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

[Music] one of the quietly unstated facts about world war ii is that far more shells were fired by warships at targets on land than wherever fired by their met other ships at sea yet the great sea battles are the ones we always hear about whereas shore bombardment is often relegated to a thing second lined warships did whilst the front-line ships did the much more interesting things yet world war one opened with a shore bombardment by the crixbarena and one of the last actions in the pacific was also a short bombardment this time by allied forces and sure bombardment barely stopped in between battles and campaigns that saw this kind of activity included but were not limited to vesta platt hell peninsula the norwegian campaign the fall of france the death breed the raids onto brook the desert war operations torch husky avalanche overlord the battle of normandy the guadalcanal campaign the invasion of the aleutians the invasion of the marshall islands the invasion of the philippines the landings on iwo jima and okinawa operation barbarossa the retreat from russia and the final campaign against the japanese home islands so what was all the point of this activity couldn't the various armies involved bring their own artillery to the fight well no not in the quantity and caliber that a navy could provide at least for the strip of land that was within range of the sea based guns this effectively comes down to the sheer weight involved when it comes to large-scale artillery and take for example a six-inch gun for a long-range 40 caliber or longer variant the gun itself might weigh somewhere around 7 to 10 tons then you need to account for the weight of the carriage that you're going to put that gun on then you've got to account for the weight of the team of horses or ideally some form of motorized transport with which to tow it then all the ammunitions wait all the transport provisions for moving the ammunition then hopefully some spotting or fire control equipment then all the men to service the gun the ammunition the needs of those two groups as well as various ancillary functions and all the transport for them you could get some lighter weapons in this caliber but they'd be shorter barreled and thus shorter ranged and overall didn't really affect the weight of the entire gun train all that much you could of course go larger with land-based field artillery but by that point you were usually entering the field of short barrel howitzers of somewhat limited range compared to their caliber or else railway guns which had rather limited transportation routes and transportation options or in a few cases there was the odd road mobile gun in something approximating the eight inch range which weighed as much as a mid-war tank just for the gun and carriage and had no power of its own often would have to be moved around in sections and then reassembled on site and on top of that most weapons of that caliber you were usually classified as siege artillery and not open and available to support the average trooper on the ground so getting even an 8-inch gun on call was rare quite expensive and would take a lot of time to set up conversely in naval terms a long barrel and thus long range six inch or eight inch weapon was fairly common the former was found on light cruisers and quite often as the secondary armament of battleships and the latter was a heavy cruiser's main battery often a single heavy cruiser might carry as many or more such weapons as the corresponding army's entire stock of road mobile long guns of approximately equivalent caliber even when you were faced with destroyers whose four to five inch weapons on average were considered lightweight by naval standards they still carried a considerable amount of firepower as these guns which by metric standards were in the 105-127 millimeter range would often be viewed on land as the largest commonly available heavy artillery and navies tended to have a lot of destroyers and destroyers tended to have more than one gun and then you moved on to capital ships and outside of our handful of massive slow-moving and very rare rail guns 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 as well in addition to the aforementioned secondary batteries ship based artillery support also came with other benefits the guns were supplied from magazines and much of their loading process from the magazine to the gun turret was mechanized which meant that they had a rate of fire that was measured in rounds per minute instead of rounds per hour which was more common with a land-based heavy artillery where semi-improvised cranes and all too often hand loading was the order of the day as indicated earlier the guns also tend to come in quite large numbers and were connected to advanced fire control equipment gyro stabilizers and the like all of which were designed to allow them to hit moving targets at speed whilst they themselves were also on the move by contrast hitting a target that remained usefully stationary was the ship itself moved in a relatively slow straight line course was comparatively easy and thanks to the square cube law a 16 inch shell came with far far more explosive or armor-piercing potential as needed than did a couple of eight-inch shells or a quartet of four-inch shells as ships had to carry enough ammunition in their magazines to fight multiple engagements there might well be something in the region of several hundred to several thousand shells on hand to cool on from a single warship far more than a typical mobile artillery piece or battery might be able to call on and certainly more than a road mobile artillery battery might be able to fire in a single day whereas a large warship might be able to empty those magazines in an afternoon and of course the ships didn't need their own separate transportation chain for ammunition it came with the ship albeit they would have to go back to port to reload eventually for most of world war ii the cruisers and battleships also tended to come with their own spotting aircraft and all ships came with their own built-in anti-aircraft defenses all things that would be extra logistical nightmares for a land-based artillery battery and then of course you had the issue that very often there might not be any friendly land-based artillery at all the ship-based guns might be the only ones you had to hand at the time but with all that said there were some limitations shore-based defenses or even shallow watercraft like torpedo boats and [ __ ] submarines could damage or sink the ships that were carrying the guns and of course whatever its other limitations road mobile artillery could go relatively speaking anywhere in the country that it was fighting in whereas shaw bombardment was limited to whatever range the guns could typically range out to from the sea minus the distance between the ship and the shore plus maybe a little bit extra if the captain was clever and inclined his ship a bit to boost the elevation of his guns and of course ships were needed elsewhere and could not always be made available although for some navies over the course of the war the launch of newer ships meant that older vessels could be pretty much solo tasked to this role on a near permanent basis so when was shore bombardment called upon well there were five primary mission roles during world war ii although a number of other perhaps more specialist roles did also exist these five big ones can be defined as one defensive support of friendly assets a land-based artillery in world war ii couldn't fire accurately and in most cases at all if it happened to be on the move and when an army was in retreat they might then be faced with a choice of either firing and risking being overrun or packing up to get away which denied the rest of the army fire support thus blunting enemies attacks by using ships was a tactic that was used on a number of occasions albeit that when your troops were being pushed back so vigorously that the mobile artillery of a cruiser or battleship was the only reliable support you could get your hands on usually meant that there were much much larger issues in play than perhaps some shore bombardment alone could solve at best it was a delaying tactic of the desperate it also presupposed that the coast and the air was still being relatively contested since otherwise an attacker dominating one or both of these environments that close to the front lines could prove very very dangerous for the ship as much as its fire could prove dangerous for troops on land as a result this type of shore bombardment was relatively rarely seen in the pacific theater unless a ship was absolutely determined to stay behind anyway or otherwise was seen as expendable operation tengo being a famously unsuccessful attempt to invoke this form of defensive fire instead most of this kind of fire support was seen in europe in particular the old french battleships kobe and paris were involved in a series of defensive fire support missions trying to stem the german tide into france in 1940 whilst at the other end of the war much of the remaining german fleet would spend late 1944 and 1945 operating in the baltic trying with about as much success as the french to stop the oncoming soviet advance in both cases the fire of the heavy guns did cause some disruption to enemy attacks but were not enough to turn the overall tide of the war although there were some specific engagements where ships participated as part of a counter-attack that therefore allowed the defenders to either retake and or hold ground considerably longer than they would have otherwise been able to do so the effort wasn't entirely wasted two preliminary bombardment at the other end of things when preparing to go on the offensive usually before an amphibious landing but also once friendly troops were ashore but enemy fortifications or concentrations of troops had been spotted ahead ships could be used to launch a bombardment of fixed enemy positions troop or vehicle concentrations or support infrastructure like bridges rail heads and the like the purpose of this was to soften up the enemy by either denying him resupply damaging or destroying his equipment limiting their ability to spot friendly troops advancing or shattering the enemy's morale with the sheer fearsome power of ship-borne artillery which many soldiers had never seen or experienced up close before this form of bombardment was seen quite obviously in the run-ups to all the big amphibious assaults and in many cases during ongoing campaigns as friendly troops advanced after the start of an offensive support of 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 all good examples of this usually the heavier naval guns were preferred for this kind of operation as their slower rate of fire didn't matter all that much since 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 of course was the devastating armor-piercing effect if they were lucky enough to hit a fixed battery three direct offensive support of friendly assets this was usually done during an amphibious raid or invasion itself this was distinct from the previous type of attack as it called for the ships to fire at enemy strong points that were currently engaged with friendly troops although in some circumstances especially the islands of the pacific this kind of action could be undertaken well after the initial landings themselves due to the small size of the area under attack meaning that the entire island was always in naval gun range with few parts being far away enough to counters anything other than point blank for most warships whilst larger ships could be used for this mission due to the higher rate of fire and greater accuracy that was afforded by being able to move in closer into shallower waters destroyers and other similar vessels were generally preferred for this role their guns were still quite large and capable by land-based standards and quite often the friendly troops might be close enough that the blast effects of a battleship grade shell going off might well injure or kill as many of them as the enemy this was also usually riskier to the ships that were involved due to having to approach close in where enemy shore defenses both active in terms of guns and aircraft and passive in terms of mines and underwater obstacles might be somewhat more effective and so this was usually only seen when the fighting was especially desperate or captains were feeling especially bold the d-day beaches are one of the most commonly cited examples of this kind of support but a number of other landings would see similar displays as would a number of raids such as those on dieppe and to brook four destruction of enemy assets not every short bombardment was connected with troops going ashore or already ashore sometimes ships could be sent in with the simple objective of blowing up something that was particularly critical and happened to belong to the enemy that would otherwise have a negative effect on friendly operations later on although this kind of mission might also occur in order to protect an invasion that was going on elsewhere but somewhat nearby because this would not involve spotters on the ground and might run into significant enemy air power the targets chosen for this kind of mission were usually very coastal i.e within 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 dockyard equipment and fortifications by the allied forces associated with operation torch the attacks on italian facilities at genoa during operation grog the bombardment of enemy troop concentrations at the desert by hms erebus the bombardment of tripoli and various attacks on the japanese home islands towards the end of the war and five diversion distraction and demoralization sometimes the objective of a shore bombardment was not directly related to a specific military objective that was taking place in that area at that time it could also be undertaken to draw attention away from another operation that was taking place somewhat far away or to convince the enemy that the operation in question was going to take place in the location the bombardment was hitting and sometimes it was simply to try and demoralize the enemy by emphasizing that your navy could and was simply sailing up to the enemy coast and blowing up valuable things without the enemy being able to do all that much about it this necessarily is the most diverse and odd category of the five main ones and was a fairly expensive and risky thing to undertake several large-scale fleet maneuvers were undertaken as part of operation bodyguard for example this being the deception efforts surrounding d-day but even these did not result in any significant direct attack on german installations outside of the northern france area in most cases the war efforts involved were resource intensive enough that short bombardments tended to be kept for areas where they'd have a direct and immediate benefit but towards the end of the war in both major theaters as the pressure on allied resources began to ease and the ability to minimize casualties by these three d rated measures began to be more possible a number of deception bombardments were carried out especially in various pacific island campaigns and many of the direct attacks on the japanese home islands contained at least some element of this kind of objective so with that established let's briefly cover the types of ships used in these missions as you'll have gathered from earlier almost anything that floated and had a gun could be and often was used at some point in shore bombardment missions everything from the latest and greatest battleships all the way down to pre-dreadnoughts and mine layers that might have a single three inch gun showed up at some point but broadly speaking you could divide the ships used into four groups first ships used as a matter of desperation certain vessels were less suited to shore bombardment than others and so they would only get called into the role when there was absolutely nothing else better available at that time or place the aforementioned polish minesweepers are a good example in the opening days of the war a single 3-inch gun didn't amount to tremendously much definitely for ships and even so 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 put up a fight they did then you have 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 indeed a 15-inch arm monitor is almost perfectly suited for this kind of mission but in terra's case its guns were hopelessly worn out and it was pretty much the only heavy gun platform that could be spared at the time for bombardments that were considered necessary and so it had to go despite almost everything else saying that it shouldn't in most cases ships that fall into this category would either be relieved as soon as pressures eased up or the country in question would fall to the enemy which rendered the whole matter irrelevant in any case second were ships used due to obsolescence in other roles this is quite a broad category but the simple fact is that some ships were verging on obsolete at the start of the war and quite often were slated for replacement and others would become so during the war either due to the march of technology leaving them behind and or accumulated battle damage that hampered their overall capabilities that and of course this battle damage would occur in 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 is used to essentially denote ships that are no longer suitable for a front line position in their primary originally designed role uss arkansas for example fell into this category almost immediately being a slow battleship with relatively little modernization and armed with 12-inch guns as did the two german pre-dreadnoughts schliesen and schleswig-holstein whilst they had been modernized quite extensively they were still pre-dreadnaughts and thus relatively slow and underarmed many of the u.s standard class battleships would also later find themselves in this position as would at various times relatively famous british vessels like warspite and rodney as well as the french battleship lorraine most of the ships in this category for obvious reasons tended to be older or damaged battleships as older cruisers tended to either be refitted for new roles such as anti-aircraft cruisers or shuffled on to other positions such as convoy escorts and the like although a few older cruisers would show up at odd bombardments likewise older destroyers would tend to find themselves converted to entirely new roles such as fast troop transports or anti-submarine escorts as opposed to being dedicated to shore bombardment focused missions albeit that as with cruisers there would always be a few exceptions third front line ships that had a particular utility in a certain form of fire support now there were a few ships around in world war ii which had relatively little utility beyond shore bombardment or some other improvised missions monitors for example were generally not particularly well protected except against torpedoes somewhat slow and of course had originally been designed to act exclusively in the shore bombardment role whilst some would find roles running supplies or acting as some kind of anti-aircraft defense vessel at the site that they were at they were always going to feature heavily in short bombardment roles for obvious reasons that was their frontline position other ships had been designed for roles that had just gone away with the outbreak of war a lot of vessels designed for colonial service fell into this category and since they were usually slow relatively unprotected but relatively well served with guns they would also find themselves off of enemy coasts shooting at land targets on a fairly regular basis gun boats of all stripes were particularly featured here but the dutch flores class gunboats were a particular standout in this regard occasionally it would be other capabilities which might see a ship put into this category the use of the congos to bombard henderson field during the guadalcanal campaign arguably falls into this category since they were specifically selected because of their combination of high speed which cruisers and destroyers could also provide that was also coupled with heavy firepower in the shape of their 14-inch guns which cruisers and destroyers couldn't provide and no other class of japanese navy ship that had a similar level of firepower had the speed to get in and out fast enough to minimize their level of vulnerability and so the congos being front line ships just happened to fit that particular niche when it came to shore bombardment fourthly there were front line ships present and conducting shore bombardment simply because there wasn't all that much else to do now whilst that might sound dismissive in most cases you've got to bear in mind ships of all classes were tasked with duties other than attacking land targets mostly surrounding attacking or protecting targets at sea but the number of non-frontline ships equipped with significant firepower was for relatively obvious reasons somewhat smaller than the number of front line combatants equipped with significant firepower when it came to most navies thus in areas where other ships were either not immediately available or simply didn't exist in large enough numbers for a given operation frontline units could also be used there were also periods when the navy or navies in question had such an overwhelming superiority against their enemies that relatively few frontline units were actually needed to keep what was left of the enemy navy away the guns of the remaining newer ships therefore could be employed in shore bombardment as they might be more accurate heavier or faster firing or combination thereof when compared to the older ships the various large allied invasions of axis territory are the best examples of this specifically because they tended to only be undertaken once the combined forces of the u.s navy and royal navy which happened to be the two largest navies on the planet were sure that they had more than enough force in place to keep the kriggs marina or reggia marina or imperial japanese navy away from the landing areas by the time that they put that level of force into the area they tended to find that they had cruisers destroyers and even the odd battleship allocated to the task but with relatively little to do and so these were put into play and sure bombardment as well so with all that established let's finish this off by looking at some examples that show how shore bombardment could go very well how it could go very badly and where sometimes it really didn't matter how well it did so whilst it's a large enough operation to contain examples of all three if you view at specific incidents in isolation the general trend of operation overlord was that shaw bombardment went fairly well this was done in three primary phases the opening phase saw the allied warships attempting to take out coastal batteries that were a threat to themselves and the landing craft as well as more direct destruction of as much of the german beach defenses as possible then during the landings themselves direct attacks on various german defenses that were causing specific problems plus bombarding german supply and communications routes in order to keep german reinforcements out of the area and then finally as the advance got going specific fire missions were called in to support allied troops in part to compensate for the lack of land-based artillery ashore some of the operations to knock out gun batteries didn't go quite as planned but the overall objective of keeping the landing areas safe from their fire tended to mostly be accomplished anyway for example there was a battery at long sumer which was attacked several times before the landings without much success but on the 6th of june itself when it began to open fire on landing forces it was counter batteried by hms argonaut and hms ajax which disabled it for much of the day before the french cruiser george legue knocked it out for good when the gun crews cleared some of the debris and opened fire again uss texas likewise engaged what was left of the point du hack batteries whilst this didn't immediately knock them out it meant that the batteries were largely engaged responding to her and every shell they fired at texas was a shell they weren't firing at approaching landing craft a texas also took the time to engage the beach german defenses directly with both her primary and secondary guns all the way down to taking on some very very unfortunate snipers with full-scale naval artillery after the beachheads were established she went on to provide fire support to areas that were so far in land she had to flood some of her offside torpedo bulges to gain increased gun elevation in contrast hms rodney actually arrived somewhat late to the party compared to a lot of the d-day bombardment force but as a result she ended up conducting a lot of support missions for troops that had moved off the beaches when some of the battleships had been there earlier were heading home for re-ammunitioning resupply of fuel or replacing gun barrels this target list for rodney included bridges troop concentrations and german panzer units the latter famously to devastating effect ian hamilton who was aboard rodney at the time recalled we'd scarcely return to portsmouth when we received orders to return to the beaches there followed three days in which we fired 300 rounds of inch shells 450 rounds of 6 inch shells and countless rounds of multiple pom-poms and all-looking guns our targets were enemy batteries and concentrations of armored fighting vehicles even without taking direct hits the blast from our exploding 16-inch shells was fearsome enough to knock a 45-ton tank over on its side and obliterate any personnel who weren't hiding behind armor we were hammering away without any possibility of response at tank concentrations as far inland as khan it must have been devastating to the morale of the german tank crews at the other end of things verna courton house wrote that day june the 9th for us was one of the hardest actions ever we had assembled with about 10 tanks under the trees of the avenue south of escoville we drove with closed ports one tank after the other to the right past the chateau into a large meadow which was enclosed by hedges there we intended switching to a broad wedge formation for the attack the grenadiers behind and alongside us then everything happened very quickly within a few minutes we had lost four tanks knocked out by naval guns on my tank the turret was jammed so i could only shoot into the hedges with my machine gun the fire became more intense so that on orders from major von luck we had to withdraw as did the grenadiers the artillery continued unabated some 30 to 40 grenadiers must have been killed by it in a smaller scale operation somewhat earlier in the war the battleships war spite barham and valiant along with the cruiser gloucester and some destroyers headed for tripoli for a dawn attack the report for the engagement stated air spotting was rendered difficult by smoke and dust from a preceding air attack but three or four ships were set on fire or sunk in the naval basin and two or more others were hit as well as a destroyer the harbour facilities and shore establishments were also seriously damaged some 530 tons of shells having been fired no naval units were encountered and there was no reply from the shore batteries for 20 minutes there was no damage or casualties to our ships during the approach naval aircraft shot down four troop carrying aircraft and one bomber and after the bombardment destroyed one bomber and defeated an attack by dive bombers one of which was shot down and one probably destroyed conversely shor bombardment could go horribly horribly wrong in september 1942 there was a raid onto brook called operation agreement being launched the idea was a combined naval bombardment and naval amphibious operation along with the support of special forces and air power with an objective to destroy various bits of harbor infrastructure any ships that happen to be in dock any stores that were visible and various other targets as well as the direct destruction of any enemy war-like assets that might be found the amphibious raid was due to go in under the cover of shore bombardment from the ships in question the strike force included a cruiser hms coventry and half a dozen destroyers who were to provide the majority of the fire support unfortunately due to issues deploying the beacons that would tell the attackers whereabouts they were along the coast along with a number of other delays the tribal class destroyer seek was hit repeatedly by italian 6-inch and german 88 guns although contrary to what you might think the fatal hits were actually from the 88 millimeter weapons which left the ship without power and vulnerable to further attack thus alerted considering that sikh had also been going for something of the wrong beach the axis defenses also managed to sink a number of the smaller craft accompanying the warships and with the raid a failure the survivors aborted but the cruiser coventry as well as another tribal class destroyer hms zulu were both hit and sunk by aircraft that chased them almost all the way home during their retreat and then you have instances where shaw bombardment really couldn't have helped a bad situation all that much one way or another operation jubilee and better known as the diet parade was one such operation here support was limited from the start to only destroy us due to concerns about enemy air attacks which were something of a weakness of shore bombardment missions in many cases if allied air superiority or at least majority air control could not be assured the lack of experience in amphibious operations at the time led to quite a few planning failures which in turn meant that whatever support was offered by the ships offshore it was never going to turn the tide of the numerous disasters that all added up into the dieppe debacle still silver lining to every cloud it did at least give everybody a list of what not to do in future operations now of course this summary has focused primarily on the sea going component of short bombardment there's a whole other facet of naval gunfire support that was performed by various converted landing craft and other close-in shore support vessels but that discussion is one best kept for another video that looks at those kind of vessels in more detail generally and of course some of the actions mentioned here such as the upgrade operation overlord operation agreement as well as some of the critical battles in the pacific during the us island hopping campaign will at some point in the future merit their own videos but hopefully this has served as a useful primer on how common shaw bombardment was the types of shore bombardment that were accomplished what ships accomplished them and some of the outcomes that could result from these various bombardment missions that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry dock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 521,205

Keywords: wows, world of warships, shore bombardment, USS Texas, HMS Warspite, D-DAy, Operation Overlord, Dieppe Raid, Tripoli Raid, Tobruk Raid, USS Arkansas, HMS Rodney

Id: c_5CcY6yNnA

Length: 37min 8sec (2228 seconds)

Published: Wed May 12 2021