USS Calamus (AOG-25)
Calamus: the indian cane, a plant of the Palm family. It furnishes the common rattan.
The USS Calamus, an 845-ton Mettawee class gasoline tanker, was built at Bayonne, New Jersey, under a U.S. Maritime Commission contract. She was transferred to the Navy when completed in July 1944 and placed in commission on 11 July 1944 with a Coast Guard crew. Calamus went to the Pacific in September 1944, arriving in the war zone later in the year. Into 1945 she served as a station tanker at Ulithi in the Caroline Islands, Eniwetok in the Marshalls and Saipan in the Marianas. In April she went to Okinawa, to support the ongoing battle to wrest that strategic island from the Japanese. Following the end of World War II, Calamus had occupation duty in the western Pacific. She returned to the United States in March 1946 and was decommissioned and her Coast Guard crew removed on 15 May 1946.
She was then transferred to the Maritime Commission in September 1946; Calamus was laid up in that agency's reserve fleet at Suisun Bay, California. She was sold for scrapping in March 1964.
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Photographs:
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Original photo caption; description; date; photo number & photographer (if known). Unless otherwise noted all photos are official U.S. Coast Guard photographs.
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USS Calamus (AOG-25) underway off San Francisco in 1946.
Naval Historical Center photograph, courtesy of Donald M. McPherson.
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Sources:
Cutter History File. USCG Historian's Office, USCG HQ, Washington, D.C.
Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Vessels.