During the decades between the world wars, a great deal of military innovation was undertaken. One field in which advances occurred was that of the assault from the sea, the landing of attack forces on defended shores. The second world war would see many such operations in almost all theaters. With their history of seapower, the British in particular were in a position to exploit such a capability. Budgetary constraints, doctrinal considerations, and the difficulties of coordinating the actions of the Army, Navy and Air Force acted to curtail this effort. The tragic legacy of the Great War, in which the largest British amphibious campaign, that at the Dardanelles, had resulted in a costly failure, also deterred the use of scarce resources in this area. As a result no major effort was made until after the fall of France, when an attack of this kind became all but necessary for a return of the Allies to the Continent. In the meantime, a force of highly skilled troops was assembled to conduct a kind of maritime guerilla warfare against the Axis, destroying coastal installations in hit and run raids designed to keep the enemy off balance and force him to commit his troops to defend otherwise quiet areas. These Commandos, as they became known in 1940, harassed the Axis from the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean.
2 мар 2021
