19 Amphibious Assaults That Changed the Course of History

Operation Torch was part of the successful drive to drive the Nazis out of North Africa and open the way for the Allied liberation of southern Europe. It was also intended to relieve pressure on the Soviets on the Eastern Front. The amphibious assault commanded by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was a pincer maneuver involving Americans landing on Morocco’s Atlantic coast and another force of Americans and British troops landing on Algeria’s Mediterranean coast.

Sicily’s geographic location between North Africa and southern Europe has made the island historically significant dating back to Antiquity. In World War II, Sicily was the natural choice for an Allied landing on their way to subduing the Nazi-aligned Italian fascists. The massive amphibious assault known as Operation Husky commenced in the pre-dawn hours of July 10, 1943, initially involving 150,000 ground troops launched from a flotilla of more than 3,000 ships covered by more than 4,000 aircraft.

Operation Shingle took place between two major operations – six months after the Allied landing in Sicily, the staging ground for fighting against Axis forces in Italy, and four months before Operation Overlord, or D-Day, in Normandy, France. The amphibious landing of U.S. and British troops took place in these two coastal cities about 40 miles from Rome. After months of clinging to a narrow stretch of beach, Allied forces were able to break out and liberate the Italian capital on June 4, 1944.

Operation Overlord, as it is officially known, was history’s bloodiest amphibious assault. About 9,000 Allied soldiers were killed in the first 24 hours of the Normandy landings, many of them by entrenched Nazi artillery and machine gunners before they reached dry ground.

According to the U.S. Department of Defense, one of the explanations for the name “D-Day” is that Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower decided that any amphibious landing would be termed “departed date,” or D-Day. But the scope and significance of Operation Overlord led to the term becoming popularly applied specifically to this massive amphibious assault.

Operation Dragoon is also referred to as France’s “Second D-Day,” an amphibious landing by Allied forces along a 45-mile stretch of the French Riviera that is often overshadowed by the landing in Normandy that took place just weeks earlier. Both operations involved about the same number of Allied troops, but unlike the thousands who died in Normandy, American forces incurred only 395 casualties before quickly securing a beachhead. Within 48 hours, the Americans had penetrated 20 miles inland with the help of the First French Army.