Kentucky Marine: Major General Logan Feland and the Making of the Modern USMC

5. Prewar Postings, 1913-1917

67 5 Prewar Postings, 1913–1917 After returning to Philadelphia at the beginning of May 1913, Captain Logan Feland could finally turn his attention to the Advanced Base School and the creation of an Advanced Base Force. Captain William Fullam, the navy’s aid for inspections, had criticized the Marine Corps for its failure to create a viable force. Specifically, Fullam “charged that the Marine Corps had shirked its ‘true field’ of expeditionary duty and advanced base force training for thirteen years and had demonstrated its lack of interest by ‘its failure or inability’ to form permanent battalions and to surrender its anachronistic ships guard and Navy yard security functions.”1 Other naval officers supported Fullam’s critique in Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute. As a result, the U.S. Navy’s General Board decreed that the Marine Corps’s Advanced Base Force would participate in the 1913–1914 Atlantic Fleet winter exercises in three ways: conduct a landing, set up fortifications , and defend those fortifications. Accordingly, Commandant Biddle focused on solidifying the Advanced Base Brigade in Philadelphia. The force would consist of the First Regiment, focusing on fixed defenses, and the Second Regiment, serving as mobile defense. Feland would command Company C, the submarine mine company, in the First (Fixed) Regiment .2 The other companies in the First Regiment included artillery, engineer , signal, and searchlight groups. Their task would be to go ashore, set up advanced base fortifications, and mine the harbor to protect the U.S. fleet. The Second (Mobile) Regiment would consist mainly of infantry supported by light artillery and machine guns designed to repulse enemy landings. Each regiment would number about 800 men, which was fewer 68 KENTUCKY MARINE than optimal but realistic, given the Marine Corps’s continuing expeditionary and fleet duties. The brigade needed much more material, which finally started arriving in the summer of 1913, including several types of landing craft. A former ocean liner, the Hancock, was refitted to carry the First Regiment.3 As the brigade came together, training intensified. Put in command of an artillery company of three-inch guns, Feland’s friend Frederick “Fritz” Wise later recalled that “the easy days in Philadelphia were over.” The companies drilled and practiced, and Wise noted that his company had to build a “portable railroad,” dig pits, build gun platforms, and mount the guns.4 As Feland prepared his company, he had to wrestle with issues such as which electrical mines to use, how to transport them, how to rig them to fire properly, and how to lay the mines in the harbor. The mining company had a very important role in the Advanced Base Force. Whereas the navy laid contact mines, the Marines used controlled mines that needed an electrical connection to detonate. The two types of mines worked together: navigation channels could be established using contact mines, and then controlled mines could be used within the channels to determine which ships could pass through it. Captain Feland focused on experimenting with the electrical firing systems of the mines. Although he had been trained at MIT as a civil engineer and an architect, his penchant for technical work made him well suited to the complex electrical engineering required to control the mines.5 Finally, in December 1913, the Marine Corps’s Advanced Base Brigade boarded ships to begin the winter exercise. The First (Fixed) Regiment ’s task was to land and establish fortifications on the small island of Culebra, off the Puerto Rican coast, and set up mines in the harbor. Colonel George Barnett commanded the brigade, and Colonel Charles “Squeegee” Long headed the First Regiment, which boarded the Hancock in Philadelphia. The Second (Mobile) Regiment, headed by Lieutenant Colonel John Lejeune, assembled at Pensacola, Florida, and embarked on the Prairie. By mid-January, both regiments had landed at Culebra and set up their defenses. Feland’s company laid mines to protect Great Harbor. The Atlantic Fleet arrived and tried to enter the harbor; then it landed its shipboard Marines. Observing the exercise, chief naval umpire Captain Wil- Prewar Postings 69 liam Sims pronounced that the defense had won. After the exercise, the Fixed Regiment conducted further artillery tests and attempted to detonate the mines. Unfortunately, Feland’s Company C could detonate only one mine.6 In a lengthy report, Feland laid out many of the problems encountered during the exercise and made recommendations for solving them...