At the time of the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, the American army was not experienced in dealing with challenges abroad. The Army spent the last quarter of the nineteenth century fighting the Indian Wars in the West and a generation of officers grew to maturity commanding small frontier posts where only a few had the opportunity to maneuver large formations during the Spanish-American War. The infantrymen who marched into Peking in August of 1900 were transitioning between the tactics of the past and the future. The Napoleonic formations used in the American Civil War, already made obsolete at that time by the lethal firepower available, still lingered in the collective memory as the preferred method of maneuvering large bodies of troops and bringing firepower to bear.
The Americans who participated in the Boxer Relief Expedition demonstrated impressive adaptability and flexibility. They assembled a sizeable force in China from a scattered military, occupied with fighting an insurgency in the Philippines and garrison duties in the United States. General Chaffee worked within a loosely organized coalition of allied armies in order to rescue the besieged legations in Peking.
It is ironic that the Boxer Rebellion, and the international coalition mounted to combat it, was doomed to slip into near obscurity, overshadowed by the military conflagration to come a decade and a half later. The American role in the China Relief Expedition foretold events that would occur in the next major war in the twentieth century, the Great War.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-01282004-104948 |
| Date | 28 January 2004 |
| Creators | Smith, Eric T |
| Contributors | William A. Clark, Karl A. Roider, Stanley E. Hilton |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-01282004-104948/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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