King Wilhelm II
 The King Wilhelm II as a USAT US Grant , 1938
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The König Wilhelm II was built in 1907 as a liner for the Hamburg-American Packetfahrt-Actien-Gesellschaft (Hapag) and was the third of four of a type of ship that began with the construction of the Cap Vilano . It was built for the scheduled service to South America that had been carried out jointly with Hamburg Süd since 1901 . Both shipping companies use two ships of this type each.
Confiscated in the USA in 1917, the ship remained in the possession of the Department of Defense until it was demolished in 1947.
history
The King Wilhelm II (9,410 GRT), the only ship of the class built by AG Vulcan in Stettin , had, like all HAPAG South America liners, a large deckhouse, two masts and a chimney. She was slightly longer and, at 15.5 knots, faster than the König Friedrich August , the first Hapag ship of this type built by Blohm & Voss . The ship was named after the last Württemberg King Wilhelm II (1848–1921) . King Wilhelm II was launched on March 23, 1907, and on July 30, her maiden voyage from Hamburg to the La Plata ports began. In 1908 it was originally intended for a Spitzbergen cruise, which was then carried out with the Crown Princess Cecilie . The König Wilhelm II was occasionally used on other lines.
In the spring of 1914 she was assigned to the Atlas Service from New York to Central America. With this, HAPAG wanted to make it clear that even after the sale of its reefer ships Carl Schurz and Emil L. Boas it would continue to provide large passenger capacities to Panama . In August, the King Wilhelm II was launched in New York due to the First World War .
In the service of the USA
On April 4, 1917, the US Shipping Board confiscated the ship and used it as a Navy transporter Madawaska from September 27th . In September 1919 it joined the United States Army . The ship made 17 round trips across the North Atlantic and brought 12,000 men to France and about 17,000 soldiers back to the States. At the beginning of 1920 the Madawaska evacuated parts of the Czechoslovak legions from Vladivostok and brought the Czechs to Fiume , from where they could return to their homeland. After her return to New York, the Madawaska was launched.
After an overhaul and modernization of the propulsion system in the spring of 1922, the ship was renamed USAT US Grant after the former president of the same name by his granddaughter and put into service on June 3, 1922 . Until 1941, the ship, which was equipped with a cooling system, ran according to fixed timetables from San Francisco to Honolulu , Guam , Manila , Qinhuangdao and Shanghai , but also to the Panama Canal Zone and New York, and transported detachments, equipment, supplies and passengers.
In June 1941 it came back to the United States Navy as USS US Grant (AP-29). The ship remained in the Pacific until 1944 and was mainly used between the US West Coast and Alaska, but also for some trips to Hawaii. In 1943 the ship was involved in the recapture of the islands of Attu and Kiska . In the first half of 1945 the US Grant moved to the Caribbean. In September 1945, the ship made another trip from San Francisco to Okinawa and was then returned to the Army in January 1946. They had it hung up in Seattle and scrapped in 1947.
literature
- Noel RP Bonsor: North Atlantic Seaway. An illustrated History of the Passenger Services linking the old World with the new. Volume 3. Enlarged and completely revised edition. Brookside Publications, St. Brelade 1979, ISBN 0-905824-02-4 , p. 1315.
- Carl Herbert: War voyages of German merchant ships. Broschek & Co, Hamburg 1934.
- Arnold Kludas : The History of German Passenger Shipping. Volume 3: Rapid growth 1900 to 1914. Ernst Kabel Verlag, Hamburg 1988, ISBN 3-8225-0039-9 ( writings of the German Maritime Museum 20).
- Claus Rothe: German ocean passenger ships. 1896 to 1918 . Steiger Verlag, Moers 1986, ISBN 3-921564-80-8 .