Perhaps there is no more controversial topic in the modern military history of our country than the role of the USSR Navy in the Great Patriotic War and in the final results of World War II for our country as a whole.
What opinions on this matter do not sometimes have to be heard. "The fleet is the most expensive way of producing infantry", the evacuation of Tallinn with huge losses on mines, the loss of three warships at once on October 6, 1943 from the actions of German aircraft, which could have been easily avoided - this is what fans of military history usually remember. More erudite citizens will recall the unsuccessful raid on Constanta, the landing detachments in the Baltic that were killed uselessly in 1941, network barriers at the exit from the Gulf of Finland, the steamer "Armenia", the frequent fact that there is no information about shelling from the sea in the logs of military operations of German formations, in the case when, according to our information, such a shelling was conducted. The history of the fleet in the Second World War, according to some figures, seems to be the story of the beating of large and numerous, but stupid formations by small forces of well-trained German pilots and even smaller allies of Germany: Italians on the Black Sea, Finns on the Baltic.
Someone knows that German submarines operated unhindered in the North near the Soviet shores until the very end of the war, and it was impossible to do something with them.
The most advanced will remember how the fleet dodged the opportunity to attack a Japanese surface ship detachment in 1945 and gain at least some combat experience in naval battles. Even quite serious public figures, employees and leaders of domestic think tanks (let's not poke our fingers at respected people for now), in all seriousness defend the thesis that the Navy was a burden in that war. True, more often behind their statements are clashes of group interests in the Ministry of Defense related to the division of the military budget. Why are there public figures, even many sailors, saddened, agree with this point of view. And it begins: "The Russian fleet has never really helped all the money for the land forces, we cannot compete with the developed maritime nations" and so on until the thesis is voiced about the inability of the Russians to have effective naval forces in general. About de facto cultural inferiority.
Meanwhile, the real history of the Great Patriotic War speaks of exactly opposite things. You just need to throw off the blinders from your eyes. Moreover, that historical lesson is still very relevant.
To begin with, it is worth looking at the objective state of the Navy before the war. First, in the USSR by 1941 there simply did not exist in a sufficient number of competent naval command personnel. After 1937 and the revealed inability of the Navy to ensure the safe delivery of cargo to Spain (the order to deploy the forces of the fleet in the Mediterranean was given by I. V. Stalin, but was in fact sabotaged), as well as the mass incompetence of the command personnel in the fleets that emerged during a series of exercises, Stalin arranged a grandiose "clean-up" operation in the Navy, accompanied by massive repressions and the promotion to command posts of political appointees who had no idea of naval activities at all. Naturally, this did not help. The level of training of command personnel continued to fall, the accident rate grew. In fact, the fleet began to exist as a fleet and, at the very least, to prepare for hostilities only in the spring of 1939, when Stalin first decided to appoint N. G. Kuznetsov as the People's Commissar of the Navy, and secondly, when the flywheel of repression in the Navy went to idle, and the seamen ceased to be in a fever with mass and sudden arrests. Only from May 1939 began the putting in order of the normative documents concerning combat training, regulations and instructions.
N. G. For a long time it was customary to idealize Kuznetsov. Then, in recent years, on the contrary, a wave of critical publications began to be observed, and attempts to almost debunk the admiral's personality cult. I must say that a brilliant naval commander by world standards N. G. Kuznetsov, of course, did not appear. But his contribution to the pre-war Naval development is strictly positive. His post-war ideas about naval development were not entirely adequate to the situation. Nevertheless, he was, for example, the most consistent and competent supporter of the creation of an aircraft carrier fleet in the USSR. On the whole, he was a talented leader, whose role in the development of our fleet is undoubtedly positive. He did not show himself as a significant military leader who was in charge of the course of hostilities, but, frankly, he did not have such opportunities, including during the war. But it was not his fault, to which we will return.
Thus, the first factor - the fleet had only two years to put itself in order after the era of incompetent leaders, and brutal repression. At the same time, the experience of the past could not be used by the fleet - the revolution led to a break in historical continuity, including with cadres. All the often-mentioned failures of naval commanders - from the inability to provide air defense of ships in the Black Sea, to the inability to suppress German artillery fire from the sea in 1945 in the Baltic - they are from there.
The second important factor that determined the specificity of the combat path of the Navy in the war was the inability of Russian military science to correctly determine the shape of the war of the future. Apparently, there is no need to stigmatize Russian theoreticians. His, this appearance, could not be determined by no one, except the Germans, who were able to correctly combine the theory and practice of "lightning war", and, having very limited resources, put the British Empire and the USSR on the brink of military defeat at the same time, simultaneously "reeling on tracks" France, also considered then a world power, and several smaller countries.
And this inability to determine what the future war would be fraught with played a truly fatal role. But on the other hand, who on June 21, 1941 could determine that the German army would reach Moscow, the Volga and Novorossiysk? How could you prepare for this? Someone may argue that there was an experience of the Civil War and intervention, but the fact is that in the early forties the political reality in the country and the assessment of the Red Army by the political leadership and society made such a way of thinking impossible.
Thus, the very nature of the future war a priori excluded the possibility for the Navy to prepare for it: it was almost impossible to imagine the real course of events even after the war began, which means that it was impossible to prepare for these events. This is a very important fact that is usually overlooked. The navy was not preparing for the kind of war it had to enter. One of the consequences of this was the ship composition that was absolutely inadequate to the real tasks. As a result, the tasks that the Navy carried out throughout the war were often carried out with obviously unsuitable means.
The third factor was the low technical and technological development of both the fleet and the country as a whole. So, neither Soviet submarines nor Soviet torpedoes in developed countries would simply not be considered as weapons suitable for war. The only question that a German or British submariner could really ask when familiarizing himself with Soviet submarines and weapons is: "How can you fight on this?"
With surface ships, the situation was somewhat better, they, at least, were not that worse than the average world level … but worse anyway. It is worth remembering that the USSR at the beginning of 1941 was a technically backward country. Only in the course of the war were individual samples of weapons created, in a number of parameters, superior to the western ones - but precisely, that individual samples, and precisely, that for a number of parameters. The fleet in this case was not lucky. He spent the entire war with obsolete technology. Only in the naval aviation, over time, positive changes began, mainly associated with lend-lease supplies (although not only with them, of course).
The Germans in that war, although not en masse, used jet aircraft, anti-tank rocket launchers, ballistic and cruise missiles, guided bombs; by means of submarine warfare, the same USSR caught up with the Kriegsmarine many years after 1945. In general, the technical level of Germany was much higher than the Soviet one. It was generally the same with the allies - for example, such amphibious capabilities that any American tank landing ship possessed in 1942, we did not have until the raising of the St. The Soviet Army, in principle, never waited for it, armored personnel carriers appeared only in the fifties, more than ten years later than the Wehrmacht and the US Army, and so on, there were a lot of such examples. And it was in such conditions that they had to fight. And not only to sailors.
This undoubtedly influenced both the course of hostilities and their results.
The fourth, and very important factor, which had a truly fatal significance, was that neither before the war, nor during it, the place of the Navy in the general control system of the armed forces was not determined.
So, for the first half of 1941, the Navy received only ONE directive from the General Staff of the Red Army - "On the preparation of communications for the interaction of units and formations of the Red Army and the Navy" dated March 11, 1941. And that's it! There was a feeling that the country was preparing for defense separately from the fleet.
A few days after the start of the war, the fleets were transferred to the subordination of the command of the strategic directions, and after their liquidation, the fleets began to obey the fronts. In fact, the Main Naval Headquarters "dropped out" from the fleet management system. But the ground commanders could not correctly assign tasks to the sailors.
In 1998, a book by a team of authors was published under the general editorship of the then Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy, Admiral V. I. Kuroyedova “The main headquarters of the Navy: history and modernity. 1696-1997 … It, in particular, indicates:
“In practice, the command of the Navy was offered the role of a passive observer of the development of the situation in the fleets, although with the beginning of hostilities, the General Staff Regularly received operational reports from the fleets and flotillas. N. G. Kuznetsov considered it his duty to control how correctly the command of the formations, operatively subordinate to the coastal groupings of the Red Army, understood the tasks assigned to them by the corresponding military councils, and to monitor how these tasks were being solved. Operational orders, directives on behalf of the People's Commissar of the Navy and the head of the General Staff School were almost never issued. Acting on the instructions of the People's Commissar, the leadership of the General Staff tried to get information from the General Staff in advance about plans for the use of naval forces in joint operations in order to orient the executors before the issuance of the Stavka directive. However, this zeal was not always met with understanding, moreover, under the pretext of achieving secrecy in the preparation of operations with the involvement of naval forces, the employees of the General Staff deliberately limited the access of representatives of the Navy to relevant information. Sometimes there were incidents similar to what took place in 1941 on the Moonsund Islands, when the troops defending on the island. Ezel, by order of the General Staff were subordinated to one front, and on about. Dago is different. The unsuccessful outcome of defensive actions ultimately depended on the development of the strategic situation on the entire Soviet-German front, but the experience of the war suggests that in this case it would be more correct, even in peacetime, to assign responsibility for the defense of the archipelago to the Military Council of the Red Banner Baltic Fleet. The possibilities for the direct influence of the People's Commissar of the Navy on decision-making in the field of operational leadership of the forces significantly narrowed after the Headquarters of the High Command was disbanded on July 10, 1941, and it was not included in the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command.
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In 1943, the nature of the combat activity of the active fleets and flotillas changed qualitatively. With the transition of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union to a strategic offensive, it acquired a planned character, it became possible to set tasks for the formations for the period of the entire campaign or strategic operation, leaving the command of the operational-strategic, and, in some cases, the operational level of leadership to set tasks for subordinate troops and forces. … In this regard, conditions appeared for the transfer of control in the use of fleet forces along the line of the Supreme Command Headquarters - the People's Commissar of the Navy - the Navy. However, the inertia of the operational control system that developed in the first period of the war made itself felt for a long time. The People's Commissar of the Navy still did not have the rights of the commander-in-chief and therefore could not fully manage the activities of the fleets. This was compounded by the fact that he was still not part of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command. Since the end of 1942 N. G. Kuznetsov, involving the General Staff of the Navy, tried to change this situation. The first operational directive of the People's Commissar of the Navy to the Military Council of the Red Banner Baltic Fleet was signed only on August 13, 1943. Prior to that, the fleet was solving tasks that were assigned to it by separate orders of the commander-in-chief of the North-West direction or the command of the fronts. In April 1943, the head of the OU GMSH of the Navy, Rear Admiral V. L. Bogdenko wrote in a memo: “During the war, the General Staff of the General Staff was never directed by the General Staff on the further course of hostilities and the emerging tasks of fleets and flotillas. Without this, the headquarters was in a difficult situation when setting missions to the fleets, calculating the required number of ships and weapons, calculating the development of base and airfield construction. The note also noted that all attempts of the General Staff of the Navy to obtain from the General Staff at least approximate data on the plans of the upcoming operations and the use of the forces of the Navy in them were unsuccessful. At the same time V. L. Bogdenko argued that often the responsible employees of the General Staff did not even imagine the operational capabilities of the fleets and did not know how to correctly use their forces, taking into account only the obvious capabilities of the fleet forces to provide direct fire support to ground forces (the number of barrels of naval and coastal artillery, the number serviceable bombers, attack aircraft and fighters). From the memorandum of V. L. Bogdenko began work on justifying the reorganization of the naval command and control system.
At first, the General Staff did not support the proposals of the command of the Navy”.
Thus, in the very years when the Navy was conducting high-intensity combat operations, it was outside a clear and well-thought-out command system.
There were similar supply problems. So, during the evacuation of German troops from the Crimea, naval aviation sometimes sat for several days without fuel and ammunition. It is not surprising that the Germans managed to take out a significant part of the troops from the Crimea - there was simply nothing to drown them with. By that time, the surface ships were not only chained to the ports by the order of the headquarters, but they were already technically in an almost incapacitated state, with "killed" vehicles and gunshot liners. And the aviation was suddenly put on a "hungry ration". The same problems arose in the Baltic Fleet.
It is difficult to judge what could have been achieved with the available forces if they had been manipulated in a different way.
The control system of the Navy was put in order only on March 31, 1944.
In his book of memoirs "Sharp turns" N. G. Kuznetsov gives a very vivid example of how the Red Army command really treated the fleet. When, on the night of June 21-22, 1941, Kuznetsov turned to Zhukov for instructions, he was simply dismissed.
What could have been achieved by entering the war with such prerequisites?
Many people remember the failures listed at the beginning of the article. But let's take a look at what these failures are distracting from.
The first terrible day on June 22, 1941, the Navy met in full combat readiness. Faced with the absence of any orders and realizing that only a few hours remained before the start of the war, N. G. Kuznetsov banally phoned the fleets, and brought them into full combat with a simple verbal order over the phone. A colossal contrast to the army that immediately lost control! As a result, the attacks that the Germans carried out against the Soviet naval bases that day ended in nothing.
In the very first days of the war, naval aircraft retaliated against Romania. The bombing of Berlin in 1941 was also carried out by naval aircraft. From a military point of view, these were injections, but they were of great moral importance for the Soviet troops and the population.
The fleet was always the last to leave. The army left Odessa, but the Primorsky group of forces (later - the Primorskaya army) continued to fight in the encirclement, moreover, the Navy immediately provided it with serious support, delivering reinforcements and delivering supplies, and at a critical moment for the defense of Odessa, landing a large tactical assault in Grigorievka. And this was not an isolated incident. Could the Maritime Army have been able to fight if it had been cut off from the sea?
When the resistance turned out to be absolutely hopeless, more than 80,000 thousand defenders of Odessa were evacuated to the Crimea.
These operations became a kind of "prologue" to what the fleet was doing throughout the war. Lacking a significant enemy at sea, the Navy, as expected, deployed its actions against the coast - especially since the army was rapidly rolling back, leaving the enemy one strategically important city after another.
This is a very important point in assessing the effectiveness of the Navy's actions - the ground forces were unable to protect the coastal cities from an offensive from land, which led to the loss of the fleets (except for the Northern) bases, repair and production capacities. The fleet did not surrender Odessa or Crimea.
Similarly to the army, the Red Army Air Force was unable to stop the Luftwaffe, and all operations of the fleet took place with the enemy's complete air supremacy.
It makes no sense to describe in detail the course of hostilities in 1941-1945 - many books and articles have been written about this. To assess what role the Navy played in defending the country, we will simply briefly describe what it did, especially since we know in what conditions it was done.
Black Sea Fleet. After the evacuation of the defenders of Odessa, the Navy carried out operations to supply the group cut off from the main forces of the Red Army in the Crimea. After the collapse of the defense of the peninsula, the naval forces carried out the Kerch-Feodosia landing operation, strategically important for the entire course of the war. 33,000 amphibious assault personnel were landed, and later brought to the Crimea nearly 50,000 more people with equipment and weapons. This was of decisive importance - without this operation, Sevastopol would have been quickly taken and, in the midst of the first battle for Rostov, the command of Army Group South would have received a complete 11th field army with serious combat experience and experienced command at its disposal. Which in reality did not influence the battles for Rostov.
It is quite obvious that the entire course of hostilities on the southern flank of the Soviet-German front would have been different in the end. For example, the Germans could have started their summer offensive in the Caucasus in 1942 from a much more advantageous position. As a result, they wave could move further than in reality. The latter, in turn, could lead to the loss of the Caucasus, and to entry into the war on the side of the "axis" of Turkey … and even without this, German aviation in 1942 bombed ports on the Caspian Sea. The loss of the Caucasus would lead to both the loss of oil and the loss of at least a third of allied supplies of equipment and strategic materials. This would call into question the possibility of continuing the war in principle.
Instead, there were battles for the Kerch Peninsula, and hundreds of days of defense of Sevastopol, the supply of which completely fell on the shoulders of the fleet.
We remember that in the end the city was lost. As a result of the hardest battles, suffering huge losses in people (Manstein recalled one company in which there were nine people, with the staff of a German infantry company of one hundred and ninety people), the Germans nevertheless took the city.
But it was just a military defeat, but the release of the 11th Army during the decisive battles of the end of 1941 would have been a disaster.
It is customary to criticize the fleet for the outcome of the defense of Sevastopol. But is this criticism fair? It is worth asking the question - which naval forces have the same operation in their assets? To supply an isolated enclave, with tens of thousands of defenders, hundreds of days in a row, against an enemy dominating the air? Who else could do this? Who ever tried to do something like this?
Moreover, if the Stavka had given the order to evacuate Sevastopol after the collapse of the Crimean Front, then perhaps this would have been done, just as it had been done earlier in Odessa. Until a certain point, this was possible.
The Kerch-Feodosia operation and operations to supply the garrison of Sevastopol were strategically important for the entire outcome of the war as a whole. They would be even more important if the army was able to build on the success after the landing on the Kerch Peninsula. But the army did not fulfill this task.
In the future, landings and military transport became the main task of the fleet. Thus, the assault on Novorossiysk would have turned into a "Soviet Verdun" if it had not been for the simultaneous attack by troops from the Malaya Zemlya bridgehead, and, at the "hottest" moment of the battle, a landing directly into the port, which disorganized the German defenses in the city. How could all this be done without the Navy? A rhetorical question. Capturing a bridgehead without the fleet would certainly have been impossible.
And during the liberation of the Crimea, the Navy also played an important role. Although the Kerch-Eltigen landing operation was incomparable in scale with the Kerch-Feodossiysk one, and although the landing in Eltigen was defeated, and its remnants had to be evacuated, the main landing forces were eventually able to gain a foothold in the Crimea and pulled back four divisions out of the nine available to the enemy.
As a result, the task of the Soviet troops attacking from the north, who actually liberated the Crimea, was simplified by about half. Can you somehow underestimate this?
In total, the fleet carried out the following main landing operations (chronologically) at the Black Sea theater:
1941: Grigorievsky landing, Kerch-Feodosia landing operation
1942: Evpatoria landing, Sudak landing
1943: Landing at the Verbyanoy Spit, Taganrog landing, Mariupol landing, Novorossiysk landing operation, Landing at Osipenko, Landing in the Blagoveshchenskaya-Solyanoye area, Temryuk landing, Landing on the Tuzla spit, Kerch-Eltigen landing operation
1944: Landing at Cape Tarkhan, Landing in the Kerch port, Landing in the Nikolaev port, Constance landing.
And this is not counting the shelling of German troops from the sea, and military transport, and in fact during the latter two million people were transported! Apart from the evacuation of Odessa.
It cannot be disputed not only that the Kerch-Feodosia operation and the supply of Sevastopol in total were strategically important, and, for example, the Novorossiysk, Kerch-Eltigen landing operations or the evacuation of Odessa were of major operational importance, but also the fact that, in general, these the efforts exerted tremendous pressure on the enemy, and had a significant impact on the course of the war as a whole.
At first glance, the Baltic Fleet is not so simple. From the very beginning, in addition to all the inherent problems of the Navy, the Baltic Fleet also suffered from an extremely incompetent command. This is what caused, for example, the failed evacuation of Tallinn. But remembering Tallinn, we must also remember the evacuation of the garrison of the Hanko Peninsula, carried out in conditions of great mine danger, but overall, despite everything, successful.
However, the enemy managed to successfully blockade the Baltic Fleet, and the attempts of the Baltic submariners from time to time to break mine and network barriers cost them dearly. And this is in conditions when the submarines, in any case, could not inflict significant damage on enemy communications. And the first landings in 1941 and 1942 were almost completely destroyed by the Germans. The fate of the Narva landing party in 1944 was no better …
However, it is worth understanding this. Even in a blocked state, the Navy played the role of a deterrent to the Germans. To understand how, you have to make an assumption and imagine what it would be like if there were no fleet in the Baltic.
And then a completely different picture opens up to the imagination - the Luftwaffe dominates in the sky, the Kriegsmarine dominates the sea, the Wehrmacht drives the Red Army to the northeast by land dozens of kilometers a day. The Germans in general would not be constrained by anything in their activity in the Baltic, and this would inevitably end with their amphibious operations against the Red Army - in conditions when the landed German contingents could rely on air support and supplies by sea, and the reserves of the Red Army would be shackled by strikes from the front. Of course, such operations would have accelerated the advance of the Wehrmacht units even more, and it is also obvious that the Red Army would have had nothing to oppose them at that time. And this is a big question, where in such a version of reality would Army Group "North" stop, which, at the cost of super-efforts and huge losses, was actually stopped near Leningrad.
However, the Baltic Fleet still came to life. Even if the effectiveness of his actions was the lowest among all Soviet fleets.
After the disastrous (yet another) Narva landing, there were successful operations to seize the Bjork Islands and islands in the Vyborg Bay, the fleet and the army carried out an important operation to capture the Moondzund Islands, albeit also accompanied by a tragedy with a landing near Vintri, after which the troops landed from the sea on the Frische Spit -Nerung and Danish Bornholm.
Even when the blockade was lifted from Leningrad, the ships of the fleet provided all the necessary military transportation, including to the Oranienbaum bridgehead, which played a decisive role both in the defense of Leningrad and in its release. The troops that attacked the Germans from this bridgehead in January 1944 were both delivered by naval sailors and attacked with the support of naval artillery.
What would the operation to lift the blockade of Leningrad look like without an attack from this patch of land? It is worth considering this, as well as the fact that without the fleet it would not have been held.
In general, it must be admitted that of all the fleets, the Baltic one "performed" the worst way. Just do not forget that he also got the most difficult theater of operations, and for all the disadvantages of his combat work, the Baltic Fleet's zero value was never, as well as near-zero. Although much more could have been done.
The merit of the Northern Fleet is described by the simple and succinct word "convoys". It was the Northern Fleet that ensured the "connection" of the belligerent USSR with the British, and, to a large extent, with the Americans. Polar convoys were the main means of delivering material and technical assistance to the USSR, and this was of vital importance. After the war, in order not to "wave" Western propaganda, which instantly became hostile, the myth of allied deliveries as something unprincipled for Victory was thrown into the domestic historical "science" (without quotation marks, in this case, alas) and the mass consciousness. Naturally, there is nothing further from reality. For example, let us give the fact that the Soviet Union lost 70% of aluminum production by October 1941. What would have been made of aluminum (until mid-1943) blocks of diesel engines V-2, installed on the famous T-34 and KV? Aircraft engines? And you can also raise the list of the best Soviet aces pilots and see what they flew. Only the top ten "top" Soviet fighter pilots cost Germany about 1% of all aircraft produced by it during the war. And almost all of these people flew, in most cases, on "Airacobras", and not on Lugg-3, oddly enough.
It was the Northern Fleet that carried out the task of ensuring the safety of allied convoys in its area of responsibility, and most importantly, made a significant contribution to the defense of the Arctic. It is especially worth noting the landing in Zapadnaya Litsa, on the western coast, carried out in July 1941. Then 2,500 soldiers and commanders from the 325th rifle regiment and marines thwarted the July offensive of the Germans to Murmansk, forcing them to withdraw troops from the front and move them to the bridgehead captured by the landing party. The successful operation actually cost the Germans victory in the Arctic - they could not "win back" the wasted time, they missed the Red Army's counterattack, and when the Wehrmacht again launched an offensive in the fall, it did not have enough strength to break through to Murmansk. The "road of life" for the entire USSR was retained. In the future, the raids of the marines continued with varying success, ships and aircraft provided escort for allied convoys, and smaller domestic convoys along the NSR and inland waters. Also, the aviation of the fleet systematically attacked small German convoys. Each such episode separately did not mean anything, but together they seriously complicated the activities of the Germans. Preventing them from relaxing in between British attacks.
River flotillas made a special contribution to the fight against the Germans. The volume of the article simply does not allow revealing their contribution to the outcome of the war, as well as the composition and the most high-profile operations. Let us state the following. The personnel of the flotillas were recruited from the Navy, received previous training in the Navy. A significant part of the ships in the flotillas were previously created for the Navy, and were not mobilized civilian ships. Without the Ladoga military flotilla, Leningrad could well have been lost. The most successful Soviet landing operation, which had an important tactical significance, Tuloksinskaya, was carried out by river workers. Its scale exceeded the scale of most amphibious assault forces, and the ratio of losses and results achieved, the very "price of victory", would have done honor to any army and navy of those years. In general, the river fleets have landed more landings than any of the fleets. The river workers fought on the Sea of Azov, the Don and the Volga, fought almost along the entire Danube, to the Balkans and the Spree River, and ended up fighting in Berlin.
The last theater of operations in which the Navy had to fight was the Far East. By the time the USSR entered the war on the side of the United States and its allies, the Japanese fleet was almost completely defeated, and could not offer significant resistance. As in the course of the Great Patriotic War, the main type of hostilities was the landing. Accompanying the offensive of the Red Army, the Navy sequentially landed five landings in Korea, three river forces of the Amur flotilla, landed two tactical landings on Sakhalin, and conducted the Kuril landing operation, which is strategically important for the USSR then and for Russia now.
Of course, the landings in Korea and on the rivers of North China were not of fundamental importance for the outcome of the Red Army's offensive. However, there was one exception that is usually overlooked.
You need to understand - then do not have the USSR, then not only those fragile ships on which these operations were carried out, but also the commanders and staffs capable of carrying them out, do not have experience in conducting such operations, roughly speaking, do not have at least some something of the fleet in the Pacific theater of operations, and with the surrender of Japan, the Americans could enter the Kuriles. It is simply impossible to describe what the strategic implications for our country would be in this case. They would be indescribable.
Let's summarize.
During the Great Patriotic War, the Navy, operating against the coast, carried out amphibious operations and provided the army with military transport, including maintaining communications with the allies. Other tasks, such as attacks on enemy convoys by aircraft, small ships and submarines, had no strategic influence, although, in general, they had a serious impact on him. Unfortunately, the limited format of the article forced the actions of naval aviation and submarines to be left behind the scenes, although this is apparently unfair.
The actions of the Navy against the coast had a significant impact on the course of hostilities and the outcome of the war as a whole. In some cases, the operations of the fleet were strategically important for the survival or the future of the country (Crimea, Kuril Islands).
Of course, there were a lot of flaws in the plans for the amphibious operations, and in the way these plans were implemented, which led to large unjustified losses in people. But this does not diminish the importance of amphibious operations. 80% of all Soviet landings were successful, if we talk about landings that were of great operational importance, then almost all.
The understanding of those old events by Russian historians and amateurs of military history is, unfortunately, paradoxical and somewhat pathological. Without disputing the very fact of the historical events that took place, not disputing their scale, not disputing the direct damage inflicted on the enemy (killed, wounded, etc.), Russian writers, publicists and ordinary people are not able to see the whole picture, are not able to assess the “integral »The effect of the activities of the Navy in the war with Germany and the war with Japan. Nobody ever asked the question: "What if the fleet was not there?" No one has ever lost on a serious, professional level, "alternatives", in which, for example, the 11th Army participated in the Battle of Rostov, or was transferred to the Army Group Center to stop the Soviet counteroffensive near Moscow, or near Leningrad, but not at the time of the Meretskovo offensive, but six months earlier. What would have happened then? And if the Germans, who ended the campaign on the southern flank in 1941 more successfully than in reality, would have reached Poti a year later? How would Turkey react, for example? How would those troops that landed in the half-empty Crimea at the end of 1941, and their comrades who were then in besieged Sevastopol, have shown themselves if they had been thrown under German tanks a little further north? Could they have been able to “freeze” an entire army by the same amount, preventing it from being used in other sectors of the huge front? Or would they quickly burn out in cauldrons and fruitless attacks, like millions of others like them?
No one asks such questions and does not want to think about them, at best, simply brushing off the options that did not happen, not realizing that they did not happen for a reason. Tens and hundreds of thousands of people died for their non-offensive …
Yes, the Navy had a lot of frankly shameful failures. But who didn't have them? USA started the war at Pearl Harbor. The British have a battle at Kuantan, there is the sinking of the aircraft carrier "Glories" and the abandonment "to be devoured" by the convoy PQ-17. There is an inability to stop the actions of the Italian fleet until the very moment of Italy's withdrawal from the war, and it was not the Allied naval forces that forced it to surrender, well, or not only they. Is this a reason to doubt the meaningfulness of the existence of Royal Navy?
History is a good teacher, but you need to understand its lessons correctly. Let us briefly summarize what we must learn from the experience of the Great Patriotic War and military operations against Japan.
1. The fleet is needed. Even in a defensive war on land, on its own territory. In principle, there cannot be a "navy-army" opposition to which Russia often gravitates.
2. It must be powerful. Not the fact that it is necessarily oceanic, it depends on the current political and military tasks, but necessarily numerous, strong and well prepared. Its structure, size, naval composition and direction of combat training should be based on the adequate reality of the "threat model", the fleet cannot be built as a "fleet in general".
3. Military science should work intensively on defining the shape of a future war, including necessarily a war at sea. This is the only way to "guess" the type of future warships. Otherwise, you will have to use the cruisers as transports, and land troops from pleasure boats, pontoons and fishing trawlers and generally solve problems with obviously unusable means with unjustifiably high losses. As it was already in the past.
4. Army commanders cannot effectively command the fleet. It's impossible. Operations at sea are too different from those on land. The command system must be worked out before the war and then work smoothly. The task and responsibility of the military-political leadership is to create and "tune" this system in peacetime.
5. When carrying out an amphibious operation, responsibility for its conduct should be transferred to the army commanders and staffs only after the landing of the first landing echelon, or later, but never before. Examples of the opposite in the Great Patriotic War were and ended tragically.
6. When the enemy attacks the country's territory by land and the weakness of its naval forces (it does not matter, in general or "here and now"), the importance of strikes from the sea on the coast sharply increases - in those years these were landings (including raids) and shelling, today the arsenal methods and means are much higher.
7. The availability of naval aviation, well supplied and trained, is a critical factor in the success of any naval operation. This should be specifically specialized aviation, at least in terms of personnel training, and better in the technical characteristics of aircraft.
8. Ships, oddly enough, may well fight against an enemy with air superiority - this is possible, but very difficult and dangerous.
9. The use of mine weapons by the enemy and aggressive mine-laying operations can reduce the size and strength of the fleet to zero. Fully. At the same time, the enemy will need minimal forces for this. Mines are one of the most destructive types of naval weapons. This is confirmed by the American experience of the Second World War. Most likely, in a future big war, the losses from mines will exceed those from anti-ship missiles, and significantly. Both the means of mining and the mines themselves are needed, as well as elaborated measures for mine support.
10. The key to success in naval warfare is extremely aggressive, and very well-prepared offensive or counter-offensive actions. Purely defensive tasks for ships are an oxymoron; they can only exist as a starting point for intercepting the initiative and counterattacking. At the same time, the general superiority of the enemy in forces does not matter. In any case, you have to look for an opportunity for an attack, for a series of limited attacks, for raids, raids, and so on.
11. None of the number of combat fleet will be enough. We need a mobilization reserve from civilian ships, which could then be used for military purposes - both as transport and as armed auxiliary ships. Likewise, you need a reserve in people. It is advisable to have warships in conservation, as was the case in the past. At least a little.
12. The example of the enemy shows that even an improvised vessel or ship can be of great danger to the enemy (high-speed landing barges of the Germans). In some cases, such ships can pose a threat to warships. It is advisable to have such options in advance.
It is easy to see that a lot of this list, which is far from complete, by the way, is ignored in our country.
Too much.
