21st Century Ellis: Operational Art and Strategic Prophecy for the Modern Era

By Naval Institute Press

For years, the Marine Corps has touted the prescience of Lt. Col. “Pete” Ellis, USMC, who predicted in 1921 that the United States would fight Japan and how the Pacific Theater would be won. Now the works of the “amphibious prophet” are collected together for the first time. Included are Ellis’ essays on naval and amphibious operations that the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps would use to win the war against Imperial Japan, as well as his articles about counterinsurgency and conventional war based on his experiences in the Philippines and in Europe during World War I. As the United States focuses on the Pacific once again, Friedman presents Ellis’ ideas as a case study to inform current policymakers about the dynamics of strategy and warfare across the vast reaches of the Pacific. This collection reveals Ellis to be a thinker who was ahead of his time in identifying concepts the U.S. military struggles with even today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781612518084

Book preview

PREFACE

The genesis for this book rightly belongs to Lt. Cdr. Benjamin Armstrong, USN. His 21st Century Mahan: Sound Military Conclusions for the Modern Era provided the idea for and the format of this book. My contribution was to suggest that Earl Hancock Pete Ellis would be a good candidate to receive the same treatment as Alfred Thayer Mahan. Benjamin suggested that I propose the idea to Adam Kane at the Naval Institute Press, who in turn challenged me to write it out in manuscript form.

I immediately contacted the Marine Corps Archives located at the General Alfred M. Gray Marine Corps Research Center at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. The archives are an underused treasure, and the staff is exceedingly friendly, helpful, and enthusiastic. Mere hours after being challenged by Adam, the archives provided me, via e-mail, with every extant word that Pete Ellis wrote in a professional capacity.

Until that point I had read Ellis’ biography but had never read his actual work. I feared I would find only a small amount of material that applied to the modern operating environment. The Marine Corps has on occasion inflated the importance of some aspects of our history, and I feared that Ellis’ legacy was more tradition than substance. Instead, I found a trove of ideas with clear and direct applications for modern warfare portrayed in language that demonstrates a depth of knowledge and passion uncommon for junior officers of any era. The digital documents I worked with were scans of the originals. In the case of Ellis’ Naval War College papers and Advanced Base Operations in Micronesia, the originals were pages typed by Ellis himself. His passion for the subject was strong enough to leap through the typewriter and onto the page, where later technology preserved it. Handwritten changes are penned in with a strong hand, and bolded sentences and headings are pounded out in capital letters. Ellis poured himself into his work, sometimes to the detriment of his health.

The other selections contained in this book are articles Ellis wrote for the then very new Marine Corps Gazette, a publication that was intended to be—and remains today—a forum in which Marines can discuss their trade in a medium accessible to the entire Marine Corps. The Gazette and its current editor, Col. John Keenan (Ret.), have given me many opportunities as a young writer for which I am grateful. I was unaware that I was following in Lieutenant Colonel Ellis’ footsteps until the archives sent me copies of the two articles he published in the Gazette. One is about his experiences in World War I; the other is about counterinsurgency based on his time in the Philippines, then occupied by the United States. Most modern readers will be surprised by how Ellis describes the problems that his generation of American service members faced and the similarity of his recommendations to those proposed today under the auspices of new ideas.

This book will make Ellis’ works more accessible than ever before, and I hope that other researchers, thinkers, and writers will find those works useful. In my transcription I have left archaic spellings of words and turns of phrase as found in the original. I changed the formatting of some subheadings and indentations for consistency and organization. Some parts were removed because they dealt with the logistics of coal-fueled navies, which, while interesting, are not applicable to today’s operating environment.

Finally, I want to thank a few people and organizations without which I wouldn’t have this opportunity. First, I must thank the Naval Institute Press and Adam Kane for taking a chance on an untested writer, as well as Adam Nettina and Karin Kaufman for editing the manuscript. Second, I need to thank my dad Robert Friedman for instilling a love of reading and my mom Georgiana Friedman for instilling a love of writing well. And last but not least, thank you to my beautiful wife Ashton for unfailingly believing in my sometimes ambitious ideas and for being so supportive when I was buried in research or writing.

INTRODUCTION

Any war in the Pacific region will of necessity be an amphibious war. The vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean make it necessary to command the sea in order to control the land. In this overwhelmingly maritime region, neither the water nor the air above it can be ignored when seeking to operate on the land. The tyranny of the Pacific Ocean forces amphibious operations on any nation attempting to project power in the region and even dictates the types of amphibious operations that can be undertaken. When most people think of amphibious operations, they think of Utah Beach on the Normandy coast, where Allied troops battered through Adolf Hitler’s seawall head on, suffering devastating casualties but signaling the death knell of the Nazi regime. This was never the preferred course of action for amphibious practitioners and was used only when absolutely necessary. The Pacific Ocean, however, forces such measures upon those who seek to cross it in the face of opposition. A multitude of easily defensible islands act as unsinkable ships, allowing their possessors to use them as a base for supplies and sites for long-range missiles or aircraft carriers. The islands form a symbiotic strategic relationship with the ocean that surrounds them; control of one requires control of the other.

The United States and Imperial Japan once faced off against each other on opposite sides of this great ocean. Japan attempted to seize control of the islands and then hold them against the inevitable American onslaught brought on by Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor. In this they failed. The United States executed an island-hopping campaign on multiple fronts against Japanese opposition. Japan’s bid for success was to keep the United States from controlling the Pacific. Today the United States faces another competitor across that same blue expanse. If the competition comes to a head, another generation of Americans will have to battle for control of the water and assault the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

In amphibious operations theory, no voice speaks louder than Lt. Col. Earl Hancock Pete Ellis, United States Marine Corps, the first theorist to focus on amphibious operations. If he is not the only amphibious theorist, he is most certainly the only one of consequence. This is an impressive distinction for someone whose career coincided with the Battle of Gallipoli. In 1915, a combined task force of French, UK, Australian, and New Zealand troops attempted the largest amphibious operation in World War I on the Turkish-controlled peninsula. The task force’s failure, which was largely a product of poor planning, coordination, and execution at the highest levels, was blamed on the machine gun and rapid-fire artillery pieces. But although Ellis recognized the difficulties of amphibious assault in the face of modern weapons, he never accepted its impossibility.

The debate over Gallipoli occurred at a time when the U.S. armed service most interested in that battle, the Marine Corps, was facing a debate over its role. The organization began as one that augmented ships’ crews and guarded naval installations ashore. Increasingly, though, the nation had called on its Marines to go to war alongside the Army in both large and small conflicts, against both organized armies and irregular foes in small wars. This change in role culminated in 1917, when Marine Corps units were ripped from fighting bandits in South America and sent to France to join the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) under Gen. John Blackjack Pershing, USA. There, in places such as Belleau Wood, Mont Blanc, and the Somme, the Marines proved they were just as good at fighting as any soldier.

While proving itself adept at any task was certainly good for the organization, questions about what the Marine Corps was supposed to be doing remained. The days of Marines acting as sharpshooters in the rigging of sailing ships were gone with the age of sail itself. If the Marine Corps was able to accomplish the same missions as the U.S. Army, as it did in France, why have a Marine Corps at all? What does such an outfit do in the modern world? It was to these questions that a young captain named Pete Ellis, at the behest of the commandant of the Marine Corps, turned his intellect.

On 19 December 1880, Earl Hancock Ellis was born in Iuka, Kansas, to Augustus and Catherine Axline Ellis. The Ellises, who had experienced ups and downs as homesteaders, had settled in Iuka to start a family. When Earl was two, the family moved to Idaho, north of Boise, but they moved back to Iuka only four years later. Schooling on the American prairie in the late nineteenth century was primitive, but Earl proved bookish enough to attend high school from 1896 to 1900. In addition to being a budding academic, he is known to have been an enthusiastic athlete.¹

It was during this period that Ellis’ interest in the United States Marine Corps began. Ellis followed the story of the Spanish-American War through newspaper articles, and on 27 August 1900, the twenty-year-old took a train from Pratt, Kansas, to Chicago to enlist. Private Ellis was shipped to the Marine barracks in Washington, D.C., where he was trained by Marine veterans. In February 1901, less than a year after his enlistment, he was promoted to corporal. This early promotion was not enough for the ambitious Ellis, however, and his parents prevailed upon their representative in Congress, who mentioned young Ellis to the then-commandant of the Marine Corps, Brig. Gen. Charles Heywood. Ellis hired a retired U.S. Army colonel to tutor him for the officer examination, which he passed with high marks. He took his oath as a second lieutenant on 21 December 1901.

In 1902 Second Lieutenant Ellis received a brief period of instruction in Boston before being ordered to Washington, D.C., on the way to the Philippines, which had become a U.S. possession as a result of the Treaty of Paris between the United States and Spain in 1898. The Filipinos had other ideas, and by the time of Ellis’ arrival on the archipelago on 13 April 1902, resistance to U.S. control of the Philippines had not yet dissipated. While officially tasked with guarding the Spanish naval arsenal at Cavite, the Marines patrolled the countryside alongside U.S. Army soldiers in an effort to stamp out insurgents. Ellis served on shore and on ship during his time in the Philippines—for a time he was the commander of the Marine detachment on board the USS Kentucky—and during his second tour, from 1907 to 1911, he commanded companies under both Lt. Col. Joseph H. Pendleton and Gen. John A. Lejeune.

Ellis had always received high marks on his fitness reports, which contained comments such as bold, calm, meticulous, even-tempered, forceful, painstaking, and industrious.² Tellingly, he was frequently assigned to duties as an adjutant, a job whose description is roughly equivalent to the modern-day operations officer. A challenging billet involving the production of orders and coordination of a military unit’s various subunits, its occupant is usually hand chosen. After his second tour in the Philippines, Ellis’ exceptional abilities as a staff officer got him assigned to the commandant’s staff in Headquarters Marine Corps (HQMC) not long after his promotion to captain.

It was here where fate had a hand in Ellis’ future. Apparently bored by staff work that he easily mastered, Ellis applied for aviation duties, a new and dangerous vocation in 1911. However, the commandant at the time, Maj. Gen. William P. Biddle, saw the potential of Ellis’ intellect and needed to fill a spot in the summer course of the Naval War College (NWC). Ellis’ extremely successful tour at Newport will be discussed in greater detail later, but it is interesting to note that his potential was only unlocked when a senior leader in his organization recognized it and then sent him to a course of study designed for officers far more senior to Ellis’ rank of captain. When one considers that Ellis at this point in his life had no academic training beyond high school, Biddle’s choice seems audacious. Biddle’s intuition was right, though, and his small intervention would in time change the entire Marine Corps. Such episodes are rare in today’s military, and even when they do occur, officers who seek higher education too early can cause their careers to stall or even grind to a halt. Then, like today, the military personnel system was designed not to make the most of the potential of individual service members but to fill line numbers in unit rosters with anyone available. An officer of noted intellect and drive can only reach his or her potential if a high-ranking individual recognizes that person’s ability and makes exceptions.

Unfortunately, Ellis was not just recognized for his intellect. By 1914 he began to show signs of a growing dependence on alcohol. Earlier, in the Philippines, it was rumored that Ellis had livened up a dinner party with a Navy chaplain by drunkenly drawing his pistol and shooting the chaplain’s glass off the table, although this episode does not appear in Ellis’ record. That clean record changed during an assignment to Guam, when he was reprimanded for an argument with the governor designate, Capt. William J. Maxwell, USN. The following year, Ellis’ health began to deteriorate when he was diagnosed with exhaustion, fits of melancholia, and hysteria. These two changes in Ellis’ thus far exemplary record may be an indication of the alcoholism that would later become obvious.

Ellis pinned on the rank of major one week before America entered World War I. When the war began he was aide-de-camp to the commandant, George Barnett. He could have spent the war in Washington instead of Europe, but in late 1917, Barnett sent his aide to Europe to observe the arrival of the first Marine units. Ellis reported back that the American Expeditionary Force and its commander, Gen. John Blackjack Pershing, were using the Marine units for menial tasks and other drudgery in rear areas rather than training them to fight. Controversies over how the Marines were being used continued and induced Barnett to send Lejeune to France to talk some sense into Pershing. Lejeune took Ellis with him, and the two went on a whirlwind tour of the western front in France. There Lejeune not only talked sense but also talked himself into command. He took command of the 64th Brigade, 32nd Division—a Wisconsin National Guard unit—but last-minute changes opened up a spot to command the Marine unit, the 4th Brigade. Wherever Lejeune went, Ellis followed as his adjutant until Lejeune received command of the entire 2nd Division, AEF later in the war. Ellis stayed on as adjutant of the 4th Marine Brigade commanded by Brig. Gen. Wendell Buck Neville. According to Thomas Holcomb, commander of 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines, Neville held the title, but Pete ran the brigade.

Ellis also was temporarily promoted to lieutenant colonel during this time, serving in that position during the operation to reduce the Saint Mihiel salient from 13