The claim that Churchill invented the LST sits uneasily with earlier Royal Navy work. The service had explored barges, monitors, landing craft, and larger self-propelled landing vessels during World War I and in interwar exercises. Funding often stopped those ideas from becoming ships, but the concepts were available when wartime designers had to build an untested first generation. This history also contrasts the willingness of the Royal Navy and US Navy to copy useful foreign ideas with services that insisted on developing their own solutions.
Chapter · 2:22-4:59
Churchill and the contested origins of the LST
The opening challenges the familiar claim that Winston Churchill invented the landing ship tank and traces British amphibious experimentation back to the First World War.