Every time I read about or see a documentary about Allied amphibious assaults in WWII (Iwo Jima, Normandy, etc.), the story always seems to be the same: The naval ships fire thousands of tons of shells at the beach defenses, sometimes for hours beforehand, with the assumption that this artillery assault will degrade the defenses. But every time the troops actually set foot on the beach, they find that the shelling has done virtually nothing to the defensive positions, and the defenders are fine and dandy, and ready to kill them all.
Is this incorrect? Is it just the biased perspective of the landing troops who were naturally dismayed at still facing so many foes once ashore? Did naval bombardment ever actually contribute in any significant way to landing operations in WWII, or was it just so much sound and fury, etc. etc.?
The Germans at Normandy considered the Allied Naval Armada a greater threat to them the the Allied Air Forces, due to gunfire support.
At Tarawa, Japanese positions were badly mauled by the supporting gunfire. At Salerno, Navy guns hampered German attempts to reinforces there troops on the beach, troops who came perilously close to throwing the US Fifth Army back into the sea.
Naval Gunfire is not magic. Like all tactics, it can be countered. The Japanese at Iwo Jima and Okinawa stayed in bunkers during the bombardment to avoid it. Yet, that meant the could not dispute the landing themselves, which is the best place to defeat an amphibious assault. Why, because of gunfire.
In general, every opposed landing succeeded in part because of bombardment support. I can’t think of a single counterexample (contested landing op with no artilllery or air support). It’s just too easy to keep the beachhead shallow and prevent breakout if you’re defending and even marginally prepared.
I am sure that the naval shelling kept the Germans from reinforcing their local forces…but what about the danger of hitting friendly forces (the resistance)? I have seen some of the German bunkers at Normandy-they were pretty strong-but a direct hit with a 16" shell would probably destroy them
Artillery, naval or land, could be brought to bear on a position with accuracy within minutes. An airstrike is really nice, but artillery was quicker and more effective. Especially during WWII when an air strike with a bomb was not accurate and took a long time to get there. If you are pinned down and/or outnumbered, you want artillery, not a letter to your mother from your commanding officer.
At Normandy, offshore fire became more effective after the troops had started penetrating inland. At that point, Foward Observers are able to call the fire down on specific targets and provide fire correction. I’ve seen pics of tanks laying upside down smashed because of naval fire (Although some sources attribute some of it to unguided rockets from aircraft).
When the Germans finally twigged that the Normandy landings were real, they released a large number of Panzer units that had been held in anticipation of the real attack.
Those Panzer formations simply could not get to the beach head because of naval gunfire, HMS Ramillies, despite being such an elderly battleship proved particularly effective.
Interesting site, but they didn’t label their pie chart well. They gave percentage of nationalities of… something. Considering they were talking about vessels in the previous chart, I suppose they mean those. The percentages don’t match up with with nationalities of personnel.
Pretty much every Amphibious assault in WWII would have failed if not for pre assault bombardment. Lots of equipment does get wrecked, enemy troops get no sleep with all the vibrations and noise, entrenchments and light fortifications that make great infantry firing positions get wrecked and or disrupted. Some bunkers can survive multiple direct hits from heavy naval guns but plenty of them cannot.
Selective artillery support from a handful of destroyers at Omaha Beach that moved up closer to the beach to pick off German gun positions could very well have made the the entire attack succeed.
Were any amphibious landings pushed back into the sea? IIRC, the Allies got ashore in Norway, but had to pull out soon after because they didn’t bring air cover. Dieppe wasn’t an invasion, just a raid gone wrong. Anzio was a mess, but not because the beachhead couldn’t be established but because it wasn’t exploited soon enough.
The Battle of Oskarsborg Fort almost counts as well, where an amphibious landing was pushed back, but before it had even landed (plus the city was taken anyway, by airborne invasion.)
Somewhere in the dark depths of memory suggests that an Iowa class Battleship was used in a shore bombardment role in the Med, Lebanon perhaps, 70’s.
Seem to remember that the State Dept tried to keep it on the QT, 45,000 tons of Battleship, hardly discrete or surreptitious.
Peter
To put together what others have said, basically it does damage defending forces somewhat, but more importantly, it’s good for interdiction- your troops only have to face the enemies directly on the beaches- they won’t get reinforced because getting caught in the open by a barrage of 14"-16" shells is devastating to just about anything, including armored forces.
So basically if you can crack the eggshell, formed by the naval bombardment, you can move inland and direct your fire even more accurately to roughly 15-20 miles inland, at which point you’re out of range of the big guns.
At least here in America when it comes to the History channel or even movies by overwhelming amounts the amphibious landings you hear the most about are Normandy and specifically Omaha beach and the landings on Iwo Jima.
Looking at just those two landings can give the impression that naval bombardment was not very effective or helpful, but the other D-Day beaches the naval bombardment significantly helped the landings and at Iwo Jima they were only ineffective because the Japanese chose to not contest the landings at all. The Japanese commander on Iwo Jima determined that he could most effectively delay the American forces (he knew victory was not possible) by keeping his men hunkered down during the landings so that they were at full strength to make the island hostile for as long as possible once the Americans were ashore. If the Japanese had tried to contest the landings, the naval bombardments would have made their jobs very, very difficult.
Even at Omaha where the situation forced an approach through draws that had heavily fortified German positions raining death down into them, naval bombardment still helped the overall efforts as it made German movements behind the line difficult.
I could be wrong, and I’m afraid I’m a bit too tired to go look it up, but IIRC Tarawa was the first major amphibious assault on Japanese-held islands, and it was there that they quickly learned to adapt to naval bombardment by hunkering down in caves and tunnels until it passed. That’s why later battles at Peleliu (sp?) and Iwo Jima were so, so much worse for the Americans.
It’s really a different tactical outlook. The Germans felt they had a reasonable chance of pushing an amphibious landing into the sea and disrupting an attempted invasion. That makes it worthwhile to engage and contest the landing.
By the time of Iwo Jima you had Japanese commanders who were in very different situations. The German defenders, if they had disrupted the landings and stopped them from establishing a beach head, or even kept them bottled up on the beach, they had reinforcements coming that would make the situation even more untenable for the assaulting forces. The Japanese islands like Iwo Jima, there was no reinforcements coming and the local commanders knew absolutely none were coming. They knew they were vastly outnumbered and that meant there was basically no way to actually stop the Americans from taking the island, the battle was lost before it ever started and the Japanese knew that.
So recognizing a contested landing actually could never result in the desired outcome (halting the invasion), they instead reasoned that their job was to make the Americans pay as high a price as possible for the island–perhaps to dissuade the overall American forces and political leadership from actually invading the the home islands and instead coming to a negotiated peace to avoid the bloodshed. In a sense that stance actually played into Truman’s decision on whether or not to use the atomic bomb, since everyone was thinking about Okinawa and Iwo Jima when considering how many lives it would take to subjugate the home islands.