From: moy-timothy@YALE.EDU (Timothy Moy)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: A brief on Earl "Pete" Ellis, USMC patron saint
Date: 3 Nov 92 15:42:14 GMT
Organization: International Security Program, Yale University


From moy-timothy@YALE.EDU (Timothy Moy)



<gawne@stsci.edu writes>

>What can you military historians out there tell me about Earl
>Ellis?
>I know he was a Marine officer who resigned his commission rather
>mysteriously sometime in the 1930's and went off to sail around in
>the south and western Pacific.  He was "accidentally" killed by
>Japanese forces somewhere along the line.
>
>There's a building at Quantico named after him with a snippet of
>Reader's Digest article posted there which suggests he was working
>under cover for the Navy department gathering intelligence. 
Anybody
>have a more detailed opinion?
>
>-Bill Gawne,  Space Telescope Science Institute
> GySgt USMCR


     I'll take a stab at it.  Most of the following comes from
Allan Millett's history of the Marine Corps, _Semper Fidelis_,
Isely and Crowl's _U.S. Marines in Amphibious War_, an article by
John J. Reber in the Naval Institute _Proceedings_, November 1977,
and from archival sources in Breckinridge Library, Quantico, VA. 
(If you hadn't guessed, I recently wrote a dissertation on some of
this stuff.  God, I've got to get out more.)

     Earl "Pete" Ellis has become something of a patron saint for
the modern Marine Corps; better yet, he is sometimes seen as
something of a martyred saint.  One thing is clear: Ellis was a
prescient and creative strategic planner who, along with others,
laid a foundation for Marine Corps doctrine for amphibious warfare
during the interwar years.
     In 1920, Ellis was one of Commandant John A. Lejeune's group
who saw amphibious operations as the solution to the Corps'
bureaucratic difficulties in the aftermath of World War I.  Lejeune
tasked Ellis with working out a detailed mobilization plan for an
amphibious campaign (the called advance-base operations) across the
Pacific in an Orange War.  At the time, Ellis was a major in the
Operations and Training Division of MCHQ.  He was a native of
Kansas and a brilliant strategic planner, despite a long history of
emotional disorders and alcoholism.
     Ellis went into monastic seclusion in a small office in the
basement of HQ, surrounded by maps and liquor, obsessed with the
problem; supposedly, he would not emerge from the office for days
at a stretch.  By early 1921, he had generated several versions of
what became Operational Plan 712, "Advanced Base Force Operations
in Micronesia."
     "Micronesia" is an almost frighteningly detailed description
of amphibious ops in a war with Japan.  The document is eighty-
eight pages plus long appendices of charts and schedules.  Although
the largest proportion of the document is devoted to the defense of
advance-bases, the reports greatest impact was its treatment of the
assault.  He described many aspects of the theater of operations:
the geography, the character of the seas, the weather, the
indigenous populations, their languages and economies, prevalent
native diseases, and assessments of Japanese materiel and manpower. 
Ellis' description of the ship-to-shore movement became the
standard until the writing of the _Tentative Manual_ at Quantico
over ten years later.
     After finishing _Micronesia_, Ellis was determined to continue
the work.  Recently hospitalized several times for depression,
Ellis was granted a ninety-day leave to visit Europe in the spring
of 1921.  The leave was a ruse; in reality, Ellis went to the
Micronesian islands, under cover as a trader, to gather some on-
site intelligence.
     By modern standards, the intelligence mission was remarkably
ill-planned.  No American governmental or military officials in the
region were alerted.  Ellis himself had no preparation for
maintaining his cover story, which was quickly blown.  He suffered
several more nervous breakdowns after reaching the western Pacific,
and ended up in the U.S. Navy hospital in Yokohama.  Lejeune
ordered Ellis home.  On 6 October 1922, Ellis slipped out of the
hospital, AWOL.
     Eluding both Japanese and American officials, Ellis hopped
among the Marshalls, Carolines, and Palaus, drinking heavily and
getting into fist fights with local police, trailed by Japanese
police almost every step of the way; they had identified him as a
spy, but were apparently unaware that he was a military officer. 
Several of the people who came to know him during those months
later reported that by the spring of 1923, Ellis' drinking had
become severe and violent; he died, drunk, on the morning of 12 May
1923.  The exact cause of death was never determined.
     Among Marines at the time, the rumor quickly circulated that
Ellis had been poisoned by the Japanese.  The mystery was compli-
cated by the fact that the U.S. naval officer sent to retrieve
Ellis' cremated remains was ordered to take the opportunity to do
some on-the-spot intelligence gathering himself.  Although he
succeeded in recovering Ellis' ashes, he returned glassy-eyed,
ashen, and unable to communicate beyond incoherent mutterings.  The
Navy doctor who examined him reported that he appeared to have been
drugged.  The myth was immortalized when the officer and his wife
were killed two weeks later by an earthquake that devastated
Yokohama in September 1923 (though, to my knowledge, no one claims
that the Japanese engineered the earthquake).  Ellis' remains were
recovered (again) and buried in his home town of Pratt, Kansas.

     Hope this is useful (or at least interesting).


Timothy Moy
moy@minerva.cis.yale.edu
Newsgroups: sci.military