HMS Anzio (L3003): A Workhorse Landing Ship Born Just Too Late for the War

Built for a War That Was Nearly Over

HMS Anzio began life simply as LST 3003, one of the LST(3) Mark II class of tank landing ships built by Vickers Armstrong on the Tyne. She was launched on 8 June 1945, a month after the war in Europe had already ended, and commissioned on 30 November 1945, three months after Japan's surrender had brought the entire Second World War to a close.

The yard is worth naming properly. She was built at Vickers-Armstrong's Naval Yard at High Walker on the Tyne, a firm whose usual output was cruisers, battleships and submarines, and the reason a yard of that calibre was turning out tank landing ships in 1945 tells you what the Admiralty thought the next two years were going to look like. The invasion of Japan, Operation Downfall, was expected to need amphibious lift on a scale that made Normandy look modest, and the ships being laid down in Britain in the spring of 1945 were being laid down for the Pacific. Anzio went down the ways on 8 June 1945, a month after Germany surrendered, and was still fitting out when the atomic bombs ended the argument. She was commissioned on 30 November into a navy that had, quite suddenly, more amphibious shipping than it could think what to do with.

Named, in keeping with naval tradition, after the brutal 1944 Allied landings at Anzio in Italy, she was in the slightly odd position of entering service too late to take part in any of the amphibious operations her class had originally been designed for.

The name she was given in 1947 is better chosen than it looks. The landing at Anzio in January 1944, Operation Shingle, was meant to put an Allied force ashore behind the German line and unhinge the whole Italian front. Instead the beachhead was contained almost at once and spent four months under fire, sustained entirely by sea. Churchill's verdict was that he had hoped to hurl a wildcat onto the shore and had got a stranded whale instead. The ships that made the landing possible were LSTs, and the ships that kept twenty thousand men alive on that beachhead through the spring were LSTs as well, running in and out under shellfire for four months. Putting the name on a tank landing ship is not a decoration. It is a job description.

The LST(3) class was built around a simple, robust purpose: getting tanks, vehicles and troops directly onto a beach without needing a harbour, via bow doors and a long ramp.

The numbers behind that purpose are worth having. The great majority of the war's tank landing ships were American, supplied under Lend-Lease and due to go back once the fighting stopped, so Britain and Canada built their own: forty-five in British yards, the rest in Canada, numbered from LST 3001 and LST 3501. A single one of them could carry fifteen forty-ton tanks, or twenty-seven lighter ones, or an entire landing craft sitting on her deck, or fourteen three-ton lorries and 168 men, and put any of that onto an open beach through bow doors and a ramp with no harbour, crane or pier involved anywhere. Between them the British and Canadian ships gave more than twenty years of postwar service.

The type also had an afterlife that almost nobody associates with warships. Several of the class went on charter to the Atlantic Steam Navigation Company, which used them to run vehicles across the North Sea between Harwich and the Hook of Holland, keeping the British Army of the Rhine supplied. Driving lorries straight aboard at one end and straight off at the other was a genuinely novel idea in commercial shipping at the time, and the roll-on roll-off ferry that every holidaymaker now takes entirely for granted descends directly from the wartime tank landing ship. When the Suez operation came in late 1956 the whole of that fleet was taken up for the Mediterranean, and the cross-North Sea service did not start again until January 1957.

The ferry story deserves telling properly, because it starts with one man and a very good idea. Lieutenant Colonel Frank Bustard had spent his career in shipping and had long thought that the way to move vehicles across water was to drive them on at one end and off at the other, rather than swinging them over the side with a crane. In 1946 he founded the Atlantic Steam Navigation Company and chartered three surplus British LSTs from the government, numbers 3519, 3534 and 3512, and renamed them Empire Baltic, Empire Cedric and Empire Celtic. On 11 September 1946 Empire Baltic sailed from Tilbury for Rotterdam with sixty-four vehicles aboard, bought by the Dutch government, and got there in about twenty-four hours. That is the first commercial roll-on roll-off sailing in history, and it happened because the war had left a pile of ships with bow doors and a ramp lying about with nothing to do. The company went on to run thousands of Army vehicles between Tilbury and Hamburg, a service shifted to Antwerp in 1955.

It is worth pausing on what that actually changed, because almost nobody thinks about it. Before the LST, putting a lorry on a ship meant a crane, a quayside, a gang of dockers, several hours and a fair chance of damage, at both ends. Bow doors and a ramp reduced the entire operation to a driver and a piece of steel plate. Every car ferry, every freight ferry, every Channel crossing anybody has ever made in a vehicle descends in a direct line from a ship designed to put tanks onto a defended beach under fire. It is one of the very few pieces of military technology that made civilian life obviously and immediately better, and it did so almost by accident, because the surplus existed and somebody looked at it and saw a business rather than scrap.

It was an unglamorous but particularly vital capability, and the design proved sturdy enough that several sister ships, including HMS LST 3002, survived serious collision damage in the years immediately after the war and were successfully repaired and returned to service.

A Postwar Working Life

Like most of her class, Anzio's real career was a postwar one rather than a wartime one, part of the Royal Navy's peacetime fleet of amphibious and logistic support ships during a period when Britain still maintained a global military presence and regularly needed to move armour, vehicles and stores to trouble spots and garrisons across the Mediterranean, Middle East and beyond.

The naming in 1947 was part of a general tidying-up rather than a compliment to her personally. The wartime LSTs had gone to sea as numbers, which was fine for a fleet of hundreds in a war and unsatisfactory for a peacetime navy that intended to keep some of them, so the survivors were given names, and the ones chosen were the battles their type had made possible: Anzio, Salerno, Reggio, Narvik, Suvla, Messina, Lofoten, Striker, Puncher. Every one of them commemorates a landing. It was a neat piece of naming and it has a slight sting to it, because most of the ships that received the names had been finished too late to take part in any of the operations they were named after. Anzio the ship missed Anzio the battle by seventeen months.

She was also modified at some point to carry heavier tanks, which is a small alteration with a large amount of history behind it. The LST was designed around the medium tanks of 1942, a Sherman weighing about thirty-two tons. By the 1950s the British Army's main battle tank was the Centurion, which in its later marks was pushing fifty tons, and after that came Chieftain at fifty-five. A ramp and a tank deck sized for a Sherman will not take a Chieftain, and neither will the ship's trim, so the surviving LSTs had to be strengthened and their ramps reworked to stay useful. That is the unglamorous reason a 1945 ship was still worth having in 1965: somebody kept spending money on her to keep her in step with what the Army was actually driving.

Ships of her type formed the unglamorous backbone of exactly this kind of work through the 1950s and 1960s, valued more for reliability and capacity than for speed or firepower.

Which brings us to the one thing she certainly did. Anzio was one of five LST(3)s in the armada assembled for Operation Musketeer, the Anglo-French intervention at Suez in November 1956. Eleven years after being completed too late for the war she was designed around, she finally did the job: putting armour and vehicles onto a hostile shore from an open beach. The politics of Suez were a disaster for Britain. The amphibious mechanics of it worked, and they worked because ships like this one existed.

Suez was not the end of her operational life either. She went on to work off Aden, and the timing means that was almost certainly during the Aden Emergency, the long, grinding insurgency that ran from 1963 until Britain pulled out of South Arabia altogether in November 1967. That withdrawal was itself one of the larger amphibious operations of the post-war era, run in reverse: rather than putting an army ashore, the Royal Navy had to take one off, along with its vehicles, its stores and a great many civilians, from a port that was becoming less friendly by the week. It is exactly the sort of operation a tank landing ship exists for and exactly the sort nobody makes films about. A ship built for the invasion of Japan spent her middle age carrying the British Army out of the last of its Middle Eastern garrisons.

Beyond Suez, Anzio's deployments in this period have attracted far less attention than those of the ships that saw significant combat action, a reasonably common state of affairs for landing ships of her generation, whose service tended to consist of steady, repetitive, well-documented-at-the-time but poorly-remembered-since logistic runs rather than the sort of dramatic single engagement that tends to survive clearly in the historical record.

A Quiet End

Anzio remained in service for roughly a quarter of a century, a truly respectable career for a ship built in the last weeks of a world war, before she was sold in 1970 and scrapped the following year. She never fired a shot in anger and never made headlines, but ships exactly like her were what kept Britain's postwar military commitments actually functioning, one unremarkable, essential beach landing at a time.

She did not go straight to the breakers either. She was sold to Spain in 1970 and broken up at Valencia the following year, twenty-five years after she was commissioned into a navy that had no obvious use for her. Her type outlasted her in a different form: the lessons of the LST(3)s went into the Sir Lancelot class of landing ships logistic, which took the same idea of bow doors, a tank deck and a beaching hull and built it properly for the 1960s, and which were still doing the job in the Falklands in 1982. Between the LSTs of 1945, the ferries of the Atlantic Steam Navigation Company and the LSLs that followed, a design drawn up to put tanks on a hostile beach ended up underpinning both a quarter of a century of British military logistics and the entire modern ferry industry. Not bad for a ship that was finished too late for her war.