USS LSM-380
LSM-1-class landing ship medium
USS LSM-380 was a LSM-1-class landing ship medium in the United States Navy during World War II. She was later sold to Fred Devine to be used as a salvage ship, renamed MV Salvage Chief. She is the last known surviving LSM of World War II in the world.
Construction and career
LSM-380 was laid down on 23 December 1944 at Brown Shipbuilding Co., Houston, Texas. Launched on 13 January 1945 and commissioned on 10 February 1945.
During World War II, LSM-380 was assigned to the Asiatic-Pacific theater. She took part in the Occupation and China service from 18 July to 24 November 1946. She would leave China and sailed to Guam in December 1946, and on to Pearl Harbor in January 1947 before making her final leg across the Pacific to San Francisco, where she would join the mothball fleet at Suisan Bay.
LSM-380 was decommissioned on 19 February 1948 and few days later on the 27th, she was sold to Devine Salvage Co. to be converted and used as a salvage ship with the name MV Salvage Chief.
She was struck from the Navy Register on 12 March 1948.
“USS LSM-380” enters the record as lSM-1-class landing ship medium. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what LSM-380, LSM-1-class and landing can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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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 Q110316125. Authority coordinates are 46.191, -123.746. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1944, 1945, 1946 and 1947.
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This entry incorporates text from “USS LSM-380” 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.