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By Joseph Trevithick,War Is Boring
Amphibious assaults are the domain of the U.S. Marines, not the Army. But there was a period in history when the Army tried to out-do the Marines in hitting the beach—including planning how to deploy entire divisions of amphibious tanks.
Today, the whole concept seems more than a little bizarre. The Army isn’t much involved in amphibious warfare. But in the years after World War II, the ground combat branch had plenty of experience with seaborne assaults in the Pacific. Had Japan not surrendered, the United States planned to storm the home islands with hundreds of thousands of troops including more than a dozen Army divisions.
That influenced the fighting in the next war—Korea—as Army troops stormed ashore at Inchon. To many high-ranking officers it looked like “hitting the beach” would be a key Army job for decades to come.
“When World War II ended, the Army leadership believed their service should assume the amphibious warfare mission,” retired Army Col. Donald Boose, Jr. wrote in Over the Beach: U.S. Army Amphibious Operations in the Korean War. “But it was the Marine Corps that emerged from the defense unification and roles and missions struggles of the late 1940s with their amphibious warfare mission validated by Congress, the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
But just in case, the Pentagon ordered the Army to be prepared—and to keep training—for amphibious warfare. This meant figuring out how to get the Army’s fearsome tanks off Navy transport ships and onto the sandy battlefields.
