USS Gage, one of 117 attack transports of the 6,873-ton Haskell-class, was built to a modified Victory ship design at Portland, Oregon, and was commissioned in November 1944. After shakedown training at San Diego, Gage departed the West Coast in January 1945 for the South Pacific. After additional training in the Solomon Islands, she joined the Okinawa invasion force at Ulithi in March. She participated in the initial assault on Okinawa on 1 April 1945 and landed men and supplies there for the next five days despite nearly continuous alerts of Japanese suicide attacks. She returned to San Francisco in May, transported an Army Air Corps unit to Manila in June, transported some troops from New Guinea to the Philippines, and returned to Seattle in early August for repairs.
Following the Japanese surrender, Gage delivered Army personnel to Saipan in September and then delivered Marine troops to Honshu in October to participate in the occupation of Japan. She then returned homeward bound servicemen to Portland, Oregon, as part of Operation "Magic Carpet." Two more "Magic Carpet" voyages followed, in which she returned troops to San Francisco from Yokosuka, Japan, in February 1946 and from Samar in the Philippines in May. She carried occupation troops from San Francisco to China and Japan, embarked returning veterans in the Marianas and Hawaii, and delivered them to Norfolk, Virginia, in July 1946. Decommissioned there in February 1947 and retained on the Navy list for the next decade as a mobilization asset, Gage was transferred to the Maritime Administration in September 1958 for further retention and stricken from the Navy list in October. She was withdrawn from the Maritime Administration Reserve Fleet at least twice since 1984 for sale or for use as a target, but disposal plans fell through and she and one sister, Lauderdale (APA-179), remained in the James River Reserve Fleet into the Twenty-first Century.
This page features all our views of USS Gage (APA-168).
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.
If you want higher resolution reproductions than the digital images presented here, see: "How to Obtain Photographic Reproductions." |
Page made 22 October 2003