USS Cythera, a 1000-ton (displacement) patrol vessel, was completed in 1907 at Leith, Scotland, as a 603 gross ton steam yacht. Named Agwa and Cythera during the next decade, she was leased by the U.S. Navy for World War I patrol service and placed in commission in October 1917. Late in that month Cythera left Newport, Rhode Island, on the first leg of a voyage escorting submarine chasers and other patrol vessels across the Atlantic. Stopping in Bermuda and the Azores while en route, she arrived at Gibraltar a few days before the end of the year. Based at Gibraltar during the rest of the war, Cythera was employed on escort and patrol missions in the western Mediterranean, encountering enemy submarine activity on at least two occasions. In December 1918, several weeks after the Armistice ended the fighting, Cythera left Gibraltar for home. Arriving at New York early in February 1919, she was decommissioned in mid-March and returned to her owner.
Following more than two decades of renewed use as a private yacht, Cythera was reacquired for Naval service at the end of 1941, soon after the United States formally entered World War II. Recommissioned in early March 1942 as USS Cythera (PY-26), she was assigned to patrol duties during the struggle to control the then raging German submarine offensive in the western Atlantic and Caribbean areas. On 2 May 1942 she was torpedoed and sunk by U-402 off North Carolina. Only two of her 68-man crew survived to become German prisoners of war.
This page features the only views we have concerning USS Cythera (SP-575, later PY-26) and the civilian steam yacht Cythera.
For more photographs related to USS Cythera's November
1917 trip from Bermuda to the Azores, see:
If you want higher resolution reproductions than the digital images presented here, see: "How to Obtain Photographic Reproductions." |
Click on the small photograph to prompt a larger view of the same image.
For more photographs related to USS Cythera's November
1917 trip from Bermuda to the Azores, see:
If you want higher resolution reproductions than the digital images presented here, see: "How to Obtain Photographic Reproductions." |
Page made 31 October 2004