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Scratchbuilt LCM6 Landing Craft

A Year in the Life of a Landing Craft

Let me state from the very start that I am not an expert on Landing Craft. My interest was sparked by attending an IPMS show in Bath in England a couple of years ago where I met a man who was part of the special interest group on landing craft. I was taken by the models that he had made in 1/35th scale out of cardboard and bought an LCM 6 from him purely because it looked big enough to fit a tank in!

I didn’t know then that I would be spending the next year researching and building my model in plastic. I had an old Time Life book with a fantastic photo of landing craft waiting in a Belgian canal for the Rhine crossing and I thought that I would tidy up the cardboard model, but it just wasn’t good enough. I decided to start from scratch and started to look around for more references.

I like to trade books at model shows and thought I would be in a good position to find references but there is only one! An old out of print Ian Allen book that didn’t have much beyond small-scale plans. Enter John Baumann the information officer of MAFVA. with a set of plans that he got many years ago from the Admiralty in London.

Without books for reference I tried the Internet and found that the most helpful sites with photos were the Australian War Memorial and the US NARA sites. There are hundreds of in action shots from the pacific on these sites, especially the Australian one, and I for one haven’t seen many of them before.