And they were superbly led and disciplined.
The result was that the Finns were able to cause severe per-sonnel 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 terri-ble 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 Envelop-ment-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 para-chute 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 pre-vailed against David. Courage, discipline, and skill in the tech-niques of warfare cannot stand up forever against an enemy who possesses both overwhelming logistical superiority and man-power, 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 ef-fect, Major Franklin G. Neville was ordered home-but not to retire, as he had anticipated. Instead, he was ordered to Head-quarters, USMC, in Washington. There he was given a desk in a crowded office and asked to expand on the reports he had ca-bled 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 opera-tions in the future.
It was temporary duty, and government quarters were not au-thorized 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 inten-tion 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 re-turn 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 outstand-ing. 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-pro-phetically-had a vision of a new cutting edge for the Marine Sword. He saw properly trained and equipped and properly uti-lized 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 Ver-tical 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 para-chutists. 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 colo-nel. 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 com-bat. He gave several little seminars on Russian parachute opera-tions 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 there-from 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 Hel-sinki 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 War-fare, by Major Franklin G. Neville, USMC, based on his obser-vations 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 appropri-ate" 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 con-cept 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 could sneak 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 air-planes, 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 cer-tainly 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 me-chanics 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 reason-able ballpark figure for resupply of ammunition and food is a cou-ple 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 resup-ply 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 bat-talion. 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 scuttle-butt that the Army intended to redesignate the 82nd Infantry Division as the 82nd Airborne Division-this would constitute a threat to the Marine Corps' perception of itself, and, more im-portant, 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 ele-ments.
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 Con-gress's mind that war was on the horizon and that the American military establishment was ill-prepared to wage it. And Con-gress 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 appropria-tion, 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 Ger-man 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 pro-gram.
In August 1941, Major Neville submitted a report to Head-quarters, 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 rec-ommended 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.
That Marine parachutists should be removed from subor-dination to Marine Aviation.
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 Di-rector of Marine Aviation did not feel qualified either to recom-mend 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 Nev-ille'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 endorse-ment 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 gen-erally 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 Ma-rine 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:
Marine Aviation was relieved of responsibility for airborne forces.
A Provisional Parachute Battalion was authorized, to be sub-ordinate to Fleet Marine Force, Atlantic.
The Director, Marine Corps Parachute Forces, was author-ized to seek volunteers for parachute duty from Marine units within the continental limits of the United States.
Marine Corps Schools, Quantico, was ordered to establish a subordinate facility to train parachutists at Naval Lighter Than Air Station, Lakehurst, New Jersey.
Major Franklin G. Neville was appointed Director of Marine Corps Parachute Forces.
Franklin G. Neville was promoted lieutenant colonel the day he first visited Lakehurst to determine how its facilities (which is to say those not needed to support the Navy's blimps) could be quickly adapted to train parachutists.
With the exception of not being named Commanding Officer of the Parachute Battalion (and it could be argued that there was no point in naming a commanding officer of a battalion that did not yet exist), Neville had gotten everything he'd asked for.
He understood, however, that the greatest test was yet before him: turning the theory into reality. And he had a plan for that, too. And high on the plan was getting rid of every last damned one of the Marine Aviation people. Especially the enlisted men. The only Marine Aviation people he wanted to see in the future would be the ones flying the aircraft.
Based both upon his experience as a company commander in France, and on what he had observed in the Russo-Finnish War, Colonel Neville knew that the keys to military success were es-prit de corps and impeccable discipline. The two went hand in hand. The former, Neville believed, was a result of the latter.
In his early planning phase
s, he had been foolish enough to believe that because he was starting with Marines, he would have a leg up. All Marines, in his opinion, had the kind of esprit de corps and impeccable discipline that the Finns he so admired in combat had possessed. The only thing he had to worry about, then, was how to actually instruct them in the skill of parachut-ing.
His experience at Quantico with Marine Aviation, and espe-cially with the enlisted men there, quickly showed him how wrong he was about that. Not only were the enlisted men a long-haired, slovenly bunch, who slouched around with their ties pulled down and their blouses unbuttoned, but their officers let them get away with it.
At the officers' club in Quantico, he actually came as close to losing his temper in public as he ever had as a Marine. He sought out a Marine Aviation major to have a word with him, out of school, about a situation he found intolerable. He had come across a Marine lieutenant, an aviator, a staff sergeant, some sort of aircraft mechanic, and a PFC, whose function he did not really know, leaning on the wall of a hangar, laughing and joking together as if they were civilians in a pool hall.
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