USS Mount Vernon (AP-22)
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USS Mount Vernon (AP-22) In New York City 1941.
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| History | |
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| Name: | USS Mount Vernon (AP-22) |
| Ordered: | 24 May 1930 |
| Builder: | New York Shipbuilding |
| Laid down: | 20 January 1931 |
| Launched: | 20 August 1932 |
| Christened: | SS Washington |
| Acquired: | (by the Navy) 16 June 1941 |
| Commissioned: | 16 June 1941 |
| Decommissioned: | 18 January 1946 |
| Renamed: | USS Mount Vernon (AP-22) |
| Struck: | 1959 |
| Fate: | Scrapped 1965 |
| General characteristics | |
| Tonnage: | 24,289 gross tons |
| Displacement: | 34,600 tons (fl) |
| Length: | 705 ft 3 in |
| Beam: | 86 ft |
| Draft: | 31 ft 6 in |
| Propulsion: | Parsons steam turbines, Babcock & Wilcox boilers, twin screw, 30,000 shaft horsepower |
| Speed: | 20.5 knots |
| Troops: | 6,031 |
| Complement: | 766 |
| Armament: |
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USS Mount Vernon (AP-22) was a troop transport that served with the United States Navy during World War II. Prior to her military service, she was a luxury ocean liner named SS Washington.
Washington was launched in May 1933 by the New York Shipbuilding Company of Camden, New Jersey, and operated as a passenger liner from New York City to Plymouth, England, and Hamburg, Germany. Renamed Mount Vernon 6 June 1941, the liner was acquired by the Navy 16 June 1941 and commissioned at the Philadelphia Navy Yard the same day, Captain Donald B. Beary in command.
Converted for naval use by Philadelphia Navy Yard, Mount Vernon trained along the east coast while mounting tension in the Far East drew the United States toward participation in World War II. In the fall, the new transport joined a convoy at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and sailed for Cape Town, South Africa. As Mount Vernon steamed toward Cape Horn, word arrived that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor.
The transport, part of convoy DM.1, reached Singapore 13 January 1942. Here she debarked British and Canadian troops, watched dogfights between Japanese and British planes over the city, and underwent an air attack before sailing 16 January for Aden, where she embarked Australian veterans of the Mediterranean Theatre for transportation to Ceylon and Fremantle. Mount Vernon was the lead ship in Operation Stepsister, the movement of Australian troops from North Africa and the Middle East to Southeast Asia, the Dutch East Indies and Australia in response to war in the Pacific, and was carrying 4,668 of those troops in waters south of the Dutch East Indies even as allied naval forces were withdrawing in the face of Japanese attacks. On 9 March Mount Vernon delivered the returning Australian Imperial Force (A.I.F.) troops to Adelaide.
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