Between its establishment in January 1918 and late 1919 the U.S. Navy's Naval Overseas Transportation Service (NOTS) operated some 427 commissioned freighters and colliers, 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. In addition the Navy had another 18 freighters and colliers, which it operated throughout the war to support its combatant ships and never assigned to NOTS. (These 18 ships were Abarenda, Ajax, Brutus, Buffalo, Dixie, Hannibal, Lebanon, Leonidas, Nanshan, Neptune, Panther, Pompey, Prairie, Prometheus, Rainbow, Saturn, Supply, and Vestal.) This list thus includes a total of 445 ships. Fourteen of the Navy's freighters were lost during the war. (The ships lost were Buenaventura, Californian, Cyclops, Herman Frasch, Lake Bloomington, Lake Borgne, Lake Damita, Lakemoor, Oosterdijk, Saetia, Ticonderoga, Westgate, Westover, and Zaanland.) After the November 1918 armistace some of the larger NOTS freighters 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 also listed on the page for "World War I Era Transports" in a section entitled "freighters converted to transports.")
This large number of U.S. Navy freighters is divided here into twenty groups, containing between 3 and 55 vessels. The freighters differ from World War I era transports, which are easily categorized by number of smokestacks and number of masts, because all but a few of the freighters 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 freighters 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.
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. Some ex-German ships 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 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 freighters 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 26 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 freighters 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 Historical Center and from the 1918 and 1919 editions of the 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.
If you want higher resolution reproductions than the digital images presented here, see: "How to Obtain Photographic Reproductions." |
If you want higher resolution reproductions than the digital images presented here, see: "How to Obtain Photographic Reproductions." |
Page made 13 December 2007