HMS Rocksand (F184)
1943 infantry landing ship
HMS Rocksand was an infantry landing ship in service with the Royal Navy during the late stages of the Second World War. She was launched in 1943 as Cape Argos and renamed Empire Anvil before being taken into Royal Navy service. Postwar she reverted to Empire Anvil and then Cape Argos and back to Empire Anvil again. She spent ten years laid up before resuming service as Hai Ya and Fu Ming before being scrapped in 1974.
Career
Wartime
HMS Rocksand was built by Consolidated Steel Corporation, Wilmington, California as the Cape Argos, and transferred under the terms of lend lease shortly after being completed in late 1943 under the name Empire Anvil. She was taken over by the Ministry of War Transport in 1944 and operated by Furness, Withy & Co. At the Normandy Landings, she and a sister ship Empire Javelin, were carrying US troops for Omaha Beach. In November 1944 she was requisitioned by the Admiralty and commissioned as HMS Rocksand, under which name she served out the remainder of the war.
Post war
HMS Rocksand participated in the reoccupation of the Nicobar Islands in October 1945, after which she was returned to the Ministry of War Transport in 1946, which briefly returned her to Furness, Withy & Co under her original name of Empire Anvil. By June 1946 she had been returned to the United States Navy.
“HMS Rocksand (F184)” enters the record as 1943 infantry landing ship. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Rocksand, F184 and infantry can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5634080. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1943, 1974, 1944 and 1945.
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This entry incorporates text from “HMS Rocksand (F184)” 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.