The United States continued to build LCTs post-war, and used them under different designations in the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

Let there be built great ships which can cast upon a beach, in any weather, large numbers of the heaviest tanks.It was at the insistence of the British prime minister Winston Churchill in mid-1940 that the LCT was created.

It was designed to land three of the heaviest tanks (40t) then envisaged for the British Army in 2 ft 6ins of water on a 1:35 gradient beach.

The craft was a little faster but three sets of running gear strained the supply position so later Mk2 had two Paxman diesel engines of 500 hp each.

Construction was somewhat flimsy and a number of these vessels broke their backs on uneven beaches or in heavy seas; nevertheless, the type gave excellent service.

[7] After World War II, eleven were used in 1950-1960 by the Polish Navy amphibious forces, with BDS, later ODS prefixes.

One hundred and sixty Mk.5 and Mk.6 LCTs were provided as Lend-Lease to the Royal Navy,[4] and a small number to the Soviet Union.

One hundred and eighty-six Mk.8s were ordered; however, when the war ended, most were cancelled and scrapped, or sold directly into civilian service.

[4] The LCTs had a variety of weapons, with the British (40mm) QF 2-pounder "pom-pom" mounts being gradually replaced by the faster firing 20 mm Oerlikon cannon.

Some were later reclassified during the Vietnam War as harbor utility craft (YFU) as they no longer served in an amphibious assault role, but were used in harbor support roles such as transporting goods from supply ships; however, the YFU-71-class were 11 "Skilak" lighters purchased as 'commercial off-the-shelf', and so were not originally LCUs.

Currently, tanks are mostly transported via Airlift or National Defense Reserve Fleet freighters (as during the Persian Gulf War[15]) over long distances, but can be delivered by Landing Craft Air Cushion.

As of August 2007,[16] at least one wartime LCT is still in use, the Mark 5 LCT-203, now renamed Outer Island, and operating on Lake Superior as a dredge and construction barge.

Later converted to a floating nightclub, in the late 1990s the vessel was acquired by the Warship Preservation Trust and was moored at Birkenhead.

[20][21] LCT 7074's renovation was completed in summer 2020 and she was moved to her new home at The D-Day Story museum in Southsea on 24 August 2020.

This suggests the vessel was broken in two by the weather and the two halves remained afloat long enough to allow them to drift slightly apart.

The history of the vessel, partly based on interviews of the captain, John Sutton, was investigated by Michael Bendon.

[28] Hammond Innes' 1946 adventure novel Dead and Alive describes the recovery of an LCT that had been washed up and wrecked on a Cornish coastal inlet.

Once recovered, the craft is used to trade between the UK and Italy; useful because of its ability to load and unload lorries on beaches rather than in the many Italian harbours destroyed in WW2.

[29] Hammond Innes' 1962 adventure novel Atlantic Fury describes the hasty late-season evacuation, on LCTs, of equipment and personnel from a military radar station on an island called Laerg (based on Hirta, in the St. Kilda Archipelago, about 40 miles west of Scotland's Outer Hebrides), while a severe storm bears down.

The author details the vulnerabilities of the LCTs in heavy seas and shifting winds, and the difficulties of landing and disembarking on the small rugged island.