The Corps 03 - Counterattack

by W. E. B Griffin

  Now they were. They regarded Finland as part of Russia, and they wanted it back.

  Major Franklin Neville immediately went to the war zone as an observer. It was clearly his duty, perhaps the most important duty a military attach? can perform, to observe the combatants at war, to report on their relative efficiency and capabilities, and to learn what he could.

  Neville, along with an officer from the Finnish High Command and Lieutenant Colonel Graf Friedrich von Kallenberg-Mattau, an assistant military attach? at the German Embassy with whom Neville played golf and tennis in the summer and hunted and skied in the winter, drove to Karelia in Freddy von K’s Mercedes. Freddy argued that the Mercedes had a better heater and more luggage space than either Neville’s Auto-Union roadster or the official, smaller Mercedes sedan the Finnish General Staff officer had been given.

  As they drove off, there was little question in Franklin Neville’s mind that soon, perhaps within the day, he would be in the hands of the Russians. They outnumbered the Finns by a factor of better than twenty to one. As courageous as the Finns might prove to be, that sort of a disbalance of opposing forces could result in only one end: the Finns would be overrun and wiped out.

  He wondered if the Russians would honor his diplomatic status, or whether he would be shot out of hand, or whether he would perhaps simply disappear.

  It didn’t matter. It was his duty to go; and without any false heroics whatever, he could no more not have gone than he could have flapped his wings and flown.

  What he found in Karelia Province was not in any way what he expected.

  He could not believe that the military forces of a major, contemporary world power would be committed to combat with such poor planning, or with such an absolute ignorance of the kind of warfare they would have to wage.

  Though the wintertime temperature in Karelia regularly dropped to below minus forty degrees Fahrenheit, eighty or ninety percent of the attacking Russian forces were not clothed or otherwise equipped to fight in such conditions.

  The apparent Russian plan to penetrate and overrun the Finns swiftly, through sheer numbers and massive artillery barrages, was an absolute disaster. The Russian artillery, for instance, was almost useless in the bitter cold. And when the pieces could be coaxed into firing, most of the projectiles simply buried themselves deep in the snow before exploding. Rarely did they do any real harm.

  The Finns, on the other hand, were not only superbly equipped to deal with the weather (they even had stoves and facilities to build "warming areas" where troops were routinely returned to be fed and warmed), but were able to wage war effectively in it. Their infantry was equipped with skis and snow-shoes, permitting rapid movement over deep snow. They had snow-colored parkas, glasses to prevent snow blindness, and even white sleeves to place over their rifles to camouflage them.

  And they were superbly led and disciplined.

  The result was that the Finns were able to cause severe personnel and materiel losses to Russian forces at little cost to themselves. Finnish forces would suddenly appear when and where the Russians did not expect them. When the Russians marshaled forces sufficient to repel the Finnish attackers, the Finns simply disappeared in the vast snowy terrain, where the Russians were unable to pursue them.

  Any other army but the Red Army, Neville cabled Washington, would have called off the offensive after suffering such terrible losses. Yet even their apparent total willingness to disregard personnel losses was not going to permit them to accomplish their objective of a quick and decisive victory.

  But the Russians did have one military capability that deeply impressed Major Neville, even if they used it improperly-they literally threw it away. The Russians had massed a large fleet of transport aircraft, from which they parachuted infantry, plus some supplies, to the ground.

  In practice, the Russians generally dropped their parachute troops in the wrong places, where Finnish forces quickly wiped them out; and Russian planning made little or no provision for reinforcing or resupplying the parachutists once they were on the ground, which meant that they ended up, in effect, dying on the vine. In Neville’s professional opinion, however, these failings did not detract in any way from the obvious fact that the use of parachute troops-the Theory of Vertical Envelopment-was an idea whose time had come.

  This theory was not new. Neville recalled that in the notoriety surrounding his court-martial for insubordination, it was often forgotten that U.S. Army Air Corps Brigadier General "Billy" Mitchell had written as long ago as the World War that parachute troops would play an important-perhaps a dominant- role on the battlefields of the future.

  As for poor little Finland, in the end, of course, Goliath prevailed against David. Courage, discipline, and skill in the techniques of warfare cannot stand up forever against an enemy who possesses both overwhelming logistical superiority and manpower, and who is not responsible to his people for the loss of their sons in battlefield slaughter. The Finns sued for armistice in early 1940.

  In February 1940, shortly after the armistice was put into effect, Major Franklin G. Neville was ordered home-but not to retire, as he had anticipated. Instead, he was ordered to Headquarters, USMC, in Washington. There he was given a desk in a crowded office and asked to expand on the reports he had cabled from Helsinki of the Russo-Finnish conflict. He was to make such observations and recommendations as he thought would be of value for planning for possible Marine Corps operations in the future.

  It was temporary duty, and government quarters were not authorized in Washington. He was, however, paid a per diem allowance. Quarters at his next duty station, USMC Schools, Quantico, Virginia, were authorized; but Estelle had no intention of going to Quantico alone and hibernating there while her husband was in Washington. And he had no quarrel with her on that.

  So the Nevilles moved into a suite at the Wardman Park Hotel. After Helsinki, Estelle argued, she was not about to return to that idiotic business of living as if they didn’t know where their next nickel was coming from.

  It was generally agreed among those who counted that Major Neville’s reports on the Russo-Finnish conflict were outstanding. Indeed, his paper on Finnish command relationships and discipline earned him a "well done" on a buck slip from the Major General Commandant himself.

  But Major Franklin G. Neville was now a much changed man. Retirement from the Corps no longer loomed before him. No more did he have to face a suitable job arranged by his family in Saint Louis, with lunch at the Athletic Club and drinks at the Country Club. Instead, he could now look forward to further service as a Marine officer.

  There was a new war coming, he felt sure of it. And he-prophetically-had a vision of a new cutting edge for the Marine Sword. He saw properly trained and equipped and properly utilized Marine parachutists changing the face of Marine warfare.

  No longer would Marines assault an enemy beach from the sea, he wrote in a paper he titled "Hostile Shore Assault by Vertical Envelopment." They would no longer be left vulnerable to murderous fire from shore batteries as their landing barges brought them to the beach. Aerial reconnaissance would show where the enemy was not. And in that place a fleet of transports would drop, by parachute, companies, battalions, and possibly even full regiments. Initially, these forces would be resupplied from the air, until, attacking from the rear, they could secure the beach.

  And, of course, he saw Franklin G. Neville, appropriately promoted, leading this invulnerable force of elite Marine parachutists. He had led men in combat well as a young captain. It was not arrogant to presume he could do so even better as a colonel. Or as a brigadier general.

  After completing his Headquarters assignment, Major Neville asked for and was granted a thirty-day leave. He went to Fort Benning, Georgia, where he met like-minded Army parachute enthusiasts. They received him cordially; not only had he seen the light, but he had actually witnessed vertical assaults in combat. He gave several little seminars on Russian parachute operations and techniques, pointing out in these talks
his perceptions of Russian strengths and weaknesses.

  The Army obligingly arranged for him to go through their experimental parachute-jumping program. He made nine jumps, and, in a quasi-official ceremony at the Benning Officers’ Club, was given a set of silver Army parachutist’s wings and named an Honorary U.S. Army Paratrooper.

  When Major Neville reported to Quantico, he was assigned to the G-2 Section, where his duties were to examine French, English, and German military publications, extracting therefrom material he believed should be made available to the Corps. He did not find this difficult. He was fluent in German, primarily because of his long friendship and association in Helsinki with Lieutenant Colonel Graf Friedrich von Kallenberg-Mattau; and he had no trouble reading the German material made available to him. Equally important, he had two sergeants of foreign extraction who could make the actual translations into English.

  Major Neville therefore had the time to gather all his thoughts, distill them, and express them clearly. The result of this was, "Vertical Envelopment in the U.S. Marine Corps: A Study of the Potential Uses of Parachute Troops in Future Warfare, by Major Franklin G. Neville, USMC, based on his observations during the Russo-Finnish War," which he submitted for publication in The Marine Corps Gazette.

  It was duly decided that Neville’s article was "not appropriate" for publication, and it was returned to him with the thanks of the editors.

  But it wasn’t long before the article took on a life of its own- especially after scuttlebutt had it that the piece had been killed by someone far superior to the Major who edited the Gazette. Copies of it were run off on mimeograph machines and made their way around the Marine Corps.

  Despite the resulting wide distribution, Major Neville’s concept of the Theory of Vertical Envelopment as it could apply to the Marine Corps met a mixed to negative reception. There were those who genuinely believed Major Neville was just one more of those harmless Marine Corps characters who were doomed to play the game of life with less than a full deck:

  Marines going into combat by jumping out of airplanes? Jesus H. Christ! Do you remember that loony who actually proposed building troop carrying submarines, so we couldsneak up to the enemy’s beach?

  And there were those who read Neville’s arguments with a more open mind and decided that whatever merits the theory might contain, for the time being at least, it was an idea whose time had not come.

  Parachute warfare would require large numbers of large airplanes, but these were not available, nor were they likely to be. And even if an aircraft fleet were miraculously to materialize, it would require an enormous logistical tail, which the Navy certainly would not want to provide:

  You could do the arithmetic for that in your head. There are roughly two hundred men in a company. With, say, twenty men per airplane, that would mean ten airplanes to drop one company. There aren’t that many R4-Ds, the only airplane that will carry that many people, in the whole Marine Corps. Using the rule of thumb of 1.5 pilots per cockpit seat, ten airplanes would require thirty pilots per parachute company, plus a like number of mechanics and crew chiefs.

  And Neville makes the doubtless valid point that the reason the Russian parachute troops couldn’t get the job done was that the Russians made no provision to resupply them. So, since a reasonable ballpark figure for resupply of ammunition and food is a couple of hundred pounds per man, and since a couple of hundred pounds is what a man weighs, that means you would need ten airplanes to drop the infantry, and another ten airplanes to resupply them.

  That’s twenty airplanes, sixty pilots, sixty mechanics, and twenty crew chiefs for one company. Not to mention things like people driving the gas trucks, and extra cooks to feed the pilots and mechanics and truckdrivers.

  And what good could one lousy company do? You ‘d need a battalion. A battalion is five companies. Multiply the above by five, and you get one hundred airplanes, and three hundred pilots....

  Major Neville, the poor bastard, obviously got carried away with the romance of it all As a practical matter, there’s just no way the Corps could do it No wonder the brass killed his article.

  But, as a result of Major Franklin G. Neville’s rejected Marine Corps Gazette article, there were those in the senior hierarchy of the Marine Corps who were forced to consider, for the first time, that the U.S. Army was indeed going ahead with Vertical Envelopment. If the Army was successful in fielding a regimental-size airborne force-and there was already scuttlebutt that the Army intended to redesignate the 82ndInfantry Division as the 82nd AirborneDivision-this would constitute a threat to the Marine Corps’ perception of itself, and, more important, to the Congress’s perception of the Marine Corps, as the assault element of United States military forces.

  The Marine Corps believed-as, for that matter, did many soldiers and sailors-that the function of the Marine Corps was to storm enemy beaches, holding them only long enough for the Army to follow up with its heavy artillery and logistical elements.

  If the Army developed its own capability to land regiments or divisions on hostile shores-in other words, if they could field an airborne division-the question would naturally be raised, "So why do we need the Marines?"

  On the other hand, if the Marine Corps had-in place-its own experts in Vertical Envelopment, or possibly even its own small force of parachutists, say a battalion, together with plans to apply their techniques to larger forces, up to a division, then the Marine Corps could reasonably argue that the Army was treading on its turf and should back off.

  While no one really thought that the Army’s parachutists posed a deadly threat to the very existence of the Marine Corps, neither was any senior Marine officer prepared to state that they posed no threat at all.

  And money, as 1941 passed, became less and less an issue than it had been in previous years. There was little doubt in Congress’s mind that war was on the horizon and that the American military establishment was ill-prepared to wage it. And Congress devoutly believes the solution to any problem is to throw money at it.

  The Marine solution to the problem posed by the Army’s parachutists proved to be simple. In a supplemental appropriation, Congress provided funds for USMC Schools, Quantico, to conduct such tests as the Major General Commandant of the Marine Corps thought pertinent regarding the use of parachute forces in future Marine Corps operations.

  Marine Corps Headquarters delegated overall responsibility for Marine Parachutists to Marine Aviation, following the German practice of subordinating their Falschirmjaeger to the Luftwaffe rather than to the Wehrmacht. And they decreed that Major Franklin G. Neville would be action officer for the program.

  In August 1941, Major Neville submitted a report to Headquarters, USMC, of the original tests at Quantico, together with a list of recommendations. Surprising no one, he reported that the tests proved beyond any doubt that Vertical Envelopment offered great advantages to the Marine Corps. He recommended also:

  (1) That a provisional battalion of parachute troops be formed, and that a suitably experienced officer be named as its commander. Neville listed desirable qualifications for such an officer. These surprised no one: With the exception that the recommended commanding officer should be a lieutenant colonel, these qualifications matched those of Major Franklin G. Neville and no one else anyone could think of in the Marine Corps.

  (2) That Marine parachutists should be removed from subordination to Marine Aviation.

  (3) That the Marine Corps establish a formal parachutist’s school, preferably at some location other than Quantico, whose training facilities were already overloaded.

  The report was submitted through Marine Aviation channels to Headquarters, USMC. The endorsement stated that the Director of Marine Aviation did not feel qualified either to recommend or recommend against the incorporation of parachutists into the Marine Corps. But, clearly, parachutists were now a practical matter.

  If, however, it was decided to establish Marine parachutists, Marine Aviation was in complete agreement with
Major Neville’s recommendations that such a force be withdrawn from subordination to Marine Aviation. And Marine Aviation strongly endorsed the recommendation that any further Marine parachutist training be conducted elsewhere than Quantico. For example, the U.S. Naval Lighter Than Air Station at Lakehurst, New Jersey, which was currently underutilized, might well prove to be a suitable location.

  There were those who regarded the Marine Aviation endorsement as another example that there was really no intraservice rivalry between the air and ground components of the Marine Corps. But cynics maintained that Marine Aviation actually wanted to distance itself as far as possible from paratroops generally and from Major Franklin G. Neville specifically. That Neville was now known popularly as "Fearless Frank" was not taken as an auspicious omen for the future development of Marine Vertical Envelopment. Almost to a man, Marine Aviation personnel believed that anyone who willingly jumped out of a perfectly functioning aircraft was, kindly, a little strange.

  Action on the Neville report and its recommendations came unusually quickly, within a month. All the recommendations were approved: