A gap appears in accounts of the ships' otherwise well-recorded wartime service. The American Western Task Force's order of battle identifies three battleships, USS Ranger and four Sangamon-class escort carriers, seven cruisers, 38 destroyers, eight fleet minesweepers, and five tankers. Accounts of the British-led Center and Eastern task forces often reduce the ships carrying thousands of assault troops to a generic landing force. Torch mattered as a large Anglo-American combined-operations test after Dieppe showed the danger of attacking a defended port without bringing supporting infrastructure. The Glen class supplied essential lift at the center of that experiment, even though the surviving summaries make those transport ships harder to identify than the escorts.
Chapter · 33:20-38:29
The missing landing-ship detail in Operation Torch accounts
Orders of battle often document Torch's escorts and warships better than the landing ships that carried thousands of assault troops.