Return to Naval History and Heritage Command home page. Return to Online Library listing

DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY -- NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND
805 KIDDER BREESE SE -- WASHINGTON NAVY YARD
WASHINGTON DC 20374-5060

Photo # NH 65121:  S.S. Pasadena, 1918

Online Library of Selected Images:
-- U.S. NAVY SHIP TYPES --

World War I Era Cargo Ships --
Organized by Type

This list contains 377 cargo ships used by the Navy during World war I. Between its establishment in January 1918 and late 1919 the U.S. Navy's Naval Overseas Transportation Service (NOTS) operated nearly all of these ships, primarily to carry supplies to American forces in the European combat zone and then help bring Army supplies and equipment back to the United States. Thirteen of these cargo ships were lost during the war, both to enemy action and by accident. (The ships lost were Buenaventura, Californian, Herman Frasch, Lake Bloomington, Lake Borgne, Lake Damita, Lakemoor, Oosterdijk, Saetia, Ticonderoga, Westgate, Westover, and Zaanland.) After the November 1918 armistice some of the larger NOTS cargo ships and some similar newly acquired vessels were hastily converted into troop transports and reassigned to the Cruiser and Transport force to help bring the soldiers home. (These are listed both here and on the page for "World War I Era Transports" in a section entitled "Freighters Converted to Transports.") For some special-purpose cargo ships see the pages on "World War I Era Supply Ships and Refrigerated Cargo Ships" and "World War I Era Colliers."

This large number of U.S. Navy cargo ships is divided here into eighteen groups, each containing between 3 and 55 vessels. The cargo ships differ from World War I era transports, which are easily categorized by number of smokestacks and number of masts, because all but a relative few of the cargo ships had two single masts, one fore and one aft, and one smokestack. (In addition, nearly all had plumb bows and counter sterns.) Instead the groups of cargo ships are defined by basic characteristics of their entire rig (the number of single and paired uprights--masts and kingposts respectively) and the basic features of their deck lines (the number and location of hull islands). In some cases the ships are further subdivided by the location of the uprights. Nearly all kingposts did double duty as ventilators--many had fancy tops and some looked like cowl ventilators with booms. Although mainly intended as a tool for ship picture identification, these groups and the similar groups on the "World War I Era Transports" page are also useful for analysis and understanding of the Navy's huge but temporary World War I inventory of large non-combatant vessels.

Some of these cargo ships are listed as having been built to Emergency Fleet Corporation Designs or as being precursors to those designs. Beginning in 1916 U.S. shipyards received a surge of orders for new ships, mostly from Great Britain, as the Allies strove to offset heavy losses to the German U-Boat campaign. The designs for these ships were mostly developed by the individual shipyards according to their individual practices with inputs from the foreign buyers. In April 1917, following U.S. entry into World War I, the U. S. Shipping Board established a commercial enterprise, the Emergency Fleet Corporation (EFC), to build the huge number of merchant ships that the U.S. would need to prosecute the war. As it placed its contracts, the EFC generally adopted and assigned numbers to the designs already being used by the shipbuilders. In August 1917 the EFC requisitioned all ships in U.S. shipyards that had not already been completed and delivered to their owners--this order affected around 434 ships including most of the ones ordered by the British and their allies. Technically, only the ships ordered under EFC contracts were built to the EFC designs, but many of the ships built under the earlier foreign orders were constructed to essentially identical designs and are listed here as precursors to the EFC designs. The design with the greatest number of representatives in this list is Emergency Fleet Corporation Design 1013, with 58 ships (including precursors) in two groups that differ only in their rigs.

Special Features of the Groups

During the war some U.S.-built ships were given modified rigs, probably intended to reduce vulnerability to submarine attack. In these ships, the topmasts on the single masts fore and aft were removed and a single topmast was fitted on a kingpost near the smokestack. (If there were no kingposts near the stack, a light pole was added to support the topmast. At this time the main purpose of this topmast--or of the two regular topmasts in the ships that retained them--was to support radio antennas.) In order not to separate these ships from their normally-rigged sisters, the topmasts and light poles amidships are excluded from the definitions of the ship groups presented here.

A more extreme variation, seen primarily in the earliest war-built ships, also included the replacement of the single masts fore and aft with short paired uprights (kingposts). These ships, which thus lacked any single masts besides the single topmast amidships, are covered separately in their own group at the top of this list.

Some Dutch-origin ships had an unusual type of very tall paired mast instead of the standard type of single mast. To avoid arbitrarily separating these ships from their normally-rigged Dutch counterparts, these special Dutch uprights are treated here as single masts even though they are paired.

A few ships, mostly ex-German, had a single short upright in the extreme stern, usually rigged with a boom. Because of its height, location, and use, this is counted as a kingpost (if it is counted at all) even though it is not paired. USS Pensacola (ex German Nicaria) also had an upright in this position but it was a full-height mast.

The few cargo ships that had their engines (and their smokestacks) aft are covered in a separate category near the end of the list, as are a few passenger-type ships used as cargo ships and the 23 ships for which configuration information was unavailable.

Caution: Not every ship bearing the characteristics shown on these pages was commissioned in the U.S. Navy. There were many World War I era ships, large and small, that were employed by the U.S. Government under commercial charter, or which operated under the flags of the United Kingdom, France, Italy and other nations. Many of these closely resemble ships that did serve in the U.S. Navy, and a large proportion wore pattern camouflage schemes very much like those carried by the Navy's ships. Approach any ship identification task with this firmly in mind!

A Note on Sources: The basic source for the cargo ships serving in NOTS is the book by Lewis P. Clephane, History of the Naval Overseas Transportation Service in World War I, published by the Naval History Division, Washington, D.C., in 1969. Tonnage (in gross tons except for ships built by the Navy) and dimensions were taken from a file of World War I-era ship data cards now in the custody of the Naval History and Heritage Command and from the 1918 and 1919 editions of the official Ships Data Book (whose data usually matches that on the cards). Additional information came from the 1918-1919 and 1919-1920 editions of Lloyds Register of Shipping and from the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships.

This page features a list of World War I era U.S. Navy cargo ship groups, defined by ships' physical characteristics, with links to pages dedicated to each group of ships. Those pages provide further links to the individual ships in each group. Representative photographs are also presented for ship groups and for individual vessels.

Note: In the listings below, and on the pages directly linked from them, PRINCIPAL RECOGNITION FEATURES are given in UPPER CASE. Recognition features that differentiate a group of ships from those listed previously are given in ITALICIZED UPPER CASE.


If you want higher resolution reproductions than the digital images presented here, see: "How to Obtain Photographic Reproductions."

  • In the listings below, click the Number (of) Ships entry to access a table of the individual U.S. Navy ships with that specific group's characteristics.
  • Click the small photographs to access the Picture Data Sheets for those images.

  • Photo # NH 96308:  S.S. Howick Hall

    WWI era U.S. Navy cargo ships with TWO SMOKESTACKS:

  • THREE SHIPS





  • Photo # NH 65091:  S.S. Edgar F. Luckenbach in 1916

    WWI era U.S. Navy cargo ships with ONE SMOKESTACK and THREE or FOUR SINGLE MASTS:

  • EIGHT SHIPS





  • Photo # NH 65135:  S.S. Montoso in 1911

    WWI era U.S. Navy cargo ships with ONE SMOKESTACK, TWO SINGLE MASTS, FLUSH DECKS, and NO or ONE KINGPOST PAIR:

  • TWENTY-EIGHT SHIPS




  • Photo # NH 75277:  S.S. Alaskan, 1902

    WWI era U.S. Navy cargo ships with ONE SMOKESTACK, TWO SINGLE MASTS, FLUSH DECKS, and TWO or MORE KINGPOST PAIRS:

  • TWENTY-TWO SHIPS




  • Photo # NH 93142:  USS Gulfport on 19 April 1921

    WWI era U.S. Navy cargo ships with ONE SMOKESTACK, TWO SINGLE MASTS, and FLUSH DECKS except for a WELL FORWARD or AFT:

  • NINE SHIPS




  • Photo # NH 68729:  USS Bath, circa 1920

    WWI era U.S. Navy cargo ships with ONE SMOKESTACK, TWO SINGLE MASTS, and a RAISED HULL ISLAND FORWARD (Forecastle):

  • SEVEN SHIPS





  • Photo # NH 99329:  S.S. Rijnland in 1918

    WWI era U.S. Navy cargo ships with ONE SMOKESTACK, TWO SINGLE MASTS, and a RAISED HULL ISLAND AMIDSHIPS (Bridge Island):

  • FOUR SHIPS





  • Photo # NH 105203:  S.S. Gorontalo, 1918

    WWI era U.S. Navy cargo ships with ONE SMOKESTACK, TWO SINGLE MASTS, and RAISED HULL ISLANDS FORWARD (Forecastle) and AMIDSHIPS (Bridge Island):

  • EIGHT SHIPS





  • Photo # NH 65121:  S.S. Pasadena, 1918

    WWI era U.S. Navy cargo ships with ONE SMOKESTACK, TWO SINGLE MASTS, and RAISED HULL ISLANDS FORWARD (Forecastle) and AFT (Poop):

  • TEN SHIPS






  • Photo # NH 104064:  S.S. Elinor, 1918

    WWI era U.S. Navy cargo ships with ONE SMOKESTACK, TWO SINGLE MASTS, THREE RAISED HULL ISLANDS, and NO PAIRED KINGPOSTS:

  • THIRTY-SIX SHIPS







  • Photo # NH 94487:  S.S. War Penguin, 1917

    WWI era U.S. Navy cargo ships of EMERGENCY FLEET CORPORATION DESIGN 1020 ("LAKER TYPE A"), with the same general configuration as the GROUP listed immediately above: :

  • THIRTY-FIVE SHIPS







  • Photo # NH 65126:  S.S. Panuco, 1917

    WWI era U.S. Navy cargo ships with ONE SMOKESTACK, TWO SINGLE MASTS, THREE RAISED HULL ISLANDS, and ONE PAIR OF KINGPOSTS FORWARD OF THE BRIDGE FACE:

  • EIGHT SHIPS







  • Photo # NH 102910:  S.S. West Avenal, 1919

    WWI era U.S. Navy cargo ships with ONE SMOKESTACK, TWO SINGLE MASTS, THREE RAISED HULL ISLANDS, and ONE PAIR OF KINGPOSTS AFT OF THE BRIDGE:

  • FIFTY-THREE SHIPS







  • Photo # NH 102520:  S.S. West Galoc, 1918

    WWI era U.S. Navy cargo ships of EMERGENCY FLEET CORPORATION DESIGN 1013 ("ROBERT DOLLAR" TYPE), with the same general configuration as the GROUP listed immediately above:

  • FIFTY-FIVE SHIPS







  • Photo # NH 69588:  USS Lake Champlain, 1919

    WWI era U.S. Navy cargo ships with ONE SMOKESTACK, TWO SINGLE MASTS, THREE RAISED HULL ISLANDS, and TWO or MORE PAIRS OF KINGPOSTS:

  • THIRTY-FIVE SHIPS






  • Photo # NH 65040:  S.S. Walter A. Luckenbach on trials on 30 May 1918

    WWI era U.S. Navy cargo ships with ONE SMOKESTACK and NO SINGLE MASTS:
    (Note: Most of these had pairs of kingposts in place of the usual two masts.)

  • TWENTY-FIVE SHIPS




  • Photo # NH 65067:  USS M. J. Scanlon in 1918

    WWI era U.S. Navy cargo ships with ENGINES and SMOKESTACKS AFT:

  • EIGHT SHIPS





  • Photo # NH 101960:  USS Kerlew circa 1918

    WWI era U.S. Navy cargo ships of UNKNOWN CONFIGURATION:
    (Note: As further information becomes available, ships in this group may be moved into one of the groups listed above.)

  • TWENTY-THREE SHIPS





  • NOTES:

  • To the best of our knowledge, the pictures referenced here are all in the Public Domain, and can therefore be freely downloaded and used for any purpose.

  • Some images linked from this page may bear obsolete credit lines citing the organization name: "Naval Historical Center". Effective 1 December 2008 the name should be cited as: "Naval History and Heritage Command".


    If you want higher resolution reproductions than the digital images presented here, see: "How to Obtain Photographic Reproductions."


    Return to Naval History and Heritage Command home page.

    Page made 13 December 2007
    Edited and reposted 22 September 2009