Today, the LST-325. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
The LST was a WW-II vessel
for landing troops and heavy equipment on enemy
shores. LST was an acronym for Landing Ship
Tank, because a tank could drive straight out
of one on to an enemy beach. The people who had to
use them in combat insisted that LST actually stood
for Large Slow Target. They were 328 feet
long, with a flat-bottomed hull, and their best
speed was a vulnerable 11 knots.
The LST-325 was one of the 1,050 LSTs that
were built. It came off the ways in October, 1942,
and served in both the Sicily and the Normandy
invasions. We decommissioned the ship after the
war, but then we resurrected it and lent it to
Greece in 1964. The Greek Navy used it until the
1990s before they retired it.
Then, in March, several veterans, members of a
group called the LST Association, decided they
should bring this ship home. They began
negotiations with the Greeks and had, by August,
made arrangements to begin reclaiming the old
wreck. Thirty veterans formed the crew. Their
average age was around 74. One was 78. Each paid
his own way to Greece and contributed 2,100 dollars
toward refurbishing the LST-325. It was,
alas, in worse shape than they'd expected, but they
went ahead with their task.
The LST-325 was ready for a shakedown cruise
in October. The engines ran, and it didn't leak, at
least not yet. Arrangements with Greece and the
American State Department were completed after
another month. But they ran out of money before
they could buy fuel. So BP donated 50,000 gallons,
and the old ship, with her even older crew, set out
from Athens to Mobile, Alabama, on Nov. 17th.
Plodding along at a normal speed of
seven-and-a-half knots, the ship left Crete for the
first leg of the trip. It took eleven days just to
reach Gibraltar. From there to Mobile took almost a
full month. The winter weather grew bitterly cold.
One crewmember suffered a heart attack, had to be
taken off the ship, and died soon after. Once at
sea they discovered a cockroach infestation. By the
time they reached the warmer waters of the Bahamas,
they had to hire divers to plug a nasty leak in the
hull. These ships were meant only for a brief ride
to some forbidding shore. They were not built for
comfort. Nor were they meant for long-term
occupancy. The trip turned into a real trial for
those old-timers.
Yet the LST-325 made it into Mobile Bay on
January 10, 2001. Now the LST Association will do
some more work on the old ship and then send it
from port to port as a living exhibit -- one more
nearly-forgotten piece of history brought back to
life. Unlike a grand battleship or aircraft
carrier, this was a very specialized piece of
equipment. It played a huge role during its brief
life, but then it faded just as quickly from most
people's memory.
The old men who sailed it here from Greece were
also brought back to life. For they brought with
them, not just a ship, but the feel of its rigors
and a reversal of time. One 74-year-old sailor put
it best when he said, "We were 18 again out on that ship."
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
