Introduction

Expeditionary warfare entails the deployment of forces far from their normal base of operations and, in the case of an ongoing hot war, to a theatre noncontiguous with the main theatre. Execution requires enormous logistical capabilities to transport, land, and sustain forces, often at great distance, that usually only a Great Power can muster. D-Day, Inchon, and Gallipoli represent a spectrum of the most famous examples of expeditionary warfare, with outcomes ranging from strategic success to operational success to both strategic and operational failure. Expeditionary warfare is the preferred method of warfare for naval powers, whose goals include keeping all fighting overseas and far from home territory. Naval dominance provides the luxury of fighting in so-called “away games,” rather than the costly home games that devastate one’s own territory and, in doing so, degrade the ability to remain in the war. If a naval power can leverage the sanctuary provided by its oceanic moat to maintain the health of its civilian economy during hostilities, this positions it to outlast a continental adversary in a protracted war aiming at victory through the exhaustion of the enemy. Sea powers often conduct naval expeditionary campaigns on peripheral fronts as an indirect but economical way to exert pressure on land powers, whose superior or more numerous land forces they do not wish to engage directly. Over time, as their unmolested economies continue to grow and as military operations increasingly interfere with the economies of their enemies or the allies of their enemies, the economic balance of power shifts toward the sea power. In other words, expeditionary warfare, the military operation, often works in tandem with an economic strategy. The subject of this work is the military component. Through World War II, all the cases studies examined concern peripheral operations as Sir Julian Corbett understood them: campaigns in peripheral theatres in ongoing hot wars. From the Korean War onward, however, wars have taken place within an overarching cold war: the East-West Cold War, the SinoSoviet split, or the Muslim extremist-Western clash of civilizations. As Eric Jensen discusses in Chapter 2, most expeditionary warfare campaigns are “nonconsensual,” meaning that the government with sovereignty over the destination area of the expedition did not “consent” to the invasion. In contrast, the Inchon landing was “consensual” in that the South Korean government welcomed the

landing. Prior to the advent of modern international law, which generally rejects change by military force, coercion was given far more legal latitude. The notion of “consensual” campaigns is comparatively new and involves many levels of cooperation, including the formulation of acceptable Rules of Engagement (ROEs), entry and exit permits, down to permission to deliver mail. The thirteen case studies have been arranged in chronological order. Michael Duffy focuses on the peripheral campaign that Britain’s greatest naval theorist, Sir Julian Corbett, used as the model for his discussion of peripheral operations, the Duke of Wellington’s expeditionary campaign on the Iberian Peninsula against Napoleon. Beginning in August 1808, not long after Britain gained sea control with its stunning naval victory at Trafalgar in 1805, over 30,000 British troops landed in Portugal to fight with local forces in Portugal and Spain against the French occupation. During the next five years, the Royal Navy acted as a force multiplier for land forces by delivering and protecting Wellington’s supplies by sea, disrupting enemy shipping, destroying coastal roads, and conducting shore bombardment. The Peninsular War constitutes the most protracted large-scale campaign of littoral warfare ever fought by the Royal Navy. In the Crimean War, the Royal Navy’s White Sea Campaign of 1854 took expeditionary warfare north of the Arctic Circle. Andrew Lambert shows how this most peripheral of theatres kept Russian warships and potential privateers bottled up at Archangel and how Britain’s destruction of Kola threatened all Russian coastal towns in the far north. As a result, fewer than 1,000 men under British command tied down Russian defenses for the entire theatre so that they could not be diverted to the main theatre in the Crimea. Incredibly, Britain and France defeated Russia on its home territory. In contrast to the previous two case studies, Robin Prior’s examination of Gallipoli presents a negative example. After the initial naval bombardment of Constantinople failed, the original intent not to use and land forces at all escalated to the deployment of 80,000 Commonwealth and French troops. During nine months of bitter combat while the British command remained either unwilling or unable to coordinate joint or combined operations, the opposing Ottoman force grew to 400,000. Given the rapidly ascending topography, with the Ottoman forces in possession of the high ground, Commonwealth forces suffered enormous casualties. The campaign did not relieve pressure on other theatres, because Ottomans forces were irrelevant to the main front in France and Flanders. A simultaneous British expeditionary campaign in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) also failed to provide benefits commensurate to its costs. Paul G. Halpern concludes that too few Germans were engaged in Mesopotamia to allow significant attrition. Although the campaign did protect the oil fields in Persia, it tied up too many British troops in the pursuit of other territorial objectives. Not only was Mesopotamia peripheral to the war in Europe, but it was also peripheral even to the main Ottoman concerns in Syria, Palestine, and Bulgaria. Following World War I, naval expeditionary warfare arguably came into its own. In operations that occurred virtually simultaneously with the attack on

Pearl Harbor, Japanese naval expeditionary forces landed in Thailand, on the Malay Peninsula, and on Guam; and began bombing Singapore and Wake Island, and attacking Clark Air Base in the Philippines, Hong Kong, and the international settlement at Shanghai. As S.C.M. Paine demonstrates, although operationally brilliant, none of these theatres solved Japan’s quagmire in China. Japan’s strategy, rather than cutting off foreign aid to China (the intended strategic outcome), delivered Great-Power allies to China and, for the first time, put the Japanese home islands at risk. The U.S. responded to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor with an attrition strategy grinding down Japanese forces in peripheral theatres. The most important of these was Guadalcanal, where Japan lost too many irreplaceable pilots either to remain on the offensive or ultimately defend the home islands. Bradford Lee explains that naval aviators constituted Japan’s operational center of gravity in the Pacific and their destruction, particularly at Guadalcanal, made that campaign strategically pivotal. David Stevens focuses on alliance politics in another geographically peripheral theatre in the Pacific. Although MacArthur’s campaign to protect New Guinea was peripheral to the outcome of the wider Pacific war, it remained crucial for Australian security. U.S. involvement served to shore up its alliance with Australia and New Zealand, therefore U.S. naval expeditionary forces fought hard to help Australia prevent Japan from overrunning New Guinea. Allied logistical capabilities far exceeded those of Japan and produced lopsided casualty rates, imposing unsustainable losses on Japan. Korea, although geographically peripheral to Europe, became a major hot war of the Cold War. Donald Chisholm examines MacArthur’s potentially war-winning strategy to use Inchon as the operational “hammer” against Pusan as the operational “anvil.” As MacArthur later explained, he envisioned Inchon as

a turning movement deep into the flank and rear of the enemy that would sever his supply lines and encircle all of his forces south of Seoul. I had made that decision in previous campaigns, but none more fraught with danger, none that promised to be more vitally conclusive if successful.