Japanese Amphibious Landing Tactics

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Japanese Amphibious Landing Tactics and Doctrine had undergone development since the early 1920s. Such tactics were required for effective operations in China and in the Pacific. Notably, landing operations carried out by the Imperial Japanese Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy were generally far smaller in scale and carried out at different times than their Allied counterparts, namely those carried out during the Island Hopping campaigns of 1943-1945.

For one, most Japanese landing operations were usually conducted at night, and thus unopposed most of the time. In certain cases when a landing did come under fire, landing craft would move to a new site. Reconnaissance of landing sites was performed by air or sea, with reconnaissance elements very rarely being landed ahead of time.