LAND BOUND LANDING CRAFT

Anyone who has followed these items over the years will know that we often pose questions but do not always come up with the answers. Some may be unanswerable, others perhaps too obvious and no one bothers, but every now and then a little gem is uncovered.

This is a good example. If you check out a previous article in 2005 you will find a query we raised about a photograph, showing a turretless Sherman tank launching a landing craft.

Perhaps through luck but no doubt also diligence Peter Andrews came up with the answer. It was contained in a Royal Engineers Training Memorandum dated 1948 – and here it is:-

As you see they do not actually give a location but we have no reason to suppose that our first guess was wrong on that account.

The reference to carrying landing craft on Tank Transporters is interesting because it was in fact done in March 1945, for Operation Plunder, the Rhine Crossing. But Peter also discovered a precedent for the use of tanks as carriers.

This photograph turned up in a file in the National Archives. It shows a Landing Craft Assault (LCA) being loaded onto the modified hull of a Churchill tank in Italy during preparations for crossing the River Po.

The codename chosen at the time was Toad – later used for the Churchill flail tank – but apparently it did not work and had to be abandoned. Can anyone tell us any more about this?