The LST Shipyard, Building Landing Ships in the Middle of a Continent

In nineteen forty-two, the United States Navy faced a logistics problem that had no obvious solution. It needed Landing Ship Tanks, enormous flat-bottomed vessels designed to run directly onto beaches and disgorge tanks, trucks, and infantry. It needed hundreds of them.

And it needed them fast. The problem was that America's established shipyards on the coasts were already overwhelmed with destroyers, submarines, and cargo vessels. So the Navy looked inland, toward the great river system of the interior, the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Tennessee, where flat-bottomed shallow-draft vessels had been built for generations.

Evansville, Indiana, on the banks of the Ohio, was chosen as one of several inland sites to build LSTs. What followed was one of the more improbable industrial stories of the Second World War. The Evansville Shipyard set up a production line on the Ohio riverfront and began hiring workers from across the tristate region, men and women who had worked in coal mines, furniture factories, and farms, most of whom had never seen an ocean.

They were taught to weld, to read blueprints, to work in the extraordinary physical conditions of a riverfront yard in Indiana summers. The LST was an ungainly vessel, sailors who served on them called them Large Slow Targets, but it was essential. An LST could carry twenty tanks or thirty vehicles or over two thousand tons of cargo and put them directly on a beach without a dock.

Evansville workers built more than one hundred sixty of them over the course of the war. Those ships crossed the Atlantic, participated in the invasions of Sicily and Italy and Normandy, crossed the Pacific to the island campaigns, and brought soldiers home at the war's end. Each one of those vessels began its life as flat steel plate on a riverfront in southern Indiana.

Workers riveted and welded them into shape, launched them into the Ohio, and guided them down the river and through the Gulf of Mexico before they ever touched salt water. The people who built them never saw most of what those ships did. But the ships were there.