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: