British Amphibious Operations of the First World War

224 pages

Andrew Young

Back in January, I was pleased to review Joseph Moretz’s excellent The Development of British Amphibious Operations 1882-1914 – which readers can access here (or in NR Vol. 114, No. 2, Spring 2026, pp 311-312), and am delighted to be offered the opportunity to return to his work here. His follow-on volume, British Amphibious Operations of the First World War, performs valuable service in two regards. Firstly, by rescuing British amphibious warfare from the long shadow cast by Gallipoli, a battle which has passed more into mythology than it has history. Second, by examining the uneven execution of the corpus of knowledge, experience, and their underpinning assumptions and expectations, that had accumulated in British amphibious planning in the late Victorian, early Edwardian period. In doing so, Moretz asks a fundamental question: what did amphibious capability actually look like – rather than its perceived image – during the First World War, and; to what extent were its successes and failures products of inherited assumptions, institutional arrangements, and the unprecedented demands of industrialised warfare? Both questions are timely and relevant as the Royal Navy, Royal Marines – and Defence more widely – transition a period of geopolitical upheaval, rapidly evolving technology, and a melange of political and resource dynamics which, in combination, are upending old certainties.

As indicated, the book serves as a direct sequel to The Development of British Amphibious Warfare. If the earlier volume demonstrated that Britain entered the First World War with a substantial corpus of amphibious experience and thought, albeit imperfect and in some respects ill-formed, this study examines how that inheritance performed under the pressures of a global, total war. Through three case studies – Tanga, Mesopotamia, and the Dardanelles-Gallipoli campaign – Moretz moves beyond caricature to explore the genesis, execution, and consequences of British joint operations. While the Dardanelles campaign has dominated the discourse and become synonymous with the misapplication of joint maritime power and become a byword for strategic hubris and operational incompetence, it has obscured the broader lessons of joint warfare at hitherto unprecedented scale. The result is not an operational history alone, but an examination of the relationship between theory and practice under conditions of profound strategic strain.

The study’s greatest strength lies in its refusal to reduce amphibious warfare to opposed landings. As in the pre-war volume, Moretz treats amphibious operations as an ecology of activities: demonstrations, administrative landings, riverine campaigns, evacuations, and maritime-enabled manoeuvre. This broader conception is particularly valuable because it mirrors Britain’s historical experience. The successful maritime expeditions of the Seven Years’ War – Louisbourg, Rochefort, Quebec, and Havana – were similarly varied in character and purpose. The following 150 years of experience – from the American War of Independence to the Boxer Rebellion – were influenced by those victories and built on the hard-won knowledge and expertise of generations of expeditionary specialists. These succeeded not because Britain possessed a singular amphibious doctrine, but because its military leaders instinctively understood how to exploit the sea as an operational medium, and that ‘the British Way in Warfare’ was a modus operandi uniquely suited to its political aims.

What Moretz demonstrates, however, is that the First World War placed unprecedented pressure on that inherited instinct. At Tanga in November 1914, tertiary objectives were pursued by tertiary forces with almost entirely predictable results. In Mesopotamia, operational success at the point of entry (Al-Faw – familiar territory!) in November 1914 gave way to strategic overreach as limited means became attached to unlimited ends, with the attritional disaster at Kut-al-Amara a cautionary tale in preferencing manoeuvre ‘dash’ over positional sustainment. Gallipoli, meanwhile, evolved from naval demonstration to amphibious assault and ultimately to a campaign that never became truly ‘joint’ in execution, let alone combined. Throughout these case studies, the author returns repeatedly to the themes of logistics, scale, and time – the latter being particularly pertinent when one considers the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where the defenders measure success in the ‘time’ domain as much as physical. Moretz is able to bring all of these together in the classic language of friction. If the enemy always gets a vote, as Moretz observes and we should remember, then so too do geography, climate, and administrative capacity.

This is perhaps the book’s most important contribution. It challenges the tendency to interpret British amphibious failures in the first two years of the war as evidence of institutional ignorance or doctrinal absence. On the contrary, the pre-war study demonstrated that British officers thought deeply about joint operations and appreciated their complexities, even if they did not prioritise their practice and conduct over the real business of fighting at sea or on the land. The wartime volume reveals something different to the usual accusations of inter-service rivalry, ignorance, and competition: these were not failures of imagination, but a collision between inherited assumptions and a scale of conflict not witnessed in a century. The issue was not that Britain did not understand amphibious warfare; rather, that the conditions under which that understanding had developed no longer existed. Peer-warfare, theatre entry, expeditionary campaigns were not and are not the same as small-scale, limited operations in the littoral.

For contemporary readers, particularly those engaged with the transformation of the UK Commando Force, this conclusion should resonate strongly. Amphibious capability is neither a static inheritance conferred on the chosen few nor a niche specialism to be protected from all interlopers. It is an all-encompassing, adaptive practice requiring the continuous alignment of political purpose, institutional design, and operational means, and it is inherently joint and integrated. Moretz’s case studies illustrate the dangers of assuming that previous success guarantees future utility, but equally they warn against dismissing historical experience simply because of prima facie changes in circumstance. Indeed, one of the more striking lessons of this book is the importance of patience and strategic coherence, and of challenging the assumptions that underpin all doctrinal developments. In an age increasingly characterised by distributed operations, persistent engagement, and renewed interest in littoral manoeuvre, Moretz reminds us that maritime power projection cannot be reduced to platforms or technologies alone, or husbanded as the unique selling point of one force alone. Success depends upon intellectual readiness across the whole force, not discrete institutional elements: the ability for all to understand the relationship between sea and land, means and ends, and tactical objectives to strategic purpose.

Ultimately, British Amphibious Operations of the First World War succeeds because it does not seek either to condemn or vindicate British amphibious warfare in the period. Instead, it offers a corrective to the historiography, linking pre-war expectation to reality. It demonstrates that Gallipoli was neither an isolated aberration nor the definitive expression of British amphibious capability. Rather, it was one manifestation – albeit the most famous – of a much broader and more complex wartime experience. Together with its predecessor, this volume represents one of the most important recent contributions to the study of British joint operations, and it deserves a wide readership among both historians and practitioners of maritime strategy. As for modern practitioners of this particular operational art, these volumes offer a vade mecum to inform their conceptual component.