HMAS Assault

HMAS Assault
Troops and landing craft crews training at HMAS Assault during World War II
Active	September 1942 – August 1944
Country	Australia
Branch	Royal Australian Navy
Type	Training
Disbanded	April 1945

HMAS Assault was a Royal Australian Navy (RAN) training centre at Nelson Bay in the Port Stephens area of New South Wales, Australia during World War II.

In June 1942, Royal Navy Commander F. N. Cook, the former commander of the Combined Operations Centre – HMS Tormenter – who was on loan to the RAN to help establish an Australian combined operations school, identified Port Stephens as the ideal location to establish a RAN training base for amphibious landings. On 9 August, General Douglas MacArthur ordered the establishment of the Joint Overseas Operational Training School (JOOTS) at Port Stephens. While the base was under construction, HMAS Westralia was assigned to the area as an accommodation ship, with HMAS Ping Wo serving as a tender.

The stone frigate HMAS Assault was commissioned on 1 September 1942; Assault was initially operated from Westralia, but moved ashore on 10 December 1942. The base's main purpose was to train boat crews for landing craft, beach commandos to prepare beaches and coordinate landings on the shore, and signals sections to facilitate communications between ships and land-based forces. Training at Assault was initially hampered by the lack of LCVP and LCM craft available, with the base forced to use folding boats towed by launches and lighters to simulate landing craft, and HMAS Koopa, a requisitioned pleasure boat, as an assault transport. By March 1943, enough landing craft had been manufactured in Australia and delivered from the United States to allow for full-scale landing exercises. For administrative purposes, landing and shore personnel trained at Assault were considered to be attached to the base, not the ships that they were embarked in.