“Not only a just appraisal of the campaigns waged by Marines in World War II; it is a documentation of the Marine struggle to prove the feasibility of amphibious warfare....Relentlessly accurate and impartial.”—N.Y. Times Originally published in 1951, this book is a widely regarded classic on US Marine amphibious doctrine and operations employed in the Pacific during the Second World War. The authors describe in detail the development of the theoretical aspects of amphibious assault in the inter-war period, but devote the vast majority of the narrative to the various landings and their core strategies, using Japanese documents “to sketch in the background of military decisions made by the enemy.” A must for those who wish to understand the American war against Japan.

The US armed forces were responsible for many tactical innovations during the years 1941–45, but in no field was US mastery more complete than amphibious warfare. In the vast, almost empty battlefield of the Pacific the US Navy and Marine Corps were obliged to develop every aspect of the amphibious assault landing in painstaking detail, from the design of many new types of vessel, down to the tactics of the rifle platoon hitting the beach, and the logistic system without which they could not have fought their way inland. This fascinating study offers a clear, succinct explanation of every phase of these operations as they evolved during the war years, illustrated with detailed color plates and photographs.

Conventional military wisdom holds that the amphibious assault against a defended beach is the most difficult of all military operations--yet modern amphibious landings have been almost universally successful. This apparent contradiction is fully explored in this first look at 20th-century amphibious warfare from the perspective of the defender. The author, Col. Theodore L. Gatchel, USMC (Ret.), examines amphibious operations from Gallipoli to the Falkland Islands to determine why the defenders were unable to prevent the attackers from landing or to throw them back into the sea after they had fought their way ashore. He places the reader in the defenders' shoes as such epic battles as Normandy, Iwo Jima, and Inchon are planned and fought, and then uses these cases to explain why the defenders were unable to successfully defend against enemy landings. A practitioner, teacher, and student of amphibious warfare, Colonel Gatchel follows those explanations with speculations on how a defender today might try to stop a landing and on the implications of such actions for future amphibious operations.