USS Mount Hood (AE-11)
Mount Hood class ammunition ship in service 1944, exploded in New Guinea
USS Mount Hood (AE-11) was the lead ship of her class of ammunition ships for the United States Navy in World War II. She was the first ship named after Mount Hood, a volcano in the Cascade Range in the US state of Oregon. On 10 November 1944, shortly after 18 men had departed for shore leave, the rest of the crew were killed when the ship exploded in Seeadler Harbor at Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. The ship was obliterated while also sinking or severely damaging 22 smaller craft nearby.
Service history
Marco Polo was a cargo ship built under a US Maritime Commission contract (as MC hull 1356), by the North Carolina Shipbuilding Co., Wilmington, North Carolina.
The ship was renamed Mount Hood on 10 November 1943; launched on 28 November 1943; sponsored by Mrs. A. J. Reynolds; acquired by the Navy on loan-charter basis on 28 January 1944; converted by the Norfolk Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Co., Norfolk, Virginia, and the Norfolk Navy Yard; and commissioned on 1 July 1944.
Following an abbreviated fitting out and shakedown period in the Chesapeake Bay area, ammunition ship Mount Hood reported for duty to ComServFor, Atlantic Fleet, on 5 August 1944. Assigned to carry cargo to the Pacific, she put into Norfolk, where her holds were loaded. On 21 August, as a unit of Task Group 29.6, she transited the Panama Canal on the 27th, and continued on, independently, via Finschafen, New Guinea. Mount Hood arrived at Seeadler Harbor, in Manus Island of the Admiralty Islands, on 22 September.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2470362. Authority coordinates are -2.028, 147.355. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1944, 1356 and 1943.
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This entry incorporates text from “USS Mount Hood (AE-11)” 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.