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Marines

Military organization specialized in amphibious warfare

  • 41 min read
  • 5 chapters
  • 4 labs on Lably
New Providence Raid, March 1776 Oil painting on canvas by V. Zveg, 1973, depicting Continental Sailors and Marines landing on New Providence Island, Bahamas, on 3 March 1776. Their initial objective,
V. Zveg for the Navy Art Collection · Public domain

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History

In the early days of naval warfare, there was little distinction between sailors and soldiers on a warship. The oarsmen of Ancient Greek and Ancient Roman ships had to be capable of fighting the rowers of opposing ships hand-to-hand, though hoplites began appearing on Greek ships specifically for the boarding of enemy ships.

The Roman Republic was the first to understand the importance of professional soldiers dedicated to melee combat onboard ships. During the First Punic War, Roman crews were inferior in naval experience to the Carthaginians and could not match them in naval tactics, which required great fleet maneuverability. The Romans therefore employed a novel weapon — the corvus, a long, pivoting plank with a beak-like spike on the underside for hooking onto enemy ships. This was possibly developed earlier by the Syracusans against the Athenians during the Sicilian Expedition of the Peloponnesian War. Using it as a boarding bridge, Roman infantrymen invaded enemy ships, transforming sea combat into a version of land combat, where the Roman legionaries had the upper hand. During the early Principate, a ship's crew, regardless of its size, was organized as a centuria. Crewmen could sign on as naval infantry (called Marinus), rowers/seamen, craftsmen and various other jobs, though all personnel serving in the imperial fleet were classed as milites ("soldiers"), regardless of their function; only when differentiation with the army was required, were the adjectives classiarius or classicus added. The Roman Navy's two fleet legions, I Adiutrix and II Adiutrix, were among the first distinct naval infantry units.

The first organized marine corps was created in Venice by the Doge Enrico Dandolo when he created a regiment of ten companies across several ships. That corps participated in the conquest of Byzantium (1203–1204), later officially called "Fanti da Mar" (sea infantry) in 1550., Venice also had dedicated naval expeditionary corps of naval infantry, recruited primarily from Dalmatia, called the Oltremarini (overseas troops).

Later, Spanish King Carlos I assigned the naval infantry of the Compañías Viejas del Mar de Nápoles (Naples Sea Old Companies) to the Escuadras de Galeras del Mediterráneo (Mediterranean Galley Squadrons) in 1537, progenitors of the current Spanish Navy Marines (Infantería de Marina) corps, making them the oldest marine corps still in active service in the world.

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