Talk:SS Haiti

Largely to put up a "counter point" to the big Monterey (never direct Army operated) in USAT searches I started digging a bit for a stub on the actual USAT Monterey and found quite a bit more than I expected. A rather interesting look at early Great Depression shipbuilding. An as yet unused cite gives the origin of the ship that became the actual Army transport operated by Army:

United States Shipping Board lately granted a construction loan to the Colombian Mail Steamship Company, New York. That enterprise plans to build two combination freight and passenger liners, each 404 feet long . . .

The ship appears in a number of specialized record compilations of sailings, convoys and such indicating a wartime range between New York, probably the Army's New York Port of Embarkation, to the Caribbean (assigned to Trinidad's command) specifically for support of the Caribbean and South Atlantic bases. Palmeira (talk) 03:50, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

The prospective USS Alameda (AP-68)

The error is understandable as the Matson liner was very prominent in commercial and wartime service while the smaller vessel of the same name and launched in the same year was somewhat obscure in its New York, West Indies, Colombia and Panama operations for two less prominent companies. DANFS compounds the problem with a snippet of text about a ship never actually acquired or commissioned mentioning the larger vessel's owners:

The name Alameda and the classification AP-68 was approved for assignment to the Oceanic Steamship Company SS Monterey on 22 August 1942, in light of the recent acquisition of the ship for use as a transport. The ship, however, was returned to the War Shipping Administration on 25 September 1942 and thus never served under that name.

A look at Lloyd's (1942—43) also illustrates how easily it can be to "grab" a prominent ship instead of one with the same name—and here we have the same year—something I have seen in several other cases of published material, where the ship of the same name is represented by "—" under the first ship. Pure speculation, but some Navy writer assigned to mention a ship never actually Navy quite likely with the glamorous big ship in mind may have even checked Lloyd's and just seen the name, not the — underneath.

The key lies in the MARAD vessel status cards for Puerto Rico, the previous name of the smaller Monterey and the cards for the Matson liner. The smaller ship's history shows a break in WSA AGWI Lines operation on "8-6-42 12:01AM EWT" for "Navy Dept. (Repairing)" coincident with the period in which all the ships being acquired as combat loaders for North Africa were being converted. The Matson liner's MARAD file contains an extract showing the ships operations with no break for any contemplated conversion to a combat loader and operations between New York and Halifax, Scotland just prior to that ship's Casablanca appearance operated—not by Navy—by Oceanic Steamship Company. The details are in documents referenced but not shown by Stephen Roberts' ShipScribe page. Palmeira (talk) 14:18, 7 August 2014 (UTC)