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The T2 Tanker Page


S.S. Huntington Hills

S.S. Huntington Hills, Marinship hull number 86, completed in 33 days.


September 2001 Update

My apologies to all who have sent me email since late July. I am still on active duty in the U.S. Navy, and just transfered from Sasebo, Japan back to Newport, RI. I will try to reply to all email I have collected since my departure now that I am more or less settled again.

Crew Lists

Please consider this before you email me: I am not in possession of any crew lists for any of these vessels. I have researched only a very small amount of the history of these ships, but do not have the time or resources to try to find crew lists for them. I can provide a limited amount of additional information on the history and fate of some of these ships, but I can not provide crew information. For ships served in during WWII, some information may be gleaned from Armed Guard reports at the National Archives (http://www.nara.gov), but mostly these listed the Navy personnel only. Most crew lists will have to be obtained from the company which owned or managed the ship. You can usually find out who managed the ship during the time you are interested in by looking up the ship in a copy of Lloyd's Register for those years. You can usually find Lloyds in the storage stacks at a major library, or at a maritime center or museum. Then, of course, you'll have to look up the company whose name you found, and figure out how to get in contact. Not easy in many cases, but it can be done with patience.

Drawings and Plans

Also, please note that I do not have any drawings or plans for these or any other ships. My best suggestion is to contact the National Archives to request plans or drawings. You can find the National Archives at http://www.nara.gov.

Photographs

The only photos I have are the ones on the website. I obtained them by scanning them from library books, and from kind people who scanned their photos and emailed them to me. I have seen photos of many ships in my visits to the Mariners Museum Library (http://www.mariner.org) and the National Archives. The Steamship Historical Society is also a major source of old ship photos.


I will continue to try to add to this page and others that accompany it, listing the ships and their builders. Please feel to contact me, giving your suggestions, sea stories, and comments. I also will continue to try to answer requests for information on ships you or others served on, based on my limited resources. Since, as I mentioned before, I do this in my spare time, please be patient in waiting for a response. I will endeavor to eventually respond to all who write. Email me at dwhitt@cox.net in Newport, RI.


List of T2-SE-A1 Tankers still in active service, Aug 2000


Active T2 Tankers in August 2000

As a lifelong student of maritime and naval history, I became interested in some ships of our merchant fleet. My father was a Merchant Mariner, sailing as an engineer in several vessels before, during, and after World War II. Included in the list of ships he sailed in were seven T2 tankers. After a small amount of research, I found that there are no T2 tankers preserved as museum ships as there are Liberty ships and Victory ships.

Following World War II, there wasn't much need for the Liberty and Victory hulls, as there were already bigger and better cargo ships plying the trade more efficiently. But on the other hand, we had developed a profound thirst for petroleum products. Automobiles were being produced for the public again. Air travel had become a standard. All this required gasoline, diesel, and lubricating oils. We had to have a way of getting it here, and to the rest of the world. To meet that end, the Maritime Commission, after much lobbying by the petroleum and shipping industries, allowed the sale of the T2 tankers it had built for the war.

(Click on the Builder's name to see a list of ships built by that yard.)
Type Builder 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 Total Remarks
T2 Bethlehem-Sparrows Point 2 4


6
T2-A Sun SB & DD Co
5


5
T2-SE-A1 Alabama DD & SB Co

24 44 34 102 Last 5 cancelled in May 1945
T2-SE-A1 Kaiser Co Inc, Swan Island
1 43 64 39 147 11 cancelled in August 1945, including 5 transferred from Marinship
T2-SE-A1 Marinship Corp


12 22 34 7 cancelled, of which 2 were half complete
T2-SE-A1 Sun SB & DD Co
21 61 69 47 198 14 cancelled
T2-SE-A2 Marinship Corp

5 23 3 31
T2-SE-A2 Marinship Corp


9 3 12 Navy Oilers
T2-SE-A3 Marinship Corp



1 1 Navy Oiler

The General T2 Type Tanker

The T2 tanker design was first adapted from S.S. Mobilfuel and S.S. Mobilube, built for the Socony-Vacuum Company (later to become Mobile Oil). They were 501 feet six inches long overall, with a beam of 68 feet. They were rated at 9,900 tons gross, and a deadweight tonnage of 15,850 tons. They displaced about 21,100 tons. Six of these ships were built by Bethlehem-Sparrows Point Shipyard in Maryland.

The T2-A type tanker was another variety of the T2 design. These 5 ships were built by Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Co., Chester, PA for the Keystone Tankship Corporation and its affiliates in 1940. The Navy took them over before construction was complete in 1942 to use as Navy oilers. They were 526 feet long, 68 feet abeam, rated at 10,600 tons gross and a deadweight tonnage of 16,300. They displaced about 22,445 tons. Propulsion was provided by geared steam turbines driving a single propeller at 12,000 shaft horsepower, giving a maximum rated speed of 16 and a half knots.

The T2-SE-A1 Type

The most common variety of the T-2 style tanker was the United States Maritime Commission type T2-SE-A1, a commercial design already being built by Sun Shipbuilding Company for Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. There were 481 of these built between 1942 and 1945. Propulsion was provided by a turbo-electric drive. This consisted of a steam turbine generator connected to a propulsion motor to turn the propeller, thus obviating the need for a large main reduction gear, which would have taken quite a lot of time and machinery to produce, machinery that was already busy making these gear sets for naval vessels. These ships were built by Alabama Drydock & Shipbuilding Company of Mobile, Alabama, the Kaiser Company's Swan Island Yard at Portland, Oregon, the Marinship Corporation at Sausalito, California and the Sun Shipbuilding & Drydock Company of Chester, Pennsylvania in extremely short production times. The average production time from laying of the keel to completion for sea trials was about 70 days, including 55 in the building ways and another 15 in the fitting out dock. The record was held by Marinship Corporation, completing S.S. Huntington Hills in just 33 days; 28 days on the way and 5 days of fitting out!

These ships were 523 feet 6 inches long, 68 feet abeam and carried a gross rated tonnage of 10,448. Deadweight tonnage was 16,613 and they displaced about 21,880 tons. The turbo-electric propulsion system delivered 6,000 shaft horsepower, with a maximum power of 7,240 horsepower giving a top rated speed of about 15 knots with a cruising range of about 12,600 miles. (The A2 and A3 versions of the T2 had 10,000 SHP propulsion machinery, developing a top speed of 16 knots.) The propulsion machinery was produced by the General Electric Company, Lynn MA; the Elliott Company, Jeanette, PA; and the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company of Pittsburgh, PA.

The T2-SE tankers were not the first to have turbo-electric propulsion, nor was it a novel innovation. During World War I there were several commercial ships and some naval vessels propelled by turbo-electric plants. In 1938, some tankers built for the Atlantic Refining Company of Philadelphia, PA by Sun Shipbuilding Company were given turbo-electric plants. S.S. J. W. Van Dyke and S.S. Robert H. Colley had General Electric equipment giving them 6,040 SHP and a top speed of about 13.5 knots. Atlantic Refining had five more of this type of ship built.

The T2-SE-A1 had 9 sets of tanks. Tanks 2 through 9 had a main center tank carrying 391,500 gallons, and two side tanks (one port, one starboard) carrying about 165,000 gallons each. Tank number one consisted of only two side by side tanks, divided by a common bulkhead, as this tank set was only 13 feet 6 inches long. Tank sets 2 through 9 were 36 feet 6 inches long. Total cargo was about 5,930,000 gallons, about 141,200 barrels. There was also a small dry cargo space of about 15,200 cubic feet located forward of Tank Number 1 above the deep tank for a very small amount of dry cargo. There were two pumprooms, one forward and one aft. The main pumproom was aft, and contained six pumps. There were three large capacity pumps of 2,000 gallons per minute which were driven by electric motors located in an adjacent machinery space. There were also two 400 GPM pumps and one 700 GPM pump. In the forward pumproom was one 700 GPM pump and and 300 GPM pump which were reciprocating pumps used for fuel transfer and stripping.


A Few Other Interesting Links


The Last Navy T2, USS Saugatuck (AO 75)
Some T2 Photos and Stories
Arthur Whittaker, Merchant Mariner
WWII Merchant Shipping
Shipmate Search
US Merchant Marine Online
Greg Hayden's MM Page
Researching Your Ship
US Navy Armed Guard WWII
Info for WWII USMM Vets
Loss of S/S Marine Sulphur Queen
Unsung Heroes: Ships of the ESSO Fleet in WWII
Maritime Commission Types

Bibliography

Victory Ships and Tankers: The History of the "Victory" type cargo ships and of the Tankers built in the United States of America during World War II, by Leonard Arthur Sawyer and W. H. Mitchell. Published by Cornell Maritime Press, Cambridge MD.

Merchant Ships: A Pictorial Study, by John H. LaDage. Published by Cornell Maritime Press, Cambridge, MD, 1955.

Ships of the Esso Fleet in World War II, Standard Oil Company, 1946

Merchant Vessels of the United States, Published by the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Lloyds Register of Shipping
Record of the American Bureau of Shipping
Tanker Directory of the World, Published by Terminus Publications, LTD, London
Personal recollections and notes from Mr. Greg Hayden


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Created by A. Davis Whittaker, Jr.