USS Bland
1944 Haskell-class attack transport
USS Bland (APA-134) was a Haskell-class attack transport in service with the United States Navy from 1944 to 1946. She was scrapped in 1974.
History
Bland (APA-134) was laid down under a Maritime Commission contract (MCV hull 50) on 2 August 1944 at Wilmington, California, by the California Shipbuilding Corp.; launched on 26 October 1944; sponsored by Mrs. Lawrence A. Collins, wife of the editor and publisher of the Long Beach, California, Independent; acquired by the Navy on a loan charter basis from the Maritime Commission on 14 December 1944; and commissioned at San Pedro, California, on 15 December 1944.
Following her shakedown training in the vicinity of Los Angeles, California, and amphibious exercises at Coronado Strand, near San Diego, California, the attack transport departed San Pedro on 5 February 1945, bound for Seattle, Washington. A strong southeasterly gale forced her to lie to for 15 hours on 7 and 8 February, but she finally reached her destination on the 9th. She then underwent a three-day voyage availability period before embarking 85 U.S. Army officers, 1,219 enlisted men, and 42 sailors on 16 February for transportation westward. She sailed for Hawaii the following day.
The ship arrived at Honolulu on Washington's Birthday and disembarked 835 men and 68 officers before embarking more westward-bound passengers, both military and civilian. She sailed for the Marshalls in convoy PD-312T. Touching briefly at Eniwetok, Bland resumed her voyage on 13 March in company with an Eniwetok-to-Guam convoy.
The public source identifies “USS Bland” as 1944 Haskell-class attack transport. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bland, Haskell-class and attack.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7867741. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1944, 1946, 1974 and 1945.
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This entry incorporates text from “USS Bland” 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.