USS West Bridge was a cargo ship in the U.S. Navy during World War I. She was one of the West ships, a series of steel-hulled cargo ships built for the United States Shipping Board. She sailed in support of the war and was sunk by two German submarines in August 1918. After being decommissioned from the Navy, the ship returned to civilian service as West Bridge, but was renamed Barbara Cates, and Pan Gulf over the course of her commercial career under American registry. In May 1945, she was transferred to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease. She continued in civilian service for the Soviets until 1966, when she was scrapped at Split, Yugoslavia.
About USS West Bridge in brief
USS West Bridge was a cargo ship in the U.S. Navy during World War I. She was one of the West ships, a series of steel-hulled cargo ships built for the United States Shipping Board. After being decommissioned from the Navy, the ship returned to civilian service as West Bridge, but was renamed Barbara Cates, and Pan Gulf over the course of her commercial career under American registry. In May 1945, she was transferred to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease. Renamed Lermontov, she continued in civilian service for the Soviets until 1966, when she was scrapped at Split, Yugoslavia. The ship was commissioned into the Naval Overseas Transportation Service at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. on 26 May 1918. She had a displacement of 12,200 long tons, and her 29-foot-9-inch depth of hold allowed the ship to be rated at 5,799 gross register tons . For her U. S. Navy service, West bridge was equipped with one 4-inch gun and one 3inch gun, and had a maximum speed of 11 knots. She sailed in support of the war and was sunk by two German submarines in August 1918, but a salvage crew from the American destroyer Smith boarded her the following day and brought the ship back to port.
She served in the Navy until her decommissioning and return to the USSB in December 1919. In 1938, she had been renamed Pan Gulf for service with a subsidiary of the Waterman Steamship Company. She also sailed between New York and ports on the Gulf Coast and in the Caribbean in World War II, and made nine round trips between the UK and the United Kingdom without incident in wartime convoys. In 1946, she sailed for the Army transport company Alkanan, transporting cargo for the U States Army. She died in a collision in the Panama Canal Zone on 4 July 1967. She is buried in Panama City, Panama, with the name West Bridge in honor of her commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Mortimer Hawkins, who was killed in the battle of the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. She has been identified as the only ship to have been sunk by a German submarine during the Second World War. The wreck of the USS West Bridge is still visible in the waters off the coast of New Jersey, near the town of Monterey, where it was built in the 1930s as part of a convoy of cargo ships headed to France. The wreckage of the ship was recovered by a salvage team from the French Navy.
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This page is based on the article USS West Bridge published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 08, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
