USS Yokes
Transport ship in United States Navy
USS Yokes (APD-69), ex-DE-668, was a United States Navy high-speed transport in commission from 1944 to 1946.
Namesake
William John Yokes was born n 15 November 1918 in Franklin, Pennsylvania. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy at Cleveland, Ohio, on 3 January 1942. Yokes was a seaman second class attached to the Naval Armed Guard detachment aboard the merchant ship SS Steel Navigator, a straggler from Convoy ON 137, in the North Atlantic Ocean in October 1942. For several days, heavy seas and high winds had caused a dangerous shift in ballast in Steel Navigator. Yokes and his shipmates volunteered to go below and perform the physically exhausting task of shifting ballast to trim the ship, working for some 30 hours without rest.
On 19 October 1942, the U-610 attacked Steel Navigator. Lookouts aboard Steel Navigator spotted U-610's periscope, and the Naval Armed Guard unit swiftly manned its guns and opened fire. Soon the gunfire registered several near-misses on the periscope, and U-610 withdrew temporarily. Later that day, U-610 returned and torpedoed Steel Navigator, sinking her immediately.
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This entry incorporates text from “USS Yokes” 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.