exercise was the USS Thetis Bay. This exercise was the culmination of the Marines' developing strategy of vertical envelopment rather than amphibious assaults on heavily defended beaches. The maneuvers were well-covered by the media of the time, including LIFE Magazine. The Marine Corps subsequently adopted this method as standard operating procedure after proving that helicopters could be used to transport very large numbers of troops and large amounts of supplies in a timely fashion. Operation Deep Water was a 1957 NATO naval exercise held in the Mediterranean Sea that involved the first units of the United States Marine Corps to participate in a helicopter-borne vertical envelopment operation during an overseas deployment. During the Vietnam war the U.S. conducted the first large scale air assault operation during the Battle of Ia Drang. Algerian War The use of armed helicopters coupled with helicopter transport during the Algerian War for the French Army to drop troops into enemy territory gave birth to the tactics of airmobile warfare that continues today. The machines of the French Army Light Aviation carried out a considerable number of missions against Algerian insurgents between 1955, when the Groupe d’Hélicoptères No.2 (GH 2) was created, and 1962 when the French empire in Algeria finally came to an end. GH 2 was based at Sétif – Aïn Arnat in the east of the country, and it was equipped primarily with machines to undertake transport missions, though the Vertol H-21C, would soon join the unit owing to concerns about the lack of machines which could both defend themselves and carry out offensive missions against the insurgents. Acquiring these machines lay in the hands of the licensee Piasecki given France's urgent need to have them on account of the circumstances. Usually, the H-21 could carry up to 18 troops, yet local operating (as well as climatic) conditions decreed that the French army examples could carry only up to around 12 troops each. In two years, GH 2 received the vast majority of the H-21s acquired by ALAT, which consisted of five squadrons by the end of 1958. A sixth squadron from the French naval air arm, the Aéronautique navale, had operated with GH 2 for little more than a year. From 1955 to 1962, GH 2 took part in the major battles, which occurred near the frontier between Algeria and Tunisia, including the battle of Souk-Ahras in April 1958. The helicopters, including