Shore Bombardment in WW2 - We're in the re-landscaping business now!

One of the quietly unstated facts about World War II is that warships fired many more shells at targets on land than at other ships at sea, but we always hear about the great naval battles, while coastal

bombardment

s are often relegated to one thing that second line warships did while front line ships did much more interesting things, however, World War I began with a coastal

bombardment

by the crixbarena and one of the last actions in the Pacific it was also a short bombardment, this time by the allies. Safe forces and bombardments barely paused between battles and campaigns that saw this type of activity including, but not limited to, Vesta Platt, the Hell Peninsula, the Norwegian Campaign, the Fall of France, the Death Race, the Creek Raids, Desert Warfare Operations, The Torch, The Hoarse Avalanche, The Overlord. the battle of normandy the campaign of guadalcanal the invasion of the aleutians the invasion of the marshall islands the invasion of the philippines the landings on iwo jima and operation barbarossa of okinawa the withdrawal of russia and the final campaign against the japanese islands then, what? what was the point? of this activity, couldn't the various armies involved bring their own artillery to the fight?

No, no, not in the quantity and caliber that a navy could provide, at least for the strip of land that was within the range of sea guns, this is effectively reduced. If we take into account the large weight involved when it comes to large-scale artillery and take, for example, a six-inch barrel for a long-range variant of 40 caliber or longer, the weapon itself could weigh between 7 and 10 tons, then you have to take into account the weight of the carriage you are going to put the gun on, then you have to take into account the weight of the horse team or, ideally, some type of motorized transport with which to tow it, then all the ammunition all transportation provisions await. to move the ammunition, then hopefully some fire detection or control equipment, then all the men to repair the gun, the ammunition, the needs of those two groups, as well as various auxiliary functions and all the transportation for them, you could get some lighter weapons in this caliber, but they would have a shorter barrel and therefore shorter range and generally wouldn't affect the weight of the entire gun train much.

Of course you could upsize with ground field artillery, but at that point you were generally entering the field of short barreled howitzers of somewhat limited range compared to their caliber or railway guns which had transport routes and transport options quite limited or, in some cases, there were the occasional mobile road cannon with a range of approximately eight inches and weighing as much as a half. -The war tank was only for the gun and carriage and had no power of its own, it often had to be moved in sections and then reassembled on site and, furthermore, most weapons of that caliber were usually classified as artillery of siege and were not open. and available to support the average soldier on land, so getting even an 8-inch gun was rare, quite expensive and would take a long time to configure, conversely, in naval terms, a long barrel and therefore of long reach of six or eight inches.

The gun was quite common, the former being found on light cruisers and quite often as secondary armament of battleships and the latter being the main battery of a heavy cruiser. Often a single heavy cruiser could carry as many or more weapons of this type as the entire road fleet of the corresponding army. mobile long guns of roughly equivalent caliber, even when facing destroyers whose four to five inch guns on average were considered light by naval standards, they still had a considerable amount of firepower, as these guns which by metric standards They were in the range of 105 to 127 millimeters.

Range would often be considered on land as the largest heavy artillery commonly available and navies tended to have many destroyers and destroyers tended to have more than one gun and then it was passed on to capital ships and out to our handful of huge ships slow moving. and the very rare railguns, nothing could compete with the range and destructive power of a 12, 14, 15 or 16 inch battleship gun and battleships tended to carry quite a few of those weapons, in addition to the aforementioned secondary batteries , ship-based artillery support also came. In addition to other benefits, the weapons were supplied from magazines and much of their loading process from magazine to turret was mechanized, which meant they had a rate of fire that was measured in rounds per minute rather than rounds per hour. , which was more common with a heavy land artillery where semi-improvised cranes and all too often manual loading were the order of the day, as noted above, the weapons also tended to come in fairly large quantities and were connected to advanced equipment of fire control, gyroscopic stabilizers and the like. of which were designed to enable them to hit moving targets at high speed while they themselves were also moving, on the contrary, hitting a target that remained usefully stationary while the ship was moving on a relatively slow straight course was comparatively easy and thanks to the square.

Bucket Law: A 16-inch shell had much more explosive or armor-piercing potential, as needed, than a pair of eight-inch shells or a quartet of four-inch shells, since ships had to carry enough ammunition in their magazines. to wage multiple confrontations. There could well be something on the order of several hundred to several thousand shells available for cooling from a single warship, much more than a typical mobile artillery piece or battery might be able to use and certainly more than could use a mobile road artillery battery. It could fire in a single day, while a large warship could empty those magazines in an afternoon, and of course the ships did not need their own separate transport chain for ammunition as they came with the ship, although they would have to go back. to port to eventually reload during most of World War II, cruisers and battleships also tended to come with their own observation aircraft and all ships came with their own built-in anti-aircraft defenses, all things that would be additional logistical nightmares for a ship. terrestrial country. based artillery battery and then of course you had the problem that very often there might not be any friendly ground artillery at all;

Ship-based guns might be the only ones you had on hand at the time, but with all that said, there were some limitations, coastal defenses or even shallow craft such as torpedo boats and submarines could damage or sink the ships. ships carrying the weapons and, of course, whatever their other limitations, mobile road artillery could go relatively anywhere in the country they were fighting, while the Shaw Blitz was limited to whatever range they could normally go to. reach the guns from the sea minus the distance between the ship and the

shore

plus maybe a little more if the captain was smart and tilted his ship a little to increase the elevation of his guns. and of course ships were needed elsewhere and could not always be available, although for some navies over the course of the war the release of newer ships meant that older ships could be assigned this role alone almost permanently, so when was it necessary?

Coastal bombardment was resorted to. There were five main mission roles during World War II, although other perhaps more specialized roles also existed. These big five can be defined as defensive support of friendly assets and ground artillery in World War II. could not shoot accurately and in most cases, if it was on the move and when an army was in retreat, then they might have to choose between shooting and risking being invaded or packing up to escape, which prevented the possibility of shooting. Fire support from the rest of the army, thus mitigating enemy attacks through the use of ships, was a tactic used on several occasions, although when your troops were repulsed so strongly that the mobile artillery of a cruiser or battleship was the only reliable support.

What you could get usually meant that there were much more important issues at stake that perhaps a coastal bombardment alone could resolve at best. It was a delaying tactic of the desperate. It also presupposed that the coast and the air were still relatively contested since of Otherwise an attacker who dominates one or both environments close to the front lines could be very, very dangerous for the ship, just as his fire could be dangerous for the troops on land, as a result, this type of bombardment from the

shore

it was relatively rarely seen in the Pacific. theater unless a ship was absolutely determined to be left behind anyway or was otherwise seen as an expendable operation.

I have a famously failed attempt to summon this form of defensive fire. Instead, most of this type of supporting fire was seen in Europe, particularly on the former French battleships Kobe. and Paris participated in a series of defensive fire support missions trying to stem the German tide on France in 1940, while at the other end of the war much of the remaining German fleet would spend late 1944 and 1945 operating in the Baltic. attempting with approximately The French were very successful in stopping the approaching Soviet advance, in both cases the heavy cannon fire caused some disruption to enemy attacks, but it was not enough to change the overall course of the war, although There were some specific engagements in which the ships participated as part. of a counter-attack which therefore enabled the defenders to retake or hold ground considerably longer than they would otherwise have been able to do, so the effort was not in vain two preliminary bombardments at the other end as they prepared to continue.

The offensive usually before an amphibious landing, but also once friendly troops were ashore but enemy fortifications or troop concentrations had been detected ahead, the ships could be used to launch a bombardment of fixed enemy positions, troop concentrations or supporting vehicles or infrastructure such as bridges, railway heads and the as if the purpose of this was to soften up the enemy by denying them resupply, damaging or destroying their equipment, limiting their ability to detect advancing friendly troops or destroying enemy morale with the fearsome power of shipboard artillery that many soldiers had never seen. or experienced at close quarters before this form of bombardment was clearly seen in the periods leading up to all major amphibious assaults and in many cases during ongoing campaigns as friendly troops advanced after the start of a supporting offensive by the allied troops after normandy and italy.

The support of German troops after the start of Barbarossa and most of the island battles of the Pacific War are good examples of this. Heavier naval guns were usually preferred for this type of operation, as their slower rate of fire did not matter much. as you tended to have as much time as you wanted for the preliminaries and the morale effect of the larger shells was considerably greater, as was, of course, the devastating armor-piercing effect if they were lucky enough to hit a fixed three-support battery. direct offensives. friendly assets, this was usually done during an amphibious raid or invasion itself, this was distinct from the previous type of attack as it required ships to fire on enemy strongpoints that were currently engaged by friendly troops, although in some circumstances, Especially the Pacific islands, this type of action could be carried out long after the initial landings due to the small size of the area under attack, meaning that the entire island was always within range of naval guns and few parts were sufficiently far enough to counter anything that wasn't at point-blank range.

Most warships, although larger ships could be used for this mission due to the higher rate of fire and greater accuracy gained by being able to approach shallower water, destroyers and other similar vessels were generally preferred for This role, its cannons were still quite large and capable by Terran standards, and very often friendly troops could be close enough for the effects of theexplosion of a battleship-quality shell could wound or kill as many of them as the enemy. This also tended to be riskier for the ships involved due to having to approach where enemy coastal defenses, both active in terms of guns and aircraft and passive in terms of mines and underwater obstacles, could be somewhat more effective and therefore Therefore, this was usually only seen when the fighting was especially desperate or the captains felt especially bold: the D-Day beaches are one of the most commonly cited examples of this type of support, but similar displays would be seen in other landings, as Just as in a series of raids such as Dieppe and To Brook Four, destruction of enemies.

Not all short bombardments were related to troops landing or already ashore, sometimes ships could be sent with the simple objective of blowing up something that was particularly critical and belonging to the enemy, which would otherwise have a negative effect. in subsequent friendly operations. Although this type of mission could also occur to protect an invasion that was occurring elsewhere but somewhat nearby because this would not involve ground observers and could encounter significant enemy air power, the targets chosen for this type of mission were generally very coastal, that is, within the direct line of sight of the ships in question.

Some examples of this would include the destruction of Vichy French fleet assets and the destruction of shipyard equipment and fortifications by Allied forces associated with Operation Burn attacks on Italian facilities in Genoa during Operation Grog the bombing of concentrations of enemy troops in the desert by hms erebus the bombardment of tripoli and several attacks on the japanese islands towards the end of the war and five diversions distraction and demoralization sometimes the objective of a coastal bombardment was not directly related to a military objective specific action that was taking place in that area at that time could also be carried out to divert attention from another operation that was taking place somewhat away or to convince the enemy that the operation in question was going to take place at the location where the bombing was taking place. and sometimes it was simply to try to demoralize the enemy by emphasizing that their navy could and would simply sail towards the enemy. coast and blow up valuable things without the enemy being able to do much about it, this is necessarily the most diverse and strange category of the main five and was quite expensive and risky to carry out.

Several large-scale fleet maneuvers were carried out. As part of Operation Bodyguard, for example, these were the deception efforts around D-Day, but even these did not result in any significant direct attacks on German installations outside the area of ​​northern France. In most cases, the war efforts involved required enough resources to conduct short bombing raids. They tended to be kept for areas where they would have a direct and immediate benefit, but towards the end of the war in both major theaters, as pressure on Allied resources began to ease and the ability to minimize casualties through these three-dimensional measures began to ease. began to decrease.

It is more likely that a series of deceptive bombing raids were carried out, especially in various Pacific island campaigns, and many of the direct attacks on the Japanese islands contained at least some element of this type of objective, so once established , let's briefly cover the types of boats used. In these missions, as you may have deduced above, almost anything that floated and had a gun could be, and often was, used at some point in coastal bombardment missions, from the latest and greatest battleships to pre-dreadnoughts and layers of mines. which might have a single three-inch gun at some point, but broadly speaking the ships used could be divided into four groups.

The first ships used out of desperation, certain ships were less suitable for coastal bombardment than others, so they would only be called up. on paper when there was absolutely nothing better available at that time or place, the aforementioned Polish minesweepers are a good example in the early days of the war, a single 3 inch gun didn't amount to much for ships and even then on land , but well, the polish navy didn't really have much left that was more heavily armed and they were determined to put up a fight, so they fought and they did, so you have the hms terror, a 15 inch armed monitor and this is an example of a ship used out of desperation, not because of its class or type, in fact, a 15-inch arm monitor is almost perfect for this type of mission, but in the case of Terra its weapons were hopelessly worn and it was practically the only heavy weapon . platform that could be saved at that time for the bombings that were considered necessary and so it had to disappear despite the fact that almost everything else said that it should not be that way, in most cases the ships that fall into this category They would be relieved as soon as the pressures eased or the country in question fell into enemy hands, which made the whole matter irrelevant, in any case, secondly, if the ships were used due to their obsolescence in other functions, This is a fairly broad category, but the simple fact is that some ships were on the verge of being obsolete at the beginning of the war and very often were scheduled for replacement and others would be during the war, either due to the advancement of technology that left them behind or to accumulated battle damage that hampered their overall capabilities and of course this battle damage would occur over the course of the war now to describe some of these ships as obsolete is a bit harsh but the term obsolete For other roles it is essentially used to denote ships that are no longer suitable for a front line position in their originally designed primary role, for example the USS Arkansas fell.

This category was almost immediately a slow battleship with relatively little modernization and armed with 12-inch guns just like the two German pre-dreadnoughts Schliesen and Schleswig-Holstein, although they had been modernized quite a bit, they were still pre-dreadnoughts and therefore Therefore, relatively slow and unarmed, many of the US standard-class battleships would also later be found in this position, as would at various times the relatively famous British ships such as Warspite and Rodney, as well as the French battleship Lorraine. Most of the boats in this category, for obvious reasons, tended to be older. or damaged battleships, as older cruisers tended to be refitted for new roles, such as anti-aircraft cruisers, or moved to other positions, such as convoy escorts and the like, although some older cruisers appeared in odd bombing raids, likewise, Older destroyers tended to be converted to entirely new roles, such as fast troop transport or anti-submarine escorts, rather than dedicated to missions focused on coastal bombardment, although, as with cruisers, there would always be some exceptions, ships of third line ships that had particular utility in a certain form of fire support now there were some ships in World War II that had relatively little utility beyond coastal bombardment or some other improvised missions.

The monitors, for example, were generally not particularly well protected except against somewhat slow torpedoes and had of course been originally designed. acting exclusively in the coastal bombardment role, while some would find roles transporting supplies or acting as some type of anti-aircraft defense vessel on the site they were in, they were always going to play an important role in short bombardment roles by obvious reasons, that was their front line position, other ships had been designed for roles that had just disappeared with the outbreak of war, many ships designed for colonial service fell into this category and, as they were usually slow, relatively unprotected but relatively well served with weapons, they would also be found off enemy coasts, firing at land targets quite regularly, here gunboats of all types especially stood out, but the Dutch Flores class gunboats stood out particularly in this regard, in Sometimes other capabilities would include a ship in this category.

The use of Congos to bombard Henderson Field during the Guadalcanal campaign arguably falls into this category, as they were specifically selected for their combination of high speed that cruisers and destroyers could also provide, along with heavy firepower. in the form of their 14 inch guns which cruisers and destroyers could not provide and no other class of Japanese Navy ship that had a similar level of firepower had the speed to get in and out quickly enough to minimize their level of vulnerability, so the Congos were front-line ships. It just so happened to fit into that particular niche when it came to coastal bombing, fourthly, there were front line ships present and conducting coastal bombing simply because there wasn't much else to do now, although that may seem dismissive in most cases, Note that ships of all classes were assigned tasks other than attacking land targets, mainly surrounding attacking or protecting targets at sea, but the number of ships outside the front line equipped with significant firepower was , for relatively obvious reasons, somewhat less than the number of front-line fighters.

Equipped with significant firepower as far as most navies are concerned, so in areas where other ships were not immediately available or simply did not exist in sufficient numbers for a given operation, prime units could also be used. line, there were also periods when the navy or navies in question had such overwhelming superiority against their enemies that relatively few frontline units were actually needed to hold off what was left of the enemy navy. The guns of the remaining newer ships could therefore be employed in coastal bombardment as they could be more accurate, heavier or faster firing or a combination thereof compared to the older ships.

The various major Allied invasions of Axis territory are the best examples of this specifically because they tended to be carried out only once by the combined forces of the US Navy and Royal Navy, which turned out to be both. The largest navies on the planet were sure they had more than enough force to keep the Kriggs Marina or Reggia Marina or the Imperial Japanese Navy away from the landing areas when they put that level of force into the area they tended to find. who had cruisers, destroyers and even the occasional battleship assigned to the task, but with relatively little to do, so these were brought into play and a safe bombing run was also carried out, so with everything established, let's finish this by looking at some Examples showing how coastal bombing could go very well, how it could go very wrong and sometimes it didn't really matter how well it did, although it is a large enough operation to contain examples of all three if specific incidents are looked at isolated the general trend of the operation.

The most important thing was that the Shaw bombing went quite well, this was done in three main phases. In the initial phase, the Allied warships attempted to eliminate the coastal batteries that were a threat to them and the landing craft, as well as more direct destruction of the bulk of the Germans. beach defenses as possible, then, during the landings, direct attacks on several German defenses that were causing specific problems, as well as bombing German supply and communications routes to keep German reinforcements out of the area and finally, as As it advanced, specific fire missions were called. to support the Allied troops in part to compensate for the lack of ground artillery on the ground, some of the operations to disable the gun batteries did not go as planned, but the overall objective of keeping the landing areas safe from their fire tended to fail for the most part.

Anyway, for example, there was a battery at Long Summer that was attacked several times before the landings without much success, but on 6 June, when it began to open fire on the landing forces, it was counterattacked by HMS Argonaut and HMS Ajax, which disabled her for much of the day before the French cruiser George Legue put her out of action for good as artillery crews cleared some of the debris and opened fire again. The USS Texas also engaged what remained of the Point du Hack batteries, although this did not do so immediately. knocking them out meantthe batteries were largely busy responding to it and every shell they fired at Texas was a shell they were not firing at the approaching landing craft.

Texas also took the time to attack the German beach defenses directly with her two primary weapons. and secondary guns until facing some very, very unlucky snipers with large scale naval artillery, after the beachheads were established he moved on to providing fire support to areas that were so far ashore that he had to flood some of his torpedoes out of play. In contrast, HMS Rodney was actually a little late to the party compared to much of the D-Day bombardment force, but as a result ended up flying many support missions for troops who had moved off the beaches when some of the battleships that had been there before were heading home to resupply ammunition, refuel, or replace gun barrels.

This list of targets for Rodney included bridges, troop concentrations and German panzer units, the latter to devastating effect. Ian Hamilton, who was on board Rodney at the time. We remember that we had barely returned to Portsmouth when we received orders to return to the beaches. Three days followed in which we fired 300 rounds of inch shells, 450 rounds of 6-inch shells and countless rounds of multiple pom-poms and weapons of all types that our targets were enemy batteries and concentrations of armored fighting vehicles, even without receiving direct hits, the explosion of our 16-inch explosive shells was fearsome enough to take out a 45-ton tank and annihilate any personnel not hidden behind the armor we had. were hitting without any chance of response at tank concentrations as far inland as khan, it must have been devastating to the morale of the German tank crews on the other end of the things that Verna Courton House wrote that day June 9th for us was one of the toughest actions we have ever put together with about 10 tanks under the trees on the avenue south of Escoville.

We drove with the hatches closed, one tank after another to the right, past the castle, towards a large meadow surrounded by hedges. There we intended to change to a wide wedge formation to attack the grenadiers behind and to the side of us then everything happened very quickly within a few minutes we had lost four tanks shot down by the naval guns in my tank the turret was jammed so I could only shoot at the hedges with my machine gun. The fire became more intense, so by order of Major von Luck we had to retreat like the grenadiers. the artillery continued unabated.

Some 30 to 40 grenadiers must have been killed by her in a smaller scale operation a little earlier in the war. The battleships fight though Barham and Valiant along with the cruiser Gloucester and some destroyers headed to Tripoli for a dawn attack. The engagement report indicated that aerial observation was hampered by smoke and dust from an earlier air raid, but three or four ships were burned or sunk. The naval dock and two or more other people were hit, as well as a destroyer, port facilities and coastal establishments also suffered serious damage. Some 530 tons of shells were fired, no naval units were found, and there was no response from the coastal batteries for 20 minutes. our ships suffered no damage or casualties during the approach, naval aircraft shot down four troop carriers and one bomber and, after the bombing, destroyed a bomber and defeated an attack by dive bombers, one of which was shot down and the another probably destroyed, conversely, during the short bombardment. could go horribly wrong in September 1942 a raid was launched on a creek called operation agreement the idea was a combined naval bombardment and amphibious naval operation along with support from special forces and air power with the aim of destroying various parts of the infrastructure port, any ship in dock, any warehouse that was visible, and various other targets, as well as the direct destruction of any enemy war assets that might be found, the amphibious raid was to be conducted below deck.

After the coastal bombardment of the ships in question, the attack force included a cruiser HMS Coventry and half a dozen destroyers which would provide the majority of the fire support, unfortunately due to problems with the deployment of beacons that would indicate to the attackers their whereabouts along the coast. With a series of other delays, the Tribal-class destroyer Seek was repeatedly hit by Italian 6-inch and German 88-inch guns although, contrary to what one might think, the fatal hits were actually from 88-millimeter guns that left the ship out of power and vulnerable to further attacks. The attack was thus alerted considering that the Sikhs had also gone to the wrong beach, the axis defenses also managed to sink several smaller boats accompanying the warships and, as the attack failed, the survivors aborted, but the cruiser Coventry and another tribal HMS Zulu class destroyer was hit and sunk by aircraft that chased them almost all the way home during their retreat and then there are cases where the Shaw bombing really couldn't have helped a bad situation that much in one way or other jubilee operation and better. known as the diet parade was one of those operations here, support was limited from the beginning to destroy us only due to concerns about enemy airstrikes, which were kind of a weakness of coastal bombing missions in many cases if the Allied air superiority or at least majority air control could not be assured as the lack of experience in amphibious operations at the time led to quite a few planning failures, which in turn meant that any support offered by ships on the high seas was never going to change the course of the numerous disasters that were accumulating.

In the Dieppe debacle, there is still a glimmer of hope in every cloud, at least it gave everyone a list of what not to do in future operations. Now, of course, this summary has focused primarily on the maritime component of short bombing. There is another completely different facet to naval shooting. support that was performed by several converted landing craft and other nearby shore support vessels, but that discussion is best left for another video that looks at those types of craft in more detail in general and of course some of the actions mentioned here, like the Overlord Update Operation Deal, as well as some of the critical battles in the Pacific during the US Island Hopping campaign, will at some point in the future deserve their own videos, but it's Hopefully this has served as a useful guide to how common the Shaw bombing was. of coastal bombing raids that were accomplished, what the ships accomplished, and some of the results that could result from these various bombing missions.

That's all for this video. Thanks for seeing it. If you have any comments or suggestions for a boat to review, please let us know in the comments below. Don't forget to comment on the pinned post for questions about the dry dock.