USS Claiborne
Alamosa-class cargo ship commissioned by the U.S. Navy for service in World War II
USS Claiborne (AK-171) was an Alamosa-class cargo ship commissioned by the U.S. Navy for service in World War II. She was responsible for delivering troops, goods and equipment to locations in the war zone.
Construction
Claiborne was launched 3 September 1944, by Froemming Brothers, Inc., Milwaukee, Wisconsin, under a Maritime Commission contract, MC hull 2144; sponsored by Miss L. Kapczynski; and commissioned 19 April 1945 at New Orleans, Louisiana.
Service history
World War II Pacific Theatre operations
Claiborne departed Gulfport, Mississippi, 20 May 1945 and arrived at Hollandia, New Guinea, 5 July. For the next 6 months she operated in the Philippines and New Guinea areas, carrying food, and supplies, and helping to redeploy troops among the various islands. Claiborne sailed from Manila 6 January 1946, for Yokosuka, Japan, anchoring there 13 January.
Post-war decommissioning
Claiborne was decommissioned and transferred to the War Shipping Administration at Tokyo 7 February 1946. The ship was operated by the War Department until placed in the Reserve Fleet berthing area at Olympia, Washington, on 5 May 1950. Ultimately, she was sold to the Marine Power & Equipment Company, on 6 January 1971, and was delivered to her purchaser at Olympia on 1 February 1971 for scrapping.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “USS Claiborne” is alamosa-class cargo ship commissioned by the U.S. Navy for service in World War II. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Claiborne, Alamosa-class and cargo, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “alamosa-class cargo ship commissioned by the U.S. Navy for service in World War II” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7868377. The first chronological checks are 1944, 1945, 1946 and 1950.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “USS Claiborne”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow USS Claiborne primary sources, USS Claiborne archive and Claiborne research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “USS Claiborne”?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “USS Claiborne” 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.