Nieuport 10/11th July 1917

[InkyBill]

In the pals opinion after the German attack at Nieuport on 10/11th July 1917 was the proposed amphibious landing by Rawlingson's 4th Army dead and buried or was it the sheer lack of progress in the mud of Flanders a month or so later that saw the plan scrapped.

Marc

[Tim Birch]

Marc

I think it was abandoned partly because the Flanders campaign became bogged down and partly because the need to capture the submarine bases diminished as the convoy system/anti sumarine war began to pay off.

I often wonder just how serious the plan for an amphibious landing was? If it had been a serious proposal what happened to the training and build up of seaborn forces which one would have expected to have been in progress at the same time as the build up for Third Ypres, bearing in mind that it took months to prepare, train and build up the WW2 amphibious operations?

On this subject I was interested to learn from reading John Terraine's essay Haig 1861-1928, that it was Haig who on 18 Sept 1916 (three days after the first use of these weapons) first proposed the building of "flat bottomed boats for running ashore a line of tanks on a beach". This was an idea nearly 30 years ahead of its time which eventually materialised into the LCTs and LSTs of WW2.

Tim

[Mark Hone]

For a full discussion of the proposed amphibious landing see the essay by Andrew Wiest in the collection 'Passchendaele In Perspective' edited by Peter Liddle. An article in the American magazine Military History Quarterly (sorry don't have the edition) included some amazing pictures of tanks rehearsing the landings.