Pontoon bridge innovation, in 1708 a Swedish army used a leather pontoon bridge to cross a river before the Battle of Holowczyn French general Jean Lannes's troops built a pontoon bridge to cross the Po river prior to the Battle of Montebello (1800). Napoleon's Grande Armée made extensive use of pontoon bridges at the battles of Aspern-Essling and Wagram under the supervision of General Henri Gatien Bertrand. General Jean Baptiste Eblé's engineers erected four pontoon bridges in a single night across the Dnieper during the Battle of Smolensk (1812). Working in cold water, Eblé's Dutch engineers constructed a 100-meter-long pontoon bridge during
Navy lighterage pontoon wedge pins. The flotation blocks came in two types: The principal type of unit was a rectangular prism; the majority of NLPs were constructed using these. The second type was similar but curved upward on one side, and these boxes were used to make bows on the front of NLP barges when required. Navy lighterage pontoon The Navy Lighterage pontoon (NLP) was a type of pontoon developed in World War II by the US Navy and used by naval construction teams (Seabees) and specialized US Army combat engineers, on invasion beaches and shallow harbors or harbors where the facilities had