USAT Liberty
 USAT Liberty in the shipyard (around September 1918)
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The USAT Liberty was a supply ship that was last in service with the United States Army . The ship was built during the First World War and, apart from the name, has nothing in common with the well-known and standardized Liberty freighters of the Second World War . It was torpedoed by the Japanese submarine I-166 in January 1942 and then put on the beach in Bali .
construction
The Liberty was launched on June 19, 1918 as one of the very first ships at the Federal Shipbuilding and Drydock Company in Kearny , New Jersey , and had hull number 1. The ship was designed according to the 1037 design for the United States Shipping Board (USSB ) built as an animal transporter . It was acquired by the United States Navy on October 7, 1918 and commissioned the same day as Liberty (ID: ID-3461) under the command of Lieutenant Commander Charles Longbottom (USNRF).
First World War
The Liberty was assigned to the Naval Overseas Transportation Service and left the New York Navy Yard on October 24, 1918. On November 8, she arrived in Brest with a load of horses . Over the next six months she made two more trips from New York to France, moving animals and normal cargo.
The last trip took her loaded with 436 t of cargo for the United States Army and 2072 t of railroad tracks to Newport News in Virginia, where she arrived on April 30, 1919. On May 7, 1919, she was decommissioned and returned to the USSB.
Second World War
Until 1939 the Liberty was used by the Southgate-Nelson Corporation as a parcel ship in regular service. In November 1940 she was then taken over as one of ten ships by the United States Army and used in the Pacific from December 1941. The prefix changed so that in USAT ( U nited S tates A rmy T ransport).
In January 1942, the ship was on its way from Australia to the Philippines with a load of railway parts and rubber . On January 11, 1942 at around 4:15 a.m., it was torpedoed by the Japanese submarine I-166 about 10 nautical miles southwest of the Lombok Strait . The US destroyer Paul Jones and the Dutch destroyer Van Ghent hooked the ship and tried to tow it into the Dutch port of Singaraja on the north coast of Bali. Since the water ingress was too strong, the Liberty was beached and abandoned on the northeast coast near Tulamben .
The wreck
In the years that followed, the ship was looted by the local population, even the propeller was removed, and it fell into disrepair on the beach. When the Agung volcano erupted in 1963, the ship slipped from the beach into the Bali Sea and found its current place lying on its side parallel to the beach.
Today the wreck lies in a water depth of around 9 to 30 meters and is one of the most famous diving spots in Bali . In the meantime, it is heavily overgrown with soft and hard corals and in some cases has decayed. Diving the holds is only possible to a limited extent due to the risk of collapse. The two guns are still there, but they are also heavily overgrown.
Picture gallery of the wreck
Gun barrel of the 6-inch gun
Cargo boom of the ship
Collapsed cargo hold
Railroad tracks on the wreck
Web links
Footnotes
- ↑ a b c USAT Liberty on the US Navy website ( Memento from April 9, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
Coordinates: 8 ° 16 ′ 29.6 ″ S , 115 ° 35 ′ 38.8 ″ E