She is forty-eight metres long, flat-bottomed, and built without a keel. She crosses the Atlantic under her own power, carrying two hundred infantry to defended beaches her smaller cousins cannot reach. Her side ramps earn the grim nickname of "bullet magnets" from the soldiers who descend them under fire. Without the Landing Craft, Infantry, Large, there is no Sicily, no Salerno, no Anzio, no Normandy, no Iwo Jima, and no Okinawa at the scale the Allies achieve.

This episode of The Special Forces in World War II Podcast, tells the story of the seagoing infantry landing craft that fills the gap between the davit-launched assault craft and the great Landing Ship, Tank. From the desperate summer of 1940, when the British Army stands on the wrong side of the Channel without the means to return, the Royal Navy and the United States Bureau of Ships develop the vessel together. The first contracts are signed on June 3rd, 1942. The first hull is afloat by September of the same year. Ten American shipyards, from George Lawley and Son in Massachusetts to Albina Engine and Machine in Oregon, build nine hundred and twenty-three of them in less than three years.

We follow the L-C-I-L through her three principal design types, her transfer to the Royal Navy and the Soviet Navy under Lend-Lease, and her conversion into gunboat, mortar boat, rocket ship, flotilla flagship, and minesweeper. We follow her into combat in two theatres of war. We watch Lieutenant Alec Guinness, the future actor, land troops near Cape Passero lighthouse at Sicily. We watch the Coast Guard-manned LCI(L)-85, LCI(L)-91, LCI(L)-92, and LCI(L)-93 destroyed on Easy Red at Omaha Beach. We watch the Royal Canadian Navy's 262nd Flotilla charge through the beach obstacles at Bernières-sur-Mer at thirty kilometres per hour. We watch Group Eight at Iwo Jima, where Lieutenant junior grade Rufus Herring's LCI(G)-449 wins the Medal of Honor and ten Navy Crosses are awarded to her sister ships.

This is the story of the unglamorous, slab-sided, flat-bottomed troop carrier that helps put the Allied infantry ashore on every contested beach from Licata to Okinawa. From the Channel to the Mekong, from Bethlehem Hingham to Subic Bay, this is the operational biography of one of the most-produced and least-celebrated Allied vessels of the Second World War.

For maps, photographs, original documents, and the full source base behind this episode, visit www.worldwar2-sof.com.

#WW2 #WorldWarII #MilitaryHistory #SpecialForces #LCI #LandingCraftInfantry #LCIL #DDay #Normandy #PacificWar #Anzio #Salerno #Sicily #IwoJima #Okinawa #Walcheren #Dragoon #OperationNeptune #USCoastGuard #USNavy #RoyalNavy #RoyalCanadianNavy #History #Podcast #WW2Podcast #NavalHistory #Amphibious #WW2History #SecondWorldWar #AlliedForces #Mountbatten #BuShips #RufusHerring #AlecGuinness #BeachAssault

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