Taiwan's Navy to decommission WWII-era tank landing ship

Taipei, Feb. 23 (CNA) The Kaohsiung (LCC-1), a World War II-era U.S.-built tank landing ship, will be decommissioned this week after nearly seven decades in service with Taiwan's Navy, a military source told CNA Monday.

A retirement ceremony will be held for the Kaohsiung, first commissioned as the USS Dukes County (LST-735) in April 1944, in its namesake city on Wednesday, the source said.

After being assigned to the Asiatic-Pacific theater during World War II, the LST-542-class ship was first decommissioned by the United States in March 1946, then reactivated in November 1950 for service in the Korean War.

In 1957, Taiwan's Navy took ownership of the ship and renamed it Chung Hsi (中熙, LST-219). It was renamed the Kaohsiung after it was outfitted as an amphibious command ship in 1962.

In recent years, the ship has served as a test vessel for the military's top research institution, the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science & Technology (NCSIST), to develop indigenous naval weapons and radar systems.