History 1–USS Thomas Stone in WW2

The USS Thomas Stone was a troop transport ship, employed to carry a battalion of Army troops across the Atlantic to invade Algeria, North Africa, in 1942. It had formerly been the SS President van Buren but was pressed into naval service during World War 2. My Dad served on her during the war.

 

On November 7, 1942, as the ship was steaming in convoy with numerous other ships of Operation Torch’s large invasion force, she was torpedoed. The torpedo severely damaged a boiler room and bent both her keel and her rudder upwards, out of the water. The ship was dead in the water; her troop transport craft (very small boats called LCVPs) were quickly lowered and most of her surviving crew and the troops being carried aboard the USS Thomas Stone were loaded into them. They began a very rough, wet approach to the coastline; most of the small LCVPs ended up foundering in the high waves and the men were rescued by other ships.

USS Thomas Stone in the background

A small crew stayed on board the crippled USS Thomas Stone and eventually rigged up a tow system with another ship. They towed her very slowly into the harbor at Ain-Taya, Algiers, on November 11, 1942. While repairs were being attempted, on November 24, 1942, she was dive-bombed and further damaged, leading to her sinking partially and grounding on the beach. The USS Thomas Stone was eventually declared unsalvageable and sold to the Free French for scrap in 1944.

 

Naval Beach Battalion Shoulder Patch WW2

The Navy men on board her who had survived both the torpedoing and the sinking were reassigned; my father was assigned to the first or second Naval Beach Battalion. This unit was the spearhead for every amphibious assault from North Africa to northern Italy; they were the first on the beach and usually the last to leave. My father stayed with this unit until badly wounded in Italy. He was sent to Bethesda Naval Hospital after that, and was eventually reassigned, upon recovery, to Charleston, SC. That’s where he met my Mom, who was a Navy WAVE.

Here’s a photo of Mom in her US Navy summer uniform, in 1944, and of Dad, as a sergeant in the US Army. He joined the Army in 1947 and retired in 1988.