" US Army Small Ships in New Guinea, 1942 - 1945" Topic

Most people just think about the USN and RAN and their big ships. Robert

"After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, a group of specialist were assembled in the USA and sent to Australia to scour all the harbours between Adelaide and Cairns and identify and commandeer every small ship they could find that could support the war effort. Their mission was known as "Mission X".

Many Australians served with the US Army Small Ships Section of the US Army Services of Supply (USASOS) in the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) during WWII. They generally signed contracts which lasted for typically 6 – 12 months. The list of ships below also contains some US Army Transport Service (ATS) ships which were manned by Small Ships men. US Army Transport Service later changed its name to the US Army Transportation Corps.

Many of the Australian crew members of the US Small Ships were aged as young as 15 years old. And some were as old as seventy years old."
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MOROBE, NEW GUINEA. 1943-08-13. UNITED STATES SMALL SHIPS
SECTION, IN THEIR DAYTIME HIDEOUT.
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Also known as the "Catboat Flotilla"

Many don't know that the US Army had its own "navy".From Wiki so take with a grain of salt. The history of the service of the Argosy Lemal in US service,

"As operations against the enemy began in the island and ocean areas northward from Australia in 1942, amphibious communications became necessary, the SWPA chief signal officer, General Spencer B. Akin, created a small fleet that served as relay ships from forward areas to headquarters, however their function and number soon expanded, when they took aboard the forward command post communications facilities as the Army's CP fleet. The small communications ships, part of the U.S. Army's Small Ships Section of Australian acquired vessels known officially as the "catboat flotilla,"[14] proved so useful in amphibious actions that Army elements in SWPA operations continually competed to obtain their services. The first Australian vessels acquired by General Akin to be converted during the first half of 1943 by Australian firms into communications ships[15] were the Harold (S-58, CS-3), an auxiliary ketch, and the Argosy Lemal (S-6), an auxiliary schooner.[Note 1] From Milne Bay, the vessels then, served at Port Moresby, at Woodlark, and in the Lae-Salamaua area through mid-1943.[16]

A graphic account of some of the vicissitudes of the Argosy Lemal and its mixed crew came from S/Sgt. Arthur B. Dunning, Headquarters Company, 60th Signal Battalion. He and six other enlisted men of that unit were ordered aboard her on 9 September 1943, at Oro Bay, New Guinea, to handle Army radio traffic. The commander of the ship reported to naval authorities, not to General Akin. After six months' service along the New Guinea coast, the skipper was removed for incompetence. His replacement was no better. Among other things, he obeyed to the letter Navy's order forbidding the use of unshielded radio receivers at sea. Since the Signal Corps receivers aboard the ship were unshielded and thus liable to radiate sufficiently to alert nearby enemy listeners, the men were forbidden to switch them on in order to hear orders from Army headquarters ashore. As a consequence, during a trip in the spring of 1944 from Milne Bay to Cairns, Australia (on naval orders), the crew failed to hear frantic Signal Corps radio messages to the Argosy Lemal ordering her to return at once to Milne Bay to make ready for a forthcoming Army operation. On the way to Australia the skipper, after a series of mishaps attributable to bad navigation, grounded the Argosy hard on a reef. Most of the crew already desperately ill of tropical diseases, now had additional worries. The radio antennas were swept away along with the ship's rigging, and help could not be requested until the Signal Corps men strung up a makeshift antenna. Weak with fevers and in a ship on the verge of foundering, they pumped away at the water rising in the hold and wondered why rescue was delayed till they learned that the position of the ship that the skipper had given them to broadcast was ninety miles off their true position. As they threw excess cargo overboard, "some of the guys," recorded Dunning, "were all for jettisoning our skipper for getting us into all of this mess." Much later, too late for the need the Signal Corps had for the ship, the Argosy Lemal was rescued and towed to Port Moresby for repairs to the vessel and medical attention to the crew, many of whom were by then, according to Dunning, "psycho-neurotic." Besides Dunning, a radio operator, there were T/4 Jack Stanton, also a radio operator; T/Sgt. Harold Wooten, the senior non-commissioned officer; T/4 Finch and T/5 Burtness, maintenance men; and T/5 Ingram and Pfc. Devlin, code and message center clerks. Dunning described the Argosy as a 3-mast sailing vessel with a 110-horsepower auxiliary diesel engine. "She was the sixth vessel," he wrote, "to be taken over by the Small Ships Section of the U.S. Army, her primary purpose was handling [radio] traffic between forward areas and the main USASOS headquarters."[16]"
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and the Geonna.

and the FP-47 (originally the "Cape James")

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FM 55-130 Transportation Corps Small Boats And Harbor Craft 1944-01-31

"The purpose of this book is to tell you what the Harbor Boat Service is, what it does, and what those who are assigned to it need to know."
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my late uncle Bob served with them