Marine: A Guided Tour of a Marine Expeditionary Unit

seaworthiness and adaptability — the amphibious raiding strategy of the Norsemen dominated Europe for centuries. During the age of wooden sailing ships, various nations built landing barges with assorted fixtures (ramps, cranes, etc.) to load and unload troops, horses, and equipment. This is all well and good, but having a big navy and lots of troops does not guarantee a successful amphibious assault. The Spanish Armada in 1588 and Napoleon Bonaparte's aborted invasion of England in 1805 are classic examples of failures. The land-oriented military doctrine of continental empires could never quite solve the problem of crossing even the 30 nm/55 km of English Channel. In 1940, German General Staff planners thought crossing the Channel would simply be a 'river crossing along a wide front.' Wrong!

Many factors go into the execution of a successful amphibious assault, including air supremacy and sea control. But crossing the interface of land and water, known to most of us as 'the beach,' is the most difficult part, technologically and militarily. The beach or littoral zone can be a dangerous place, even if you just want to swim and sun yourself. Now try to move thousands of troops, hundreds of vehicles, and thousands of tons of equipment and supplies across it. It takes a lot of horsepower and engineering to create machines that enable men to do the job, and more than a little political capital. That is where our story about landing craft and amphibious ships starts. During the period between the World Wars, the problem of beach landing obsessed several groups of officers and engineers on both sides of the Atlantic. In America, Marines searching for a new mission to justify their continued existence saw amphibious assault as their future. During the 1930s they observed with interest a series of small operations by Japanese naval landing forces in China, utilizing specialized landing barges.

On the other side of the ocean, British officers, studying the failure of their 1915 invasion at Gallipoli, looked for ways to cross the beach rapidly to conduct mobile operations inland. The Gallipoli landing was the idea of the former First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Winston Churchill; and when it bogged down into a bloody stalemate, it nearly ended his political career. These problems became even more urgent for Churchill in World War II, after another disastrous landing in Norway and the Nazi conquest of Europe in 1940. For all of his many shortcomings as a strategist, Churchill clearly saw the need to build ships and landing craft in vast numbers if Europe was to be liberated from Hitler.

Even as the Battle of Britain was being fought in 1940 to fend off German invasion, the British were designing their first purpose-built landing craft, the Landing Craft, Assault (LCA, the American designation when we built them from the British design). Just over 40 ft/12.2-m long and powered by a pair of 65-hp Ford V-8 gasoline engines, they could haul thirty-five troops and 800 lb/364 kg of equipment some 50 to 80 nm/91 to 146 km. The open-topped LCA had a long, flat bottom suitable for beaching, an armored front to protect the embarked troops, and a bow ramp for rapid off-loading. LCAs could hang on a transport ship's davits, like large lifeboats. Assault troops boarded them by climbing down rope ladders and nets. The same features would appear on almost every landing craft, including the Landing Craft, Utility (LCUs), and Landing Craft, Medium (LCMs), still in use today. From the LCA design came literally dozens of specialized landing craft that would be used for the next half century. At the same time, American engineers were coming up with their own designs, such as the famous 'Higgins' boat, which was based on a surf-rescue craft. Evolutionary improvements led to standard designs like the Landing Craft Vehicle, Personnel (LCVP), built in the thousands as the backbone of the landing craft fleet that helped win World War II.

Once the landing craft had been developed, the next problem was getting the frail little boats across the oceans. Amphibious operations are fought against the elements of the ocean and the shore, as well as the enemy's defenses. The flat-bottomed assault boats, while handy in the shoal waters of beaches and atolls, needed larger 'mother' vessels to move them close to their objectives. This requirement led to specialized attack transports, grouped into amphibious 'tractor' groups. Early attack transports were converted freighters and passenger liners. They lacked cranes and other handling gear for hoisting out and loading embarked landing craft and troops. Later in the war, purpose-built ships were significant improvements, but they still had to run in close to the beaches to unload; and they were vulnerable to enemy coastal artillery, mines, and aircraft.

An important development was the Landing Ship, Tank (LST — their crews said it stood for 'large, slow target'). This was an oceangoing vessel that could beach itself, open its bow doors, drop a ramp, and then off-load vehicles up to the size of heavy tanks directly onto the beach. The last U.S. Navy LSTs (built in the 1960s) only recently retired from active service. Another special-purpose amphibious ship was the Landing Ship, Dock (LSD), equipped with ballast tanks and an interior well deck that allowed landing craft to load in relative safety. By flooding the well deck, the landing craft could easily float out, without the need for hoists or cargo nets to load the boats. The well deck was so successful that all thirty-six of the U.S. Navy's amphibious ships in the 21st century will have one. Other specialized amphibious ships built during World War 11 included amphibious command ships and fire- support vessels carrying rockets and guns.

These bizarre craft provided the sealift to liberate North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific. Soon after the victory they helped to win, virtually all of the landing craft and amphibious ships were sold for scrap or mothballed. The atomic bomb seemed to signal an end to amphibious warfare. This attitude would not last. The Korean War marked the rebirth of amphibious operations. Recalled from the moth-ball fleets, World War II amphibious ships provided General Douglas MacArthur with the lift for his brilliant landing at Inchon in the fall of 1950. Some of these same ships served off Lebanon when that troubled land erupted in 1958. While the amphibious vessels of the Second World War held the line in the 1950s, the U.S. Navy began to design new amphibious ships, suitable for the atomic age. The most important of these was the assault helicopter carrier (LPH), designed to carry a Marine battalion and land it by helicopter onto an enemy shore. The first LPHs were converted World War II aircraft carriers, but the purpose-built Iwo Jima class (LPH-3) was in production by the early 1960s. By the end of the decade, in addition to the LPHs, new classes were in production — the Newport class (LST-1179), the Charleston class amphibious cargo ships (LKA-113), and the Anchorage class (LSD-36), as well as new designs like the Austin class (LPD-4), which was equipped with a well deck. These ships maintained a credible amphibious lift capability through the Cold War years. Despite all this building, the tactics of assault with landing craft through the surf-line from a few thousand yards offshore had changed little since World War II. Landing craft themselves had changed little, with conventional medium (LCMs) and utility landing craft (LCUs) constructed as late as the 1980s.

While the technology of amphibious assaults had not changed much by the close of the 1960s, the soldiers they carried would. After the experience of Vietnam, with its conscripted combat troops, military leaders were forced to accept an all-volunteer force as the basis for a new, professional military in the 1970s. This change had many consequences. One not often noted affected the U.S. Navy: Realizing that it would have to take better care of all-volunteer crews, the Navy began to improve the habitability of warships. In the 18th century, Samuel Johnson observed that serving on a warship was like being in jail, with an added chance of drowning. This was not quite true on the World War II-vintage ships of the Vietnam era, but they were hardly designed for comfort. Naval architects try to pack as many men as possible into a warship. Personnel are needed to operate a maximum of weapons, sensors, and other systems. The emergence of the all-volunteer Navy in the 1970s meant that future warship designs would need improved habitability standards.

Another Navy goal in those days was to make warships capable of accomplishing more various missions. The results were seen in the Spruance-class (DD-963) destroyers and the Tarawa-class (LHA-1) helicopter assault ships. The LHAs were revolutionary; they were capable of operating both landing craft and helicopters, plus the new AV-8 Harrier V/STOL fighter bombers. Lessons learned from the Spruances and the Tarawas were applied to every future class of U.S. warship. Unfortunately, both types suffered rapid procurement-cost growth. The Tarawas were originally priced as a class of nine, but only five could be bought during the double digit inflation of the 1970s. The late 1970s were a bad time for the Navy in general, and amphibious forces in particular. The Administration of President Jimmy Carter took an axe to the Navy budget, particularly in shipbuilding, operations, and maintenance. And by 1979, when a series of crises broke out in Southwest Asia, the U.S. had only a minimal amphibious capability. Amphibious forces are expensive to build and tough to maintain. They are often among the first items cut in times of austerity.

As a result of the Carter austerity, planners reconsidered the capabilities of merchant shipping to supplement the specialized 'Gator ships. The first use of containerized merchant ships for amphibious forces was to be seen in the creation of Maritime Prepositioned Squadrons to provide a mobile, floating base for Marine task forces. Three such squadrons would be created, with additional units for the U.S. Army and Air Force. During the