Some 110 years ago this week at the New York Navy Yard, Brooklyn, the 15,000-ton, 455-foot USS Maumee (Fuel Ship No. 14) was commissioned.
She was not very appealing in profile.
USS Maumee (Fuel Ship # 14, later AO-2) photographed circa 1917 in her original configuration with the bridge near the bow. The unusually small smokestack is for her early-model Diesel engines. In both this ship and her near sister Kanawha, the bridge soon had to be moved aft of the foremast. Collection of Hubert C. Rickert. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph NH 93088
Her skipper was LCDR Henry Charles Dinger (USNA 1898), an engineering whiz and destroyerman with some good ideas on anti-submarine warfare.
Meanwhile, her XO and Chief Engineering Officer was a young LT Chester W. Nimitz (USNA 1905), a submariner and, at the time, the Navy’s foremost diesel expert, who had studied the curious engines at the Maschinenfabrik-Augsburg-Nürnberg (M.A.N.) plants in Europe before the Great War.
Dinger, left, Nimitz, right, circa 1916
Maumee’s outsized brainpower came from having the largest diesel engines ever used by the U.S. Navy and being the service’s first big surface ship powered by such a plant.
She was powered by two massive 2,500-horsepower M.A.N. two-cycle diesel engines (later upgraded/rated up to 3,600 h.p. each), built in the New York Navy Yard machine shop and running at 125 rpm.
Previously, the Navy’s biggest diesels were the twin 475hp M.A.N.-licensed New London Ship and Engine Company (NELSECO) engines used on a variety of small subs that Nimitz had first-hand experience with.
Proud of the accomplishment, Nimitz penned a 50-page article on the topic in the 1915 Journal of the American Society of Naval Engineers.
His line drawings from the article:
Nimitz even took these images of the engines, now in the NHHC collection. Use the men in the photos for size reference.
2-cycle single-acting six-cylinder diesel engines, 2500 BHP each, built by Fleet Admiral (then a lieutenant) Chester W. Nimitz in the machine shop of the New York Navy Yard, Brooklyn, New York, for the Navy tanker, USS Maumee, 1913-1916. Courtesy of Fleet Admiral Nimitz. NH 62734
NH 58335
NH 58334
With the U.S. entering the Great War just six months after Maumee arrived in the fleet, she was soon put to good use, shepherding 34 short-legged destroyers across the Atlantic to England to take on the Kaiser’s U-boat menace. In the process, she conducted the first at-sea underway replenishments.
As detailed by DANFS:
To refuel some of the destroyers on their way to British waters, Maumee deployed to an area about 300 miles south of Greenland, at roughly the midpoint between Boston and Queenstown [Cobh], Ireland. At 0556 on 28 May 1917, Maumee’s watchstanders logged that they “sighted destroyers 3 points forward of port beam,” as Maumee rendezvoused with Drayton (Destroyer No. 23), Jenkins (Destroyer No. 42), Patterson (Destroyer No. 36), Paulding (Destroyer No. 22), and Trippe (Destroyer No. 33) of Division 5, and became the first U.S. Navy vessel to refuel ships at sea in what she reported as “anything but a flat calm.” Indeed, the waters of the North Atlantic proved far from calm for the green crew, as biting winds whipped at sailors operating on her icy decks, and rough seas jostled the vessel under their feet. Maumee attempted to refuel two ships at once while underway — one to either side — but the foul weather often compelled her to position a single ship on the lee side, maneuvering at an average speed of five knots. Patterson slipped alongside Maumee first and during the forenoon watch Maumee pumped enough fuel to Drayton, Jenkins, and Patterson to enable them to complete crossing the Atlantic. Years later, Nimitz recounted the process for getting fuel into a moving ship:
“The leading destroyer came smartly alongside about 50 feet away. She slowed to our speed [about 5 knots], and we sent a messenger line over to her forecastle by a line-throwing gun. The destroyer then hauled a 10-inch manila hawser aboard, passed it through the proper chock abreast her bridge, and secured it to the forward gun mount. When this was done, the Maumee’s forecastle windlass pulled the hawser “towing” taut. At this point, the destroyer slowed her engines to give good steering control so that an open space of about 50 feet could be maintained between the two ships.”
USS McCall (DD 28), refueling from USS Maumee (AO 2) during an Atlantic Gale, 22 September 1917. Photograph montage printed on a postcard. NHHC Photograph Collection, NH 92065
Rebuilt and redesignated Oiler No. 2 (AO-2), Maumee was brought out of mothballs in 1942 and provided invaluable WWII service.
USS Maumee (AO-2) off Hampton Roads, VA., 22 July 1942, note her war paint and serious topside self-defense armament.
Maumee, with 19 skippers in her 30-year career, was decommissioned in November 1946 and given to Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT Nationalist Chinese Navy, where she served as ROCS Omei (AO-509/301) until 1967, when she was “scrapped at Kaohsiung, far from the land of her birth.”
By that time, the Navy had gotten pretty good at diesels and UNREPs.
Painted in a graded scheme reminiscent of that worn during her time in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Omei (AO.301), ex-Maumee, lies moored to a buoy at Sasebo, Japan, on 1 July 1951, as seen from escort carrier Sicily (CVE-118). (U.S. Navy Photograph 80-G-436782, National Archives and Records Administration, Still Pictures Branch, College Park, Md.)
