MS St. Louis was a diesel-powered passenger ship properly referred to with the prefix MS or MV, built by the Bremer Vulkan shipyards in Bremen for HAPAG, better known in English as the Hamburg America Line. The ship was named after the city of St. Louis, Missouri. Her sister ship, MS Milwaukee, was also a diesel powered motor vessel owned by the Hamburg America Line. St. Louis regularly sailed the trans-Atlantic route from Hamburg to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and New York City, and made cruises to the Canary Islands, Madeira, Spain; and Morocco. St. Louis was built for both transatlantic liner service and for leisure cruises.
Aliyah Bet was the code name given to illegal immigration by Jews, most of whom were refugees escaping from Nazi Germany, and later Holocaust survivors, to Mandatory Palestine between 1920 and 1948, in violation of the restrictions laid out in the British White Paper of 1939, which dramatically increased between 1939 and 1948. With the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, Jewish displaced persons and refugees from Europe began streaming into the new sovereign state.
The Pacific Mail Steamship Company was founded April 18, 1848, as a joint stock company under the laws of the State of New York by a group of New York City merchants. Incorporators included William H. Aspinwall, Edwin Bartlett, Henry Chauncey, Mr. Alsop, G.G. Howland and S.S. Howland.
The USS Albireo (AK-90) was a Crater-class cargo ship in the service of the US Navy in World War II and manned by a US Coast Guard crew. She was the only ship of the Navy to have borne this name. She is named after Albireo, a star in the constellation of Cygnus.
The Struma disaster was the sinking on 24 February 1942 of a ship, MV Struma, which had been trying to take nearly 800 Jewish refugees from the Axis member Romania to Mandatory Palestine. She was a small iron-hulled ship of only 240 GRT and had been built in 1867 as a steam-powered schooner but had recently been re-engined with an unreliable second-hand diesel engine. Struma was only 148.4 ft (45 m) long, had a beam of only 19.3 ft (6 m) and a draught of only 9.9 ft (3 m) but an estimated 781 refugees and 10 crew were crammed into her.
SS Audacious was the former Italian cargo ship Belvedere taken over by the United States during World War II and sunk as a blockship at Omaha Beach on 8 June 1944. Belvedere was built in Trieste and first operated as a passenger and cargo ship when the city and company were part of Austro-Hungarian Empire. After World War I the city and ship, converted to cargo in the early 1920s, became Italian. In 1941 Belvedere was in Philadelphia when foreign ships of Axis powers were interned and then seized. The ship was taken over for operation by the War Shipping Administration through agents until scuttled at Omaha Beach.
SS Manhattan was a 24,189 GRT luxury ocean liner of the United States Lines, named after the Manhattan borough of New York City. On 15 June 1941 she was commissioned as USS Wakefield and became the largest ship ever operated by the US Coast Guard. In 1942 she caught fire and was rebuilt as a troop ship. Manhattan never saw commercial service again.
SS Tarpon was a ship which sank in 1937 near Panama City, Florida, United States. The shipwreck is located 7.8 nautical miles (14.4 km) off the shore of Panama City. It became the sixth Florida Underwater Archaeological Preserve when it was dedicated in 1997. In May 2001, it was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.
SS Marine Marlin was a type C4-S-A3 ship built in 1945 by Kaiser Shipyards, Vancouver, Washington, as a troop transport ship. She had a capacity to carry 3,485 troops and was built for operation by the War Shipping Administration. The ship's first voyage from Portland, Oregon on 5 December 1945 to Yokohama, Japan was followed by a shift to the Atlantic arriving at New York on 26 February 1946. From then the ship operated as a transport to Puerto Rico and Jamaica to New York and Charleston.
USS General Omar Bundy (AP-152) was a General G. O. Squier-class transport ship for the U.S. Navy in World War II.
USS Aeolus (ID-3005), sometimes also spelled Æolus, was a United States Navy transport ship during World War I. She was formerly the North German Lloyd liner SS Grosser Kurfürst, also spelled Großer Kurfürst, launched in 1899 that sailed regularly between Bremen and New York. At the outset of World War I the ship was interned by the United States and, when the U.S. entered the conflict in 1917, was seized and converted to a troop transport.
USS George F. Elliott (AP-105) was a cargo liner built for the Mississippi Shipping Company as SS Delbrasil for operation between New Orleans and the east coast of South America in 1939 by its operator, Delta Line. The ship entered that service and operated until taken over by the War Shipping Administration (WSA) on 28 April 1942 for operation by Delta Line acting as WSA's agent. On 25 August 1943 WSA allocated the ship to the Navy for conversion to a troop transport commissioned and operated by the Navy for the duration of the war. Ownership of the ship was transferred from Mississippi Shipping to WSA on 4 February 1944 while under Navy operation and was retained until sale to American South African Lines on 22 December 1948. The ship was renamed African Endeavor until returned as a trade in to the Maritime Commission on 22 September 1960 for layup in the James River reserve fleet and later sold to Boston Metals for scrapping.
SS Ancon was an American cargo and passenger ship that became the first ship to officially transit the Panama Canal in 1914 although the French crane boat Alexandre La Valley completed the first trip in stages during construction prior to the official opening. The ship was built as Shawmut for the Boston Steamship Company by the Maryland Steel Company, Sparrows Point, Maryland and put into Pacific service operating out of Puget Sound ports for Japan, China and the Philippine Islands. Shawmut and sister ship Tremont were two of the largest United States commercial ships in service at the time and the company eventually found them too expensive to operate.
Sitmar Cruises and its predecessor Sitmar Line were company names derived from the acronym for the Società Italiana Trasporti Marittimi. SITMAR originally was an Italian shipping line founded by Russian émigré Alexandre Vlasov, however the company's headquarters were later transferred to Monaco. Vlasov initially operated cargo services from 1937, gradually replacing these with passenger services from 1947 until 1988, when SITMAR was sold to the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O). After the sale, most of the former SITMAR ships were transferred to the fleet of P&O subsidiary Princess Cruises, while one, TSS Fairstar, became the sole vessel of the newly created P&O-Sitmar Cruises. As of July 2018, one briefly named former SITMAR ship was still operational, as Cruise & Maritime Voyages's Columbus. However, two other vessels originally ordered by SITMAR but delivered to P&O, sailed under the Princess banner before operating from Australia for a number of years, such as Pacific Jewel and Pacific Dawn. As of 2021, Pacific Dawn, set to become Ambience is the only survivor, with Columbus and Pacific Jewel being sold for scrap.
A number of steamships have carried the name Vega, including
Arnold Bernstein was a German-American shipowner and pioneer of transatlantic car transport, which he revolutionised since he was transporting cars without boxing them up in wooden crates as was usual before and was thus able to reduce freight rates. When the 1929 Great Depression made the use of 'swimming garages' impractical, Bernstein then turned his cargo ships into passenger ships, with just one travel class, which he called tourist class, rather than the three that were usual. One of the first Jewish 'merchant princes', he was one of the victims of the Nazi appropriation policies.
MV Struma was a small ship with a long history that included a number of changes of use and many changes of name. She was built in 1867 as a British marquess's luxury steam yacht and ended up 75 years later as a Greek and Bulgarian diesel ship for carrying livestock. She was launched as Xantha, but subsequently carried the names Sölyst, Sea Maid, Kafireus, Esperos, Makedoniya and finally Struma.
SS Arabic was a steamship of the White Star Line and its first steel-hulled vessel. Like her predecessors, she was built by shipbuilders Harland and Wolff of Belfast.
Corvus was a steam cargo ship built in 1919 by Columbia River Shipbuilding Company of Portland for the United States Shipping Board as part of the wartime shipbuilding program of the Emergency Fleet Corporation (EFC) to restore the nation's Merchant Marine. The freighter was operated on international and domestic routes through 1944. Early in 1945 she was transferred to Soviet Union as part of lend-lease program and renamed Uzbekistan. After several months of operation, the freighter was rammed by another vessel on 31 May 1945 and was beached to avoid sinking. She was subsequently raised and towed to Portland where she was scrapped in 1946.
Ancon was an ocean-going wooden sidewheel steamship built in San Francisco in 1867. She carried both passengers and freight. In her early career she was a ferry in Panama and then ran between Panama and San Francisco. Later she began coastal runs between Sand Diego and San Francisco. Her last route was Port Townsend, Washington to Alaska. Today she is more notable for her disasters than her routine voyages. Ancon Rock in Icy Strait, Alaska is the site of her 1886 grounding. Her final wreck, in 1889 in Naha Bay, near Loring, Alaska was commemorated by Albert Bierstadt. His painting, "Wreck of the 'Ancon' in Loring Bay, Alaska" now hangs in the Museum of Fine Art in Boston.
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