Amphibious Operations or vehicles Two more amphibious operations were assayed as the Red Army went over to permanent offense Overall, a lack of purpose-built landing craft hampered Soviet operations, which put a premium on improvisation by local commanders and combat engineers Excluded from this abbreviated list are remarkable logistical and reinforcement operations conducted across the open water of Lake Ladoga during successive summers of the siege of Leningrad The Red Army recorded all major river crossings as amphibious operations Soviet historians therefore count several crossings of the Danube in 1944–1945 as amphibious operations Amphibious operations were much better planned and conducted as Red Army strength grew in all arenas later in the war The Soviet Navy also trained several hundred thousand marines by 1945, although the principal focus of the Baltic Fleet remained interdiction of shipping By the end of the war the Soviets had a significant amphibious capability, including specialized landing craft imported via Lend-Lease Once the British were expelled from France in June 1940, the Western Allies were forced to develop amphibious capabilities to cross several oceans and then the Channel to get at their Axis enemies with ground forces The British had a long tradition of fighting over water, but even they had to start essentially from scratch After the fall of France and British expulsion from Greece, there was no friendly port on the Continent To fight the Heer or Regio Esercito the British Army had to fight its way ashore first It is a testament to long-range planning, and to British fortitude, that thinking about amphibious vehicle and ship design to enable a return to the Continent began just a month after the disaster of FALL GELB (1940) Even as the Battle of Britain was underway and preparations for defense against invasion were undertaken, planners also worked on offensive amphibious projects Starting with commando raids and a landing on Madagascar in May 1942, British and Commonwealth forces built up a “combined operations” capability through hard experience The worst but most valuable lessons came with a large-scale Anglo-Canadian commando assault at Dieppe on August 19, 1942 That ended in total disaster for the attackers, but two central lessons were drawn from the failure: any landing needed to achieve surprise to be successful, and landings must be preceded by intense bombing and naval bombardment Smaller lessons called for prior close scouting of the gradient and weight-bearing load of the sand of a given landing beach; continuous close support fire from off-shore craft in the initial phase of the landing; quick clearance of beach obstacles and mines; and improved shore-to-ship communications The British did better in subsequent landings in North Africa They did very well in Italy in September 1943, where they began to perfect use of innovative Combined Operations Pilotage Parties British and Canadian troops applied the lessons of Dieppe and landings in Africa and Italy with real success on three of the five D-Day beaches on June 6, 1944 The Americans learned bloody lessons about how not to carry out amphibious operations during the TORCH landings in North Africa on November 8, 1942 Despite access to reports from the Agency Africa network, inadequate intelligence led to near disaster along the beaches and needless losses in the harbors of Algiers and Casablanca Inadequate training of too many units rushed into combat, some without proper weapons training, meant that more GIs died than was necessary, 45