 PM
Fleet Reorganization and Positioning <br />
In 1921 Edwin Denby approved a major reorganization of the fleet by setting up task forces—a battle fleet, a base force, a control force, and a scouting force....

thedrifter
02-09-04, 01:53 PM
Policy Legacy
The effect of these four decisions was not to become apparent for some two decades. In fact, not until the central Pacific drive of the Navy in November 1943 would the decisions of Lejeune and Denby become manifest and visible. Employing amphibious assault, the Marines moved some 5,000 miles from the Gilberts to the Ryukus—an offensive that prompted a return to the legacy of 1921 to 1924 policies.


Consider the issue of aviation unity. The Navy and Marines were able to retain their own aviation arm. Both rendered close air support in pre- and postamphibious operations. After Tarawa, however, the Marines demanded their own escort carriers—a recommendation that would not take effect until the Okinawa operation in 1945.


The Marine Corps Expeditionary Force naturally evolved and changed in the interwar period. In 1933 the force was renamed the Fleet Marine Force. By 1942 the Fleet Marine Force was called the Amphibious Force, Pacific. Denby’s fleet organization was similarly subject to alteration. By 1943 the Battle Fleet had evolved into the Fast Carrier Task Force. Fast battleships now screened carriers, and older battleships, assigned amphibious assault, served as counterbattery artillery in pre- and postlanding operations.


The Base Force sired the Service Squadron, Pacific—a logistics operation that enabled combatant ships, along with refueling underway, to relieve the Navy of its dependence upon fixed bases. ADM Chester W. Nimitz termed mobile logistics his secret weapon—a view confirmed by postwar interviews with Japanese admirals.


Any military conflict recasts the role of supply outsourcing, and World War II was no exception. Almost from the beginning the Bureau of Aeronautics relied upon the products of commercial airframe suppliers, but the dynamic imperative of battle demanded that products be upgraded and modified while in production. The automotive industry accepted such midcourse corrections with apparent forbearance to the extent they were accustomed to annual model changeovers. Lejeune’s frustration with bureau supplied lighters ignited a process that was to move from the arsenal model to one of competitive entry by outside suppliers. Such companies as Higgins and the Food and Machinery Corporation, among others, built some 80,000 landing craft and ships during the war years.


Although President Harding’s ship subsidy failed in 1923, the concept reappeared as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Merchant Marine Act of 1936. The fact that the Japanese were building 18-knot tankers in the 1930s apparently altered congressional attitudes toward a subsidy program. Replacing the shipping board, the Maritime Commission let contracts for some 200 oil tankers embedded with “national defense” features—namely speed. The first buyer of the Cimarron tankers was none other than the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. By 1945 the Maritime Commission had built some 5,500 merchant ships. (Indeed, by that time some 80 percent of all U.S. ships were constructed in nongovernment yards.)


The Marine Corps, anticipating the need for fast transports, was again ahead of the curve. In 1936 the Marines requested that World War I destroyers be modified as fast destroyer transports, and some 36 conversions were made by the Bureau of Construction and Repair. And merchant tankers lent themselves to conversion. Four Cimarron tankers were taken over as naval oilers, then converted to escort carriers. The Marines operated with their own escort carriers in the Okinawa campaign and were scheduled to receive eight escort carriers for the invasion of Japan.


The Pearl Harbor tank farm mercifully escaped damage on 7 December 1941. Had the tanks been destroyed, the U.S. fleet would have had to move some 3,000 miles east to the west coast, complicating any future naval offensive operations.


In 1943 VADM Paul Wenneker, Germany’s naval advisor to Japan, suggested that Japanese submarines attack U.S. merchant ships operating between Honolulu and the west coast. Some Japanese boat commanders were sent to France to learn German tactical operations, and a German submarine transferred to the Japanese navy yard at Kure. But the submarine embargo never took place. Though 20 years apart, ADM Wenneker and ADM John Robison had spotted a potential vulnerability in U.S. Navy logistics.


The Pacific campaign essentially called for two navies—one for enemy interdiction, the other for amphibious assault. Suffice it to say that Lejeune and Denby had anticipated the productivity potential of private sector firms and their supply chain of subcontractors to support such diverse operations.


Conclusion
Over time John Lejeune’s amphibious doctrine transformed into an integrated weapons system consisting of fleet carriers, light carriers, escort carriers, cargo and supply ships, fast destroyer transports, submarines, a family of landing craft and ships, battleships, and Marine divisions. Marine amphibious manuals were adopted by the Army verbatim, and Marine officers trained infantry divisions that participated in the North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and Normandy operations.


Edwin Denby, of course, did not originate the concept of amphibious assault. But as SecNav he served as Lejeune’s patron saint. And Denby comprehended Lejeune’s new doctrine. Denby fought to retain naval and Marine aviation independence, affirmed the need for an aeronautics bureau, backed Lejeune’s expeditionary force, repositioned the fleet to the Pacific, supported a battle cruisers carrier conversion program, approved the formation of the Control Force, initiated the Pearl Harbor oil tank farm, lobbied on behalf of a merchant ship subsidy program, and inaugurated a merchant ship/auxiliary conversion plan.


Lejeune and Denby’s paths were to intersect in February 1929. That month John Lejeune retired from the Marine Corps and Edwin Denby died in Detroit, MI at the age of 59. One year later Lejeune, in writing his memoirs, wrote “God rest you, Edwin Denby.” One can only speculate what Lejeune had in mind when he made that pronouncement. Perhaps it was Lejeune’s way of thanking Edwin Denby who, as SecNav, created an environment that proved to be the most innovative period in Lejeune’s illustrious career as the Marine Commandant.


>Dr. Irwin is a Professor Emeritus at the Whittemore School of Business, University of New Hampshire.


>>Typeset copies of this article, complete with footnotes, may be obtained by contacting the editorial offices of MCG.

http://www.mca-marines.org/Gazette/2004/04irwin.html


Sempers,

Roger
:marine: