Editor’s note: Andrew Perzo is on vacation. The following question and answer first ran in 2004. A companion piece will run Monday.

 

Were there ever mothballed Navy ships at the end of Ryan Street in the early 1950s?

Sort of.

Technically they were soon-to-be-scrap ships; only some of their components were mothballed, or preserved for a time; not all of them belonged to the Navy; and all but one of them were gone by 1950.

After World War II, the Navy and the Coast Guard sent several hundred ships, mostly landing craft and tow boats, up the Calcasieu River to be decommissioned in Lake Charles.

Many of the ships — LSTs, LSMs, ATRs — were berthed at the end of what is today River Road, and some were anchored at other nearby points along the river.

The Navy and Coast Guard — looking to slim down after the nation’s victories in Europe and the Pacific — declared myriad vessels surplus and sold them off to various companies, mainly for scrap.

The ships arrived in groups, and their crews spent weeks or months “packing equipment, materials, supplies and records for transfer to various Navy depots,” according to Harold E. Westhoff, a former sailor who posted a history of his ship online.

Westhoff’s vessel, the USS LSM-287, a “landing ship, medium,” was decommissioned in Lake Charles on May 2, 1946.

“We beached our ship for the last time on February 21st, with our bow lines secured to trees on the shore,” Westhoff writes.

“The ship’s engines and larger equipment, anti-aircraft guns, etc., were packed with some type of heavy grease, and ‘mothballed,’ in the event that it might ever become necessary to restore the ship to service.”

The decommissioned vessels were then turned over to the Eighth Naval Command, which listed them with the War Assets Corp., which then disposed of them, according to the March 28, 1948, edition of the American Press.

The paper that day carried a story about the end of the military’s local decommissioning program and the destinations of the last ships — Houston, New Orleans, Detroit.

“The huge assortment of surplus Navy ships from World War II, which reached a total of 350 vessels berthed on the Calcasieu River north of Lake Charles, has finally dwindled down and will soon be no more,” read the story.

“Of the 350 ships, only three remain, and those will be towed sometime this week to the U.S. Marine Commission yard in Beaumont, Texas.”

In its heyday just after the war’s end, the program saw the decommissioning of more than a dozen ships at a time.

The April 30, 1946, American Press reported on the decommissioning of “13 Coast Guard LSTs involving 300 men” and “11 Navy LSTs and 22 Navy LSMs … affecting an additional 900 to 1,000 men.”

Four days before that, the military decommissioned 14 ships at once, said Patricia Threatt with the McNeese Archives. And Westhoff ’s account says the LSM-287 was one of about 15 such ships headed for Lake Charles to be removed from service.

But not all of the Navy’s decommissioned ships made it out of the Calcasieu.

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The Informer answers questions from readers each Sunday, Monday and Wednesday. It is researched and written by Andrew Perzo, an American Press staff writer. To ask a question, call 494-4098 and leave voice mail, or email informer@americanpress.com.