The T2 Tankers of World War II and the Forgotten SS Scotts Bluff

Of the ships that bolstered the Allied navies in World War II, the T2-class tankers are largely forgotten. The Liberty and Victory cargo ships, their cousins, have also faded, but a few of those survive as museums and some can still sail. The tankers probably were not preserved because they kept working after the war, hauling oil as the world grew more dependent on it, while the cargo ships were quickly replaced by much larger and more efficient vessels. This National Park Service article uses one tanker, SS Scotts Bluff, named for Scotts Bluff National Monument, to tell their story.

"Ships for Victory," emblem of the U.S. Maritime Commission during the war effort. Image from the National Archives.

Built fast and cheap

T2 tankers and Liberty ships came out of the Emergency Shipbuilding Program, to supply the war effort against the Axis powers and to replace losses, mainly to submarines such as Germany's U-boats. Many were sold off after the war to the merchant fleets of other nations. SS Scotts Bluff came from the Swan Island Shipyard in Portland, Oregon, owned by Henry J. Kaiser, known for new shipbuilding methods that sharply cut cost and build time. Kaiser's seven Pacific Coast shipyards built 1,490 cargo and tanker vessels, some 27% of the Maritime Commission's total. Ships were built in sections and welded, and much of the labor was done by African Americans; at the Bethlehem Fairfield Shipyard in Baltimore some 6,000 of the 46,000 workers were African American.

Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyards, 1941. Photograph by Alfred T. Palmer, Library of Congress.

A T2 took 70 days on average from keel laying to fleet-ready, and the fastest took 33. Liberty ships once took 230 days, but by mid-1943 only 39. In a publicity stunt a yard in Richmond, California, built the SS Robert E. Peary in 4 days and 15 1/2 hours. The yards worked like automobile assembly lines, and at the 1943 peak three Liberty ships a day were launched. With 533 built, T2s were the second most produced vessel of the war, behind only Germany's Type VII submarine at 743. The Scotts Bluff took 39 "working days" and was launched on May 10, 1944.

The families of ships

The Ocean class was the first of the "Liberty ships," 60 vessels built between December 1940 and November 1942. The Liberty class came soon after, a little bigger and faster, with oil-fired instead of coal-fired engines, and the Victory class improved on it again. In all, 60 Ocean, 2,751 Liberty and 534 Victory ships were built; today four Liberty and three Victory ships survive as museum ships. T2 tankers were named for National Park Service monuments, parks, forts and battlefields, such as Fort Laramie, Bent's Fort, Grand Teton and Glacier. Liberty ships could be named by any group that raised $2 million in war bonds, and seventeen were named for African Americans, among them SS Harriet Tubman, the first Liberty ship named for a Black woman.

Victory ships reached 17 knots (20 mph). The Buckley-class destroyer escorts that often protected them could reach 27 knots (31 mph). A T2-SE-A1 had nine sets of tanks holding 5.93 million gallons, about 141,200 barrels. Its main pumproom, at the rear, held three pumps moving 2,000 gallons per minute each, plus additional pumps. Refueling at sea could take more than 10 hours for larger ships.

USS Housatonic refueling the aircraft carrier USS Ranger in the Atlantic Ocean, July 17, 1942. U.S. Navy photograph, National Archives.

Armed, but not warships

None of these classes was designed for combat. They carried a dual-purpose 5-inch, 4-inch or 3-inch gun and eight 20mm Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns, but their real protection was numbers and escorts. German U-boats, the most common threat in the Atlantic, sank some 3,500 merchant vessels, eight of them T2 tankers.

SS Pennsylvania Sun burning after being torpedoed by the German submarine U-571 on July 15, 1942. Official U.S. Navy photograph, National Archives.

Welding and brittle steel caused another danger: at least six T2s broke in two, some at the dock, as with SS Schenectady and SS Ponaganset. The Schenectady was repaired and served 19 years more.

SS Schenectady broken in two at its dock in Portland, Oregon, January 16, 1943, less than three months after launch. Public domain.

What became of the Scotts Bluff

Little is known of the ship's wartime history, but she survived the war. She was sold to the French government in 1948 and renamed Orcher; in 1963 to Superior Shipping Company of Monrovia, Liberia, and renamed Patrick D; and last to Trinity Shipping, Inc., which renamed her Lake Katrina. On July 19, 1968, she reached Kaohsiung, Taiwan, to be broken up. That path was common for T2s and Liberty and Victory ships: brief service in new roles, some conversions, sale abroad, and scrapping.

The last T2 survivor, SS Mission San Fernando, was launched on November 25, 1943. In 1957 she was lengthened by 80 feet and renamed Muscle Shoals, and in 1958 became USNS Vanguard, a ship that took part in the Apollo program and the Apollo-Soyuz and Skylab missions and later helped submarines test their navigation equipment. She retired in 1999 and sat in reserve. A museum plan was proposed in March 2005, but she was scrapped in November 2013, after some 70 years.

USNS Vanguard supporting space exploration. U.S. Navy photograph, public domain.

Sources

• National Park Service, Scotts Bluff National Monument, "S.S. Scotts Bluff: Forgotten Contributor" (https://www.nps.gov/articles/s-s-scotts-bluff-forgotten-contributor.htm); a 1943 sketch by an artist, the article's cost figures converted to today's dollars and a percentage comparison with modern tankers are left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.