Based on Tutorial from Telusko: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35EQXmHKZYs
pom.xml ... 1st line was showing error due to eclipse bug. Had to downgrade maven-jar-plugin as follows:
<properties>
<java.version>1.8</java.version>
<maven-jar-plugin.version>3.1.1</maven-jar-plugin.version>
</properties>
tomcat-jasper (same version as embedded tomcat in maven dependencies) needs to be added to pom.xml. This converts our jsp's to servlets.