Over the beach - University of Oregon

25 miles upriver from Gloucester on 6 May 1862. At 1600 the frst wave
of 2,000 men went ashore and formed a line of battle. Within 3 hours
10,000 men were ashore, and by dawn the next day all of the artillery
and supporting equipment had been landed and the division had gone into
action. Franklin’s division was the most well-trained amphibious force in
the Union Army at that time, but like Burnside’s Coast Division, it was
thereafter used in conventional military operations. Nonetheless, the West
Point landing is an indication of what might have been had the Union leadership
elected to put more emphasis on Army amphibious operations. 17
In January 1865, after a failed attempt in December 1864 that refected
the worst of the American cooperation approach to joint warfare, Army
and Navy forces successfully captured Fort Fisher at the mouth of the
Cape Fear River. In spite of previous friction between the two offcers,
Major General Alfred H. Terry and Admiral Porter cooperated closely.
The operation was well planned, the preliminary naval bombardment was
accurate and intense, the unopposed landing north of the fortress was well
organized, and Porter’s ships provided close support fres during the fnal
assault, which included a 2,000-man naval brigade of sailors and marines
as well as Terry’s army forces. The seizure of Fort Fisher opened the way
to the capture of Wilmington, North Carolina, thus establishing a secure
line of communication for Major General William T. Sherman’s army
advancing northward from Georgia. 18
The Army’s extensive amphibious and riverine experience in the Civil
War was not codifed into formal doctrine, although some institutional
memory of these operations is likely to have survived. 19 During the last
decades of the 19th century, the few amphibious operations carried out
by US forces were generally conducted by Navy landing teams of sailors
and marines, exemplifed by the seizure of forts along the Han River in
Korea in June 1871 by a naval landing force. 20 In the words of historian
Brian McAllister Linn, these “punitive strikes, naval landings, amphibious
raids, and other landing operations . . . were ad hoc incidents of military
forces assisting the commerce-protecting gunboat diplomacy of the era.” 21
However, in the 1890s the Navy began to consider the possibility of largescale
overseas expeditions, and the frst of such operations came in the
Spanish–American War. While Army–Navy cooperation was often good
at the tactical level, those landings revealed problems in inter-Service
cooperation and coordination and Army preparedness.
In a preliminary operation on 10 June 1898, Lieutenant Colonel
Robert T. Huntington’s 650-man Marine battalion temporarily based at
Key West, Florida, was landed at Guantánamo, Cuba. The landing went
16