Naval ship used during Phillips’ first years in Alaska

World War II landing ship tank ideal for Icy Bay camp equipment in 1953

Jen Ransom

PNA Staff Writer

When the first geological exploration party for Phillips Petroleum Co. traveled to Alaska in 1953, the supplies they needed were not readily available in the Katalla-Yakataga region they were studying.

While the geologists flew into the area via small aircraft, the prefabricated cabins, trucks, fuel and geologic equipment had to arrive by boat. But in the iceberg-rich area 50 miles east of Cordova, getting a boat close enough to taxi the equipment to shore was a problem.

The solution to the equipment problem was designed only a decade before, during World War II. Landing ship tanks, or L.S.T. crafts, were used by both American and Allied forces to invade Europe and Japan. Three hundred twenty-eight feet long and 50 feet wide, the L.S.T. could carry 2,100 tons. The largest of the Amphibian landing craft, the L.S.T. could hold 29 tanks and hundreds of men. One thousand fifty one L.S.T.’s were commissioned in December of 1942. By 1947, many of the L.S.T.’s were either sold to other countries or scrapped. A few remained in the United States as merchant vessels.

The large holding capacity and easy landing made the L.S.T. the ideal vessel to use to move equipment into Icy Bay. Once stricken from the Naval Vessel Register, the merchant-used L.S.T. Pacific Islander came up the Alaskan Passage in the spring of 1953, loaded with the supplies needed to set up the Phillips camp. But associate geologist Al Schlottman, a member of the exploration party, said the boat still had trouble landing in the ice-ridden waters of the Gulf of Alaska.

According to Schlottman, the Pacific Islander had to wait outside the bay a couple of days before the icebergs freed up enough space to allow the vessel to come ashore. Once landed, the Pacific Islander remained beached at Icy Bay through the summer, used as a storage unit for fuel.