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Author: AgProv

Aug 6th 2014 at 12:04:23 PM

Real life: quite often in WW2 it was not possible to get boats where you wanted them to go by sea because the enemy held key strategic points preventing this. And sometimes the quickest route was over land you already held. Problem with a war largely fought on an east-west axis: European rivers tend to run north-south. (except in Italy where the opposite applied). 
*Both Germany and the USSR had substantial river fleets on the Eastern Front. If one river line fell, the fastest way of salvaging naval assets and getting them to the next river line (if no canal or waterway system existed) was to transport them by road or rail. The Red Army used massive road transporters to move gunboats from one river system to the next as it advanced; a gunboat that might have fought on the river Volga in Stalingrad could easily have ended its war on the river elbe shelling Berlin - having largely travelled overland.
* Similarly, landing craft and light boats might have made the journey from the D-Day beaches to the crossing of the Rhine not by sea but on army tank transporters.