Military assault involving a combination of sea and land operations, usually with the object of invading enemy territory from the sea, amphibious warfare played a role of unprecedented importance during World War II. While the earliest amphibious assault recorded in Western history is the Battle of Marathon, 490 BC, and the U.S. Army's first true amphibious operation was Winfield Scott's 1847 assault on Veracruz during the U.S.-Mexican War, it was not until World War II that the tactics and techniques reached maturity.

The Allies brought the doctrine of amphibious warfare to an especially high state of development, both in the Atlantic (culminating in Operation Overlord, including the Normandy landings [D-day]) and the Pacific, where the intricate integration of air, sea, and land forces was the key element of victory. As fully developed, Allied amphibious warfare doctrine delivered large numbers of specially trained troops, together with equipment, vehicles, and other materiel via landing craft onto the hostile beach, which, typically, had been "prepared" or "softened up" by naval and aerial bombardment. During the landing itself, naval and air elements provided supporting fire to suppress enemy resistance. In some cases, as in Overlord, airborne troops preceded the seaborne landings. These troops worked behind enemy lines to draw defenders away from the beaches and to disrupt lines of supply, reinforcement, and communications.

Early in the war, from 1939 to 1942, amphibious warfare was largely a matter of improvisation, but as the central importance of this assault mode became increasingly apparent, Allied strategists and tacticians rapidly produced a specialized doctrine, which divided assault forces into distinct functional components. The assault formations were the vanguard. They were "combat loaded" on their assault craft, their supplies and equipment stowed so they could be unloaded precisely in the order in which they were needed. Thus, the first elements of the invasion would be delivered complete and ready to fight from the moment they hit the beach. Behind the assault formations came the follow-up formations, whose equipment was "tactically loaded," that is, stowed in a way that compromised between combat loading and loading to maximize space aboard transport craft. Finally came the build-up formations, which could afford to deploy more slowly and, therefore, had their equipment loaded exclusively to make the most use of available transport space.

Assault formations, which were landed from landing craft or even smaller amphibious vehicles, were divided into "flights," each flight a complete military unit, which were in turn subdivided into "waves." It was deemed of critical importance to keep each wave together and to coordinate the landing of the waves in the proper, most effective tactical order. This ensured that troops would not be landed piecemeal, vulnerable to defeat in detail by the defenders.

After the assault formations had gained a toehold on the beach, the follow-up formations were deployed to supply the strength necessary to secure the beachhead. Once this was accomplished, the assault and follow-up formations began their push inland, and the build-up formations were deployed on the secure beachhead to begin the full-scale exploitation of the amphibious attack: the invasion proper. . .

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