Expeditionary Warfare
Highlighting 150 years of expeditionary warfare in U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings.
By A. Denis Clift
April 2023 Proceedings Vol. 149/4/1,442
Marines with Battalion Landing Team 2/5, 1st Marine Expeditionary Unit, paddle out during a boat raid debarkation from the USS New Orleans (LPD-18). U.S. Marine Corps (Danny Gonzalez)
For Proceedings’ first examination of expeditionary warfare, one goes back to the legendary Captain Stephen B. Luce and the introductory words to his 1877 article “Fleets of the World”: “Beginning with the earliest authentic history we find that among the Greeks and Phoenicians the higher officers, and often the entire personnel of navies, fought on shore as well as at sea. It was natural, therefore, that the tactics of the land army, which was of an earlier growth, should be applied to the sea army as far as the nature of the two elements would admit.”
There were many famous Marine Corps expeditions: the Marines storming Tripoli in 1805; the 1847 Mexican-American War’s Battle of Chapultepec, with the red stripe on Marines’ blue trousers now honoring the ferocity of that fighting; to Peking at the turn of the century to protect embassies and U.S. commerce; to France in World War I; and to several expeditionary brigade campaigns in the Caribbean and Central America between the world wars.
Much closer to home, Second Lieutenant Wallace M. Greene, future Marine Corps Commandant, captured the pre-Revolutionary War history of “Piscataqua’s Pirates” and the daring of a landing force of New Hampshire men who surprised and captured the English fort of William and Mary at the mouth of the Piscataqua River in 1775, four months before the battles of Lexington and Concord.
Thomas Pickering, miller and militia captain, was in the lead, taking several small sailing craft loaded with men through a December night:
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/april/expeditionary-warfare
