"Periscope" view of the Siboney in convoy, by Musician Loren C. Holmberg, USN (c. 1919), shows the dazzle camouflage applied to the ship during World War I.
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History | |
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United States | |
Name | USS Siboney (ID-2999) |
Namesake | Siboney, Cuba |
Builder | William Cramp & Sons, Philadelphia |
Yard number | 434 |
Launched | as SS Oriente, 15 August 1917 |
Renamed | Siboney, 28 February 1918 |
Acquired | 8 April 1918 |
Commissioned | 8 April 1918 |
Decommissioned | 10 September 1919 |
Identification | Official number: 216082 |
Fate | Returned to Ward Line |
United States | |
Name | SS Siboney |
Owner | Ward Line (New York & Cuba Mail Steamship Co.) |
Route | |
Acquired | August 1919 |
In service | 1919 |
Refit | 1924 |
Out of service | 1940 |
Fate | Chartered by American Export Lines |
United States | |
Operator | American Export Lines |
Route | Jersey City–Lisbon, 1940–1941 |
Acquired | 1940 |
In service | 1940 |
Out of service | 28 May 1941 |
Fate | chartered by U.S. Army |
United States | |
Name | USAT Siboney |
In service | May 1941 |
Renamed | USAHS Charles A. Stafford, January 1944 |
Namesake | Captain Charles A. Stafford, U.S. Army Medical Corps |
Reclassified | hospital ship, January 1944 |
Refit | January–September 1944 |
Out of service | February 1948 |
Homeport |
|
Fate | Scrapped, 1957 |
General characteristics | |
Displacement | 11,298 tons |
Length | 443 ft 3 in (135.10 m) |
Beam | 60 ft (18.3 m) |
Draft | 24 ft 6 in (7.47 m) |
Speed | 17.5 knots (32.4 km/h; 20.1 mph) |
Troops | |
Complement | 346 |
Armament |
|
Differences as SS Siboney: | |
Crew | 127[2] |
Differences as USAT Siboney:[3] | |
Tonnage | 6,937 |
Speed | 16 knots (30 km/h; 18 mph) |
Range | 6,000 nmi (11,000 km; 6,900 mi) |
Capacity | cargo: 116,000 cu ft (3,300 m3) |
Troops | 1,201 |
Differences as USAHS Charles A. Stafford:[4] | |
Tonnage | 7,587 |
Range | 8,000 nmi (15,000 km; 9,200 mi) |
Capacity |
|
Armament | None |
USS Siboney (ID-2999) was a United States Navy troopship in World War I. She was the sister ship of USS Orizaba (ID-1536). Launched as SS Oriente, she was soon renamed after Siboney, Cuba, a landing site of United States forces during the Spanish–American War. After her navy service ended, she was SS Siboney for the New York & Cuba Mail Steamship Co. (commonly called the Ward Line).[note 1] The ship was operated under charter by American Export Lines beginning in late 1940. During World War II she served the U.S. Army as transport USAT Siboney and as hospital ship USAHS Charles A. Stafford.
As a transport during World War I, Siboney made 17 transatlantic voyages for the navy carrying troops to and from Europe, and had the shortest average in-port turnaround time of all navy transports. During her maiden voyage, her steering gear malfunctioned which resulted in a collision between two other troopships in the convoy.
After her World War I service ended, Siboney was returned to the Ward Line and placed in New York–Cuba–Spain transatlantic service; the liner ran aground at Vigo, Spain in September 1920. Despite considerable damage, she was repaired and placed back in service. In late 1921, Siboney was switched to New York–Cuba–Mexico routes, which were a popular and inexpensive way for Americans to escape Prohibition. In late 1940, she was chartered to American Export Lines to return Americans fleeing Europe at the outset of World War II, making seven roundtrips from Jersey City, New Jersey, to Lisbon.
During World War II, Siboney was requisitioned by the War Shipping Administration (WSA) and assigned to the War Department as a U.S. Army transport. She made several transatlantic trips and called at ports in Africa, the Middle East, Canada, the Caribbean, and the United Kingdom. During a 1944 overhaul, the ship was selected for conversion to a hospital ship. Renamed USAHS Charles A. Stafford after a U.S. Army doctor killed in action in Australia, the ship served in both the European and the Pacific Theatres. After the end of her army service, the ship was laid up in the National Defense Reserve Fleet in February 1948, and sold for scrapping in 1957.
After her reacquisition, the Ward Line placed SS Siboney in transatlantic service on a New York to Havana, Tenerife, Bilbao, Santander, and Vigo route. On 9 September 1920, the ship ran aground in the harbor at Vigo.[9] Initial efforts to re-float her were unsuccessful, but by late October, Siboney had been repaired enough to make it to Shields.[10][11] Despite considerable damage, Siboney was refitted and placed in service again and, by March 1921, the Ward Line was advertising passage to Spain via Havana aboard her.[12][13] The Ward Line, however, abandoned the New York–Cuba–Spain service later in 1921 due to a lack of passengers.[14]
By November 1921, Siboney was placed in New York–Cuba–Mexico service, where business thrived, in part because of Prohibition in the United States. Ward Line cruises to Havana were one of the quickest and least expensive ways to what one author called "alcohol-enriched vacations".[14] A typical route from this period would sail from New York and call at Nassau, Havana, Progreso, Veracruz, and Tampico, skipping Nassau on the return.[15] Prohibition also had a more direct effect on Siboney and her crew. On 27 June 1922, Siboney—freshly returned from Havana with a load of pineapples—was raided by United States Customs Service inspectors who seized 300 bottles of smuggled liquor on board.[16] In December 1923, four boiler room workers were arrested when police became suspicious of a man who had apparently just delivered a supply of alcohol to the docked ship.[17]
Siboney underwent a major refit in 1924 during which time she was replaced on her routes by SS Yucatán, formerly the North German Lloyd ship Prinz Waldemar.[12] After returning to service for the Ward Line, Siboney was the first to relay messages from Miami about the severity of the Great Miami Hurricane when she passed there shortly after the storm hit in September 1926.[18]
On 18 February 1928, Siboney rammed and sank the coal barge Seneca off Ambrose Light during a snowstorm;[19] the barge had been cut down in 1915 from SS Seneca, coincidentally, a former Ward Line ship.[12] Bad luck continued for Siboney on 5 January 1929, when she rammed and sank the Bauer Towing Company tug Phillip Hoffman off the Battery, killing the tug's engineer.[20]
Siboney continued her same routes into the 1930s, and by 1933 typical runs for Siboney were from New York to Havana, Progreso, and Veracruz and back, omitting Progreso on the return.[15] On one such return trip from Veracruz and Havana in April 1935, a passenger had $5,000 worth of diamond and platinum jewelry stolen while on board.[2] By 1935, multiple public relations disasters for the Ward Line—the fire and sinking of Morro Castle off New Jersey in 1934 and the grounding of Havana and the sinking of Mohawk in the months that followed—caused the "Ward Line" name to be dropped in favor of the "Cuba Mail Line" moniker.[21] By 1939, Siboney, still on the New York–Cuba–Mexico route, sported a new paint scheme of "dove grey" hull and black funnels with white markings to reflect this change in name.[15][22] In late 1940, however, the struggling Cuba Mail Line chartered Siboney to American Export Lines which employed her on Jersey City–Lisbon service.[12][23] During her American Export service, one of her passengers to the U.S. was French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, when he emigrated in January 1941 to Asharoken, New York after Germany's armistice with France.[24][25]
On 12 April 1941 at 13:30, 320 nautical miles (590 km) out of Lisbon, the ship—painted with a large American flag and "American Export" lettering on each side—was accosted by "two submarine chasers flying British ensigns" that fired shots over Siboney's bow, one of which landed less than 100 feet (30 m) away from the ship. According to Siboney's captain, Wenzel Habel, the two ships were British corvette types marked "K-25" and "K-125"—which may have been Flower-class corvettes HMS Azalea (K25) and HMCS Kenogami (K125). After answering questions from "K-25" shouted via loudspeaker, Siboney was allowed to resume her course. Habel filed a protest with British officials when Siboney docked at Bermuda.[26]
At the conclusion of her seventh and final journey for American Export, Siboney was placed under time charter for duty as an Army transport.[3][23] After a hasty outfitting, the redesignated USAT Siboney was put to work transporting troops. Based in New York, she made trips up and down the Atlantic and into the Caribbean, and, by the end of 1941, had called at Bermuda, San Juan, Trinidad, St. John's, Charleston, Newport News, Cristóbal, Jamaica, and Panama.[3]
December 1941 saw Siboney depart from New York to Trinidad and on to Cape Town, then sailing up the east coast of Africa to Basra, Iraq, and Bandar Shahpur, Iran. The ship returned to Cape Town via Aden and underwent routine boiler repairs there, before returning to New York in April 1942. After undergoing six weeks of repairs at Bethlehem Steel Company, the transport sailed for Halifax, Iceland, and the Clyde, Scotland, in late May, returning to New York in July. Another trip to England and back followed in September 1942.[3]
On 1 July 1942 the ship had been acquired by the War Shipping Administration (WSA) under a bareboat charter converting the Army's time charter to a sub bareboat charter. On 9 August 1943 WSA purchased the ship with the Army's bareboat charter continued.[27]
In early December 1942 Siboney departed for Newfoundland but put into Halifax for two months of drydocking and repairs after she collided with SS City of Kimberly. After returning to New York in February 1943, she made several transatlantic runs, calling at Casablanca, Oran, Gibraltar, Clyde, Durban, Rio de Janeiro, Trinidad, and Cuba over the next 11 months. Siboney returned to New York for major repairs and reboilering at Bethlehem Steel Co. In January 1944, while undergoing this work, the ship was selected for conversion to a hospital ship.[3]
The ship was renamed USAHS Charles A. Stafford after Captain Charles A. Stafford of the U.S. Army Medical Corps, who was killed during the air raid on Broome, Western Australia, while participating in the evacuation of Java on 3 March 1942. With her conversion complete in September 1944, the Stafford, equipped with new boilers, a single stack in place of her original two, and other improvements, moved to her new homeport of Charleston.[4][28] From that port the ship made monthly runs to the United Kingdom and back until May 1945, interrupting the pattern only once for a trip to Gibraltar and Marseilles. Steaming to New York at the conclusion of her last transatlantic run, Charles A. Stafford was overhauled for duty in the South Pacific.[4]
With the alterations complete, the veteran ship—now homeported at Los Angeles—sailed in August 1945 for Cristobál and on to Honolulu, Manila, Biak, Leyte, and Mindoro. After returning to Los Angeles in October, the Stafford sailed for Honolulu, Manila, and Eniwetok and back.[4]
After sailing to her new homeport of New York via the Panama Canal during February 1946, Charles A. Stafford resumed her North Atlantic runs to the UK.[4]
On 30 August 1946 the Army transferred the ship to the Maritime Commission. On 16 February 1948 the ship was placed in the James River Reserve Fleet. Kept on reserve under the name Siboney, the ship was sold by the Maritime Administration on 2 January 1957 for $286,125 to Bethlehem Steel for scrapping.[27]