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UNITED STATES NAVY
TEMPORARY AUXILIARY SHIPS
WORLD WAR I

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-- U.S. NAVY SHIPS --

USS Chatham (ID # 2510), 1918-1919.
Initially commissioned as USS Margaret.
Originally, and later, S.S. Margaret (American Freighter, 1916).

Margaret, a 3372 gross ton (7523 tons displacement) freighter, was built at Sparrows Point, Maryland, in 1916. She was commissioned in the Navy at New York, as USS Margaret (ID # 2510) on 25 March 1918 and was renamed USS Chatham on 18 April 1918, probably to avoid confusion with several other U.S. Navy vessels of the same name, most notably the converted yacht Margaret (SP-527). On the same date the freighter arrived in the Gironde River in France at the end of her first transatlantic convoy voyage from New York carrying Army supplies. Chatham made four more such trips, delivering French steel billets and supplies for the Motor Transportation Corps to Le Havre in June, general cargo to Rochefort in August and October, and more general cargo to Brest in December. Upon returning to New York in late December 1918 she entered a shipyard for a complete overhaul and was soon designated for demobilization. USS Chatham was decommissioned on 10 February 1919 and transferred to the Shipping Board for return to her owners, the A.H. Bull Steamship Company of New York City. Reverting to the name Margaret, the ship appears to have continued to serve her original owners until she was sunk, without survivors, by the German submarine U-571 on 14 April 1942 off Cape Hatteras.

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Page made 1 December 2007