Mar 18, 2023·edited Mar 19, 2023Liked by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson
An excellent book on the British effort to develop amphibious warfare capabilities is Bernard Fergusson, The Watery Maze: The Story of Combined Operations (1961). It’s interesting that the development of these capabilities in the European theater seems to have had very little cross pollination with what the US Navy, Army, and Marine Corps were doing in the Pacific. One forgotten aspect seems to be the US Army’s highly developed capabilities employed in the Pacific, including quite different methodologies from the Marine Corps. It’s been years since I’ve read about this, and I don’t know if there’s a single good book on the topic, but it’s interesting to see that the two services essentially charged with an identical task, worked without a lot of dialogue between them, and developed distinctively different approaches. Given that the Americans didn’t even talk to each other, it’s not much of a surprise that the Americans and the British were not more fulsome in their sharing of methods and lessons, either.
An excellent book on the British effort to develop amphibious warfare capabilities is Bernard Fergusson, The Watery Maze: The Story of Combined Operations (1961). It’s interesting that the development of these capabilities in the European theater seems to have had very little cross pollination with what the US Navy, Army, and Marine Corps were doing in the Pacific. One forgotten aspect seems to be the US Army’s highly developed capabilities employed in the Pacific, including quite different methodologies from the Marine Corps. It’s been years since I’ve read about this, and I don’t know if there’s a single good book on the topic, but it’s interesting to see that the two services essentially charged with an identical task, worked without a lot of dialogue between them, and developed distinctively different approaches. Given that the Americans didn’t even talk to each other, it’s not much of a surprise that the Americans and the British were not more fulsome in their sharing of methods and lessons, either.