Landing Ship Tanks Mk1s: The First Attempts to Get Troops Ashore - Key Ships Series 7 Ship 3

Churchill's description of the Scharnhorst class as battlecruisers shows how a label could support his decision to pause British capital-ship construction.

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.

The six British Mark I vessels, three tanker conversions and three purpose-built ships, served as experiments before the mass-produced Mark II.

Converting fast Royal Navy tankers into landing and crane ships met an immediate need in 1940 and 1941 but reduced mobile fuel support when the war expanded into the Indian Ocean and Pacific.

Shallow-draft Venezuelan lake tankers offered sturdy hulls for conversion, but turning them into bow-loading tank carriers demanded extensive reconstruction.

The first operational LST served from Operation Ironclad to Sword Beach and later returned to merchant tanker service.

Misoa first joined a force intended to seize the Azores, but the old Anglo-Portuguese alliance made an assault unnecessary.

HMS Misoa landed M3 tanks for Combat Command B of the US 1st Armored Division during Operation Torch, then supported Pantelleria, Malta, and Sicily.

A blocked ramp stranded Misoa at Juno Beach, after which her accommodation and stores made her useful as a mother ship for coastal craft.

HMS Tasajera followed Misoa through Torch and Normandy but first survived a large aerial-torpedo hit off Algiers.

The purpose-built Boxer class emphasized speed and ocean passage, but its deep draft, long ramp, and engineering complexity pointed toward a simpler successor.

Thruster served at Salerno, became a fighter-direction ship for Normandy, and later formed part of Dutch amphibious capability as Pelikaan.

Bruiser combined amphibious and fighter-direction duties before a long postwar career under several merchant names.

Boxer's later career moved from fighter control to action-information and radar training, and she once carried Royal Artillery gunner Spike Milligan from North Africa to Italy.

The improvised conversions arrived when alternatives were scarce, while the elaborate purpose-built ships entered service after simpler landing vessels had proved adequate.

The closing argument asks whether interwar exercises encouraged fast, sophisticated landing ships when mass warfare actually demanded many simpler hulls.

The Royal Navy's 4.7-inch destroyer mountings provide a second example of exercise assumptions masking the threats ships would meet in combat.