USS Butte (APA-68)
1944 Gilliam-class attack transport
USS Butte (APA-68) was a Gilliam-class attack transport serving in the United States Navy from 1944 to 1946. She was sunk as a target in 1948.
History
USS Butte was launched on 20 July 1944 by Consolidated Steel Corporation, Wilmington, Los Angeles, under a Maritime Commission contract; sponsored by Mrs. Thomas W. Mearns; acquired on 21 November 1944; and commissioned the next day. Butte was named for counties in California, Idaho, and South Dakota.
Following shakedown training along the California coast, Butte embarked troops at San Diego, California, and, on 5 January 1945, got underway for the western Pacific. En route to the Philippines, Butte made stops of varying duration at Pearl Harbor, Eniwetok, Saipan, Ulithi, and in the Palau Islands. She arrived at Leyte on 21 February and began five weeks of training in preparation for the amphibious assault on Okinawa in the Ryukyu Islands. On 27 March, Butte set sail for Okinawa as a unit of Task Group (TG) 55.1 of the Southern Attack Force (Task Force (TF) 55) with elements of the Army's 7th Infantry Division embarked. She arrived off the objective early in the morning of 1 April – the day the assault was launched.
The public source identifies “USS Butte (APA-68)” as 1944 Gilliam-class attack transport. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Butte, APA-68 and Gilliam-class.
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This entry incorporates text from “USS Butte (APA-68)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.