Summer 2023 - Ralph Miller: World War II 594th Signal Corps.

Landing Craft drawing

Landing Craft on the beach

Sailor on LCI 805

Ships at sea

Smoke boats

LCIs were 158 feet long and 23 feet, 3 inches wide at the middle. They typically had a crew of 24-60 sailors, and carried 200 soldiers, who descended from ramps on each side of the craft during landings. LCIs were not originally designed for cross-ocean journeys but did so out of necessity and urgency during WWII. They sailed from shipyards in the United States to the European and Pacific Theatres. Their flat-bottom hulls were designed for beaching, which meant the men aboard felt every wave, and many sailors and soldiers ended up seasick non-stop. The hull or skin was made of a quarter-inch steel plate. LCIs were propelled using two sets of quad General Motors 6-cylinder diesel engines (8 engines total).

LCIs didn’t share the limelight like the more glamorous aircraft carriers, battleships and destroyers. In fact, they earned the name “Waterbug Navy,” when an admiral looked down from his battleship and watched the LCI’s down below scurrying back and forth and commented that they looked like a bunch of waterbugs. The phrase stuck.

LCIs and the men who served on them did the dirty work of bringing invasion troops right up to the fighting, laying smoke to hide larger ships from attacks, and providing close-in fire support using machine guns, rockets, and mortars. In doing so, they suffered enormous casualties. To the sailors manning these awkward craft, they were known as the “Elsie Item” – “Elsie” representing “LC” and “Item” being the phonetic alphabet word for “I.”

The LCI was the third largest of the beaching craft, being outsized by the LST and LSM. However, the LCI was much faster than the Landing Ship, Tank (LST). It had an operating speed of about fourteen (14) knots, and it was designed solely to carry infantry. In addition to the crew, it could carry about 200 troops and land them directly on the beach by means of two ramps, lowered on either side of the bow. The original British design had no sleeping accommodations for the troops as the craft was used only for short-range operations, such as crossing the English Channel, and never far from a good shore base. Benches for troops were considered adequate for the few hours they would be aboard. However, all American LCIs had bunks installed for the troops as well as for the crew. Even so, these craft were not suitable for operations of more than one to two hundred miles at the most. As it turned out, in the Southwest Pacific, necessity required their almost continuous use in waters far distant from adequate shore or repair bases. -Vice Admiral Daniel E. Barbey, USN (Ret.) MacArthur’s Amphibious Navy: Seventh Amphibious Force Operations 1943-1945 (p. 19)