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A Soldier Of The Sea

The simplest definition of a marine is also the most traditional: a soldier of the sea. In the case of the U.S. Marine Corps, whose primary mission is amphibious assault and whose most famous battles have been fought on land, it might seem more accurate to say "soldier from the sea." The Corps's specialization is a relatively recent development, however. Marines of centuries past were neither expressly trained nor principally employed as amphibious forces. Although they participated in operations ashore, as a rule it was merely as the most proficient element of naval landing parties. For the first twenty-five hundred years of their existence, marines fought the majority of their battles at sea.

Until the mid-nineteenth century, when the introduction of explosive shells and long-range, rifled guns made it possible to sink a ship from a distance, every naval engagement was potentially a boarding action. The role of marines, who were often simply embarked soldiers, was to spearhead such actions. There were marine detachments aboard the Greek galleys that shattered the Persian fleet at the Battle of Salamis in 480 B.C., the climax of the first naval campaign in recorded history. Each of the Athenians' 180 vessels, for example, carried four archers and fourteen infantrymen protected with brass body armor and armed with a short sword and an eight-foot spear. The Greeks called their marines epibatoe (heavily armed sea soldiers). Their superiority in close combat over their Persian counterparts, mainly archers protected only by quilted tunics, was an important ingredient of the Greek victory.

Two centuries later, the Romans owed the transformation of the Mediterranean Sea into Mare Nostrum to the strong arm of their milites classiarii (soldiers of the fleet). Purely a land power at the commencement of her imperial career, Rome was compelled to become a sea power as well when the extension of her influence to the island of Sicily brought her into conflict with the maritime empire of Carthage. In the opening naval actions of the First Punic War (261-241 B.C.), the Romans quickly discovered that they lacked the skills necessary to counter the ram-and-run tactics of their seafaring antagonists. The only way to offset the Carthaginians' seamanship, they reasoned, was by finding a means to get Roman marines aboard the enemy vessels. Their solution was the invention of the corvus (raven), a heavy, fenced gangway about eighteen feet long and four wide that was secured in an upright position in the bow of each Roman galley. Attached to the underside of the upper end of this gangway was a great iron hook; the lower end was fastened into a swivel in the deck. When a Carthaginian galley approached to ram, the Romans released the tackle holding the corvus; the impact of the free-falling gangway embedded the hook in the enemy's deck; the marines charged across, two abreast; and that was that. Although the Carthaginians carried marines of sorts, they were no match for Rome's seagoing legionnaires. In time, the Romans learned to handle their ships expertly enough to do without the corvus, but they continued to rely on boarding actions to win battles.

The fragmentation of political authority in Western Europe following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D. spelled an end to regular naval and marine forces but did nothing to affect the tactics of war at sea. Throughout the Middle Ages, boarding by soldiers embarked for that purpose remained the decisive element of Mediterranean galley warfare. Often, ships of a squadron were actually lashed together to create a floating battlefield. If enemy boarders gained a foothold on any one vessel, reinforcements from neighboring ships were fed into the fray to repulse them. At the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, in which the Christian League's fleet defeated that of the Ottoman Empire in the last great galley action, twenty-five to thirty vessels crowded into a space of approximately 250 by 150 yards to support the engagement between their respective flagships, each of which carried several hundred men-at-arms.

The boarding action also retained its primacy in northern European waters, where high-sided sailing ships called cogs began to be used in combat early in the thirteenth century. Elevated "castles" were built fore and aft as fighting platforms for men-at-arms, while archers, crossbowmen, and stone throwers took position in the crow's nest. Sometimes the ship's boat was slung halfway up the mast to accommodate additional missile men. Normally, the side that established fire superiority would seek to postpone boarding until its projectiles had cut down most of the opposing fighting men. Grappling hooks were used to prevent an enemy from disengaging, and, as in the Mediterranean, friendly ships often roped or even chained themselves together.

In the sixteenth century, the age-old format of war at sea was broken by a revolutionary weapon system created by the integration of two technological innovations that had appeared approximately one hundred years earlier. They were the three-masted, square-rigged ship, an ocean-sailing vessel of unprecedented efficiency; and the single-piece, cast-bronze cannon, the first reasonably reliable gun. When such guns were positioned to fire broadside along the length of such ships, it became readily possible to disable an opposing vessel without coming into physical contact with her. This potential gave birth to a new age of naval tactics, destined to last into the twentieth century, in which the gunnery duel supplanted the boarding action as the principal mode of combat. The change was signaled by the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Both the English and the Spanish fleets consisted almost entirely of broadside-firing ships; but the towering Spanish galleons were much less maneuverable and their cannon were mostly short-range, heavy-caliber ship smashers intended to soften up the enemy for boarding, to which the Spanish remained committed. Finding that their agile vessels could easily evade the Spaniards' attempts to close, the English kept out of their grasp while maintaining a galling fire that reduced the Invincible Armada to a mob of fugitive ships.

But the advent of the gunnery duel did not end the usefulness of marines. Battles were still fought at very close quarters. As late as the War of 1812, the maximum effective range of naval guns was no more than four hundred yards. Serious engagements usually opened at two hundred yards, and a captain with strong nerves might hold fire until half that. In these actions, marines positioned on their ship's deck or aloft in her fighting tops would rake the enemy with musketry. Their fire began to become effective at two hundred yards and increased in accuracy as the range fell until, at one hundred yards or less, an average marksman could hit a man-sized target more often than he would miss. The distance between Lord Nelson, the most illustrious victim of ships' small arms fire, and the unknown Frenchman who put a musket ball through his spine from the mizzen-top of the Redoubtable at the Battle of Trafalgar was approximately fifteen yards.

Marines also joined in the boarding actions that, despite the ascendancy of the gun, often formed the last act of such close combat. In contests between ships of comparable sizes, the side that found itself getting the worst of the gunnery duel would frequently attempt to reverse the tide of battle by boarding. Conversely, the side that dominated the gunnery action might try to board and capture a beaten ship rather than batter her to pieces.

In addition, marines stiffened the parties their ships sent ashore in landings and raids. This had always been one of their functions, of course, but its importance increased as the expansion of Europe made possible by the ship and the gun extended the interests of the Atlantic powers to the four corners of the earth. The colonial and maritime conflicts that ensued did more than give marines active employment, however. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the spoils of these struggles contributed to the rise of governments that could afford to maintain their own full-time, professional armed forces, institutions that had been absent from the Western world since the fall of Rome.

The first regularly constituted marine formation in modern times, the French regiment la Marine, was founded by Cardinal Richelieu in 1627 to guard the country's ports and "form the garrison" of ships. Richelieu embodied a second marine regiment, the Royal Vaisseaux, in 1635, and later in the century his successors organized two others. Meanwhile, Great Britain had established the Duke of York and Albany's Maritime Regiment of Foot-commonly called the Admiral's Regiment, for the duke was Lord High Admiral of England- by an Order in Council of 28 October 1664 directing that "twelve hundred Land Souldjers be forthwith raysed . . . to be distributed into his Ma's Fleets prepared for Sea Service." The United Provinces of Holland followed suit by the creation of their Korps Mariners on 10 December 1665.

The evolution of British marine forces was naturally the most relevant to the military experience of the American colonists. The Maritime Regiment of Foot was disbanded in 1690 after active service afloat and ashore in the Anglo-Dutch Wars, the Low Countries, and North Africa; one company had also done two years' peacekeeping duty in Virginia. The reason for the regiment's dissolution was probably its presumed sympathy for its first colonel, the Duke of York, who, having ascended the throne as King James II in 1685, had been driven off it by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. That the value of marines was not an issue is indicated by the fact that two new units, the 1st and 2nd Regiments of Marines, were organized later in 1690. Detachments of both entered combat almost immediately. In 1698 the two regiments, apparently much reduced in numbers, were consolidated and three infantry regiments were converted into marines. But by then the country was at peace, and all four regiments were disbanded in 1701.

Among the amphibious campaigns, several were undertaken wholly or in part by American forces. The War of Jenkins's Ear, so called because its proximate cause was the unremitting indignation of Capt. Robert Jenkins, a merchant mariner who claimed that a Spanish customs official had cut off his ear, consisted mainly of seaborne assaults on Spanish possessions in the New World. In 1740 militia units from Georgia and South Carolina and five hundred Indians under the command of Gen. James Oglethorpe invaded Florida, capturing two Spanish posts on the St. Johns River and laying siege to the Castillo de San Marcos at St. Augustine. The old fortress proved superior to the colonials' siegecraft, and after two months outside its coquina walls they withdrew. A second attempt on the fortress in 1743, also led by Oglethorpe, was equally unsuccessful.

In the meanwhile, the first authentic American Marines had shared in a debacle that might stand as a model of everything an amphibious operation ought not to be. After reestablishing its own marines in 1739, the British government decided to raise four additional battalions in North America, whose inhabitants were presumed to be better suited than Britons for campaigning in the Tropics, where the deadliest foe was always disease. Some thirty-six hundred men were enlisted and organized in one very large regiment. As was customary in British forces, the unit took the name of its commander, Col. William Gooch, the lieutenant governor of Virginia, and was called Gooch's Marines. With the exception of about thirty British younger sons, the officers came from the upper levels of colonial society; the rank and file came from the nethermost, the majority of the colonies having filled their quotas with criminals, debtors, and derelicts.

One thing that had been accomplished was to reveal the error of the assumption that North Americans would flourish in the Tropics, for only 10 percent of Gooch's Marines survived them. However else it might be esteemed, there is no gainsaying Allan Millett's conclusion that "as an experiment in social purification, the regiment was a success." Among the handful who came home was Capt. Lawrence Washington. A company commander in the Virginia contingent, he had a great respect for Admiral Vernon so great, in fact, that he named his estate after him. When Captain Washington succumbed to a disease contracted at Cartagena, Mount Vernon was inherited by his young half-brother, George.

The last expedition of the decade in which Americans took part ended, quite unlike Cartagena, in victory. Moreover, it was basically an American affair. In 1744 France officially entered the War of Austrian Succession, in which Britain had intervened several years earlier. The colonial extension of the conflict was called King George's War. The French had just completed the construction of a great fortress at Louisbourg, on Cape Breton Island, to guard the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, the umbilical cord of New France. The hostilities opened when a detachment from Louisbourg seized a New England fishing base at Canso, Nova Scotia. Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts thereupon proposed launching an assault on Louisbourg. It was an audacious initiative. The British government promised to furnish naval support, and a force of four thousand Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire men was organized under the command of Col. William Pepperell, a fish merchant by trade. Sailing from Boston in its own transports, the expedition reoccupied Canso on 1 April 1745. Three weeks later a Royal Navy squadron appeared to cover the landing on Cape Breton, and the New Englanders invested Louisbourg. Amateur soldiers though they were, their conduct of the siege was highly creditable. On 17 June the largest coastal fortification on the continent hauled down its flag. Acclaimed as "the severest blow that could have been given the Enemy, and in the tenderest part," the capture of Louisbourg was the major event of the war in North America.

To its conquerors' dismay, the fortress was returned to France by the peace of 1748, so Canada was as well defended as ever when the French and Indian War broke out six years later. By the close of the Seven Years' War, the employment of marine forces and the practice of amphibious warfare had become part of the American as well as the British military experience. The victory year of 1763, when Britain, having extinguished the French threat in North America, seemed to have secured an empire that would soon be lost.

Merrill L. Bartlett & Jack Sweetman. The U.S. Marine Corps: An Illustrated History. Naval Institute Press. 2001.

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