She has no name. She carries only a number on her bow. She is slow, flat-bottomed, and unglamorous. Sailors call her a Large Slow Target. Yet without the Landing Ship, Tank, there is no Operation Torch, no Husky, no Avalanche, no Shingle, no Overlord, no Dragoon, no Iwo Jima, and no Okinawa.

In this episode of The Special Forces in World War II Podcast, host Michael Weyers tells the story of the vessel that solved a problem the Royal Navy had carried unsolved since the beaches of Gallipoli in 1915. How do you put a thirty-tonne tank ashore on a hostile coast where no port exists, no crane stands ready, and no pier reaches into the surf?

The answer arrives, improbably, on the back of an envelope in a Washington office in November 1941. John C. Niedermair sketches the design in a couple of hours. From that sketch flows a programme that builds more than 1,051 ships in inland yards beside the Ohio and Illinois Rivers. The cornfield shipyards employ firms with no prior shipbuilding experience. Reservist crews learn their craft under fire, driving their bows onto hostile beaches in defiance of every instinct trained into a naval officer.

This episode follows the L.S.T. from Churchill's first memorandum on July 6th, 1940, through the Maracaibo conversions, the Anglo-American design meetings, the production miracle, the disaster of Exercise Tiger, the cross-Channel shuttle to Normandy, and the kamikaze storms of the Pacific. Twenty-six L.S.T.'s are lost to enemy action. Hundreds of crewmen die by torpedo, mine, and kamikaze. Their story deserves to be told.

#WW2 #WorldWarII #MilitaryHistory #SpecialForces #LST #LandingShipTank #DDay #Normandy #PacificWar #Anzio #Salerno #Sicily #IwoJima #Okinawa #Gallipoli #Churchill #History #Podcast #WW2Podcast #NavalHistory #Amphibious #WW2History #SecondWorldWar #AlliedForces #RoyalNavy #USNavy #Niedermair #ExerciseTiger #OperationOverlord #OperationDragoon

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