Amphibious Landing

Amphibious Landings shaped World War 11. This site will tell how and why. But do not expect boilerplate history. Yes, the making of grand strategy will be discussed. So will the art of seaborne assault. And the brutal experience of warriors doing the fighting up front and personal. But the intention here is not to lecture. Nor is it to add another layer of mythology, or to resurrect yet again an oft-told tale, or to recirculate a well-worn theory. We'll do the reverse. We'll search out facts and actions heretofore forgotten, hidden, unexplored or lost in the dark, and try to cast them into new lights, and see what results we find.

Hopefully this will open new seams into historic events and enliven those events with the prodigious energies, talents, achievements, and yes the foibles, too, of the warriors who lived those events. Thus we'll provoke. But do it in ways that spark serious interest and informed discussion leavened by perspective and respect that move the dialogue into deeper understandings. So we hope to enrich the bloodstream of the history of World War II, and give the Greatest Generation, its remarkable accomplishments, its incredible stories, their due.

Along the way we’ll explore topics such as:

How, in the spring and summer following Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Generals Marshall and Eisenhower pushed hard for a 1942 cross-channel amphibious assault into France which risked a debacle on the battlefield, the ruination of the Anglo-American Alliance, and raised in the minds of some the spectre of a constitutional crisis, before President Roosevelt intervened to save the day.

How Admiral Ernest J. King in the late spring and summer of 1942 faced down Generals Marshall and MacArthur to stop the Japanese offensive at its high water mark, seizing a foothold on Guadalcanal. This not only secured New Zealand and Australia, it became the springboard that he used to roll Japan back up the Solomons, fatally weakening its war machine, while it also gave him the time to built on the ocean a right flank for the Admiral’s knockout punch, his grand thrust across the Central Pacific to the Asian Rim.

How Admiral King, after his initial successes in the South Pacific, engineered his game changer that in November of 1943 centered the US war against Japan squarely on the US Navy Fifth Fleet in a bold thrust across the Central Pacific. How King's strategic maneuver was also a masterful political stroke that ended the greatest threat to US forces in the Pacific, inter-service infighting, while it also thrust strong men armed directly across the Pacific into the heart of Japan's Imperial Empire, while it also unraveled Japanese defenses on two flanks, neutralized several Japanese armies and strongholds, severed Japan from its critical resources, and smashed its innermost defenses. Thus we'll explain how America fashioned out of whole cloth and executed in three short years, the grandest seaborne offensive in the history of war.

Aug. 1942: U.S. Marines charge ashore on Guadalcanal Island

Nov. 1943: US Troops on their way into Bougainville

Normandy Invasion, June 1944, from the U.S. Coast Guard Collection in the U.S. National Archives