The Development of British Amphibious Operations 1882-1914 [Hardcover]

The projecting of military force to a distant shore has come to be seen as a uniquely British way of waging war. To be sure, many of these operations would now be classed as administrative landings with battle, if occurring at all, only following sometimes afterward. Others, of course, merit the label of opposed landings. To contemporaries of the period covered by this study, the evolutions went by the appellation of conjoint or combined operations. Less important than how they were styled remains the thought and the purpose giving rise to these ventures. In the decades before the First World War, professionals appreciated the myriad difficulties and dangers associated with amphibious operations. The laity, including statesmen, thought rather less of these matters but could recount numerous examples of their occurrence before 1914. Indeed, whatever operational failings Britain demonstrated during the World War a corpus of relevant experience was the least of these.What is now styled joint amphibious operations were difficult because they were never of a single type. Naval support to a military force standing on the defensive, raids, feints, blocking operations, riverine operations, and, yes, an opposed landing, spoke to a series of joint operations of ever-increasing complexity. Meanwhile, as every operation must at some point end, even the manner of evacuation came to be viewed as a special type of combined operation to be understood and learned. Finally, it remained that in a campaign of the grandest scale, examples of each might feature at differing moments along the way. Landings before 1914 were difficult and what military and naval authorities thought feasible before the onset of the World War in the realm of joint operations is a neglected field of studya surprising omission given the ink that has been spilt retelling the debacles experienced at Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and East Africa. Every campaign has its contextoperational and strategic to be surebut al#Å