Photographed in port on August 20, 1918, the USS Lenape (ID‑2700) sits in her wartime gray at the New York Navy Yard, a former East Coast passenger steamer temporarily transformed into a troopship during World War I. Launched in 1912 by the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company in Virginia, Lenape originally served the Clyde Steamship Company on commercial passenger‑cargo routes between New York, Charleston, and Jacksonville. Following America’s entry into the war, she was first chartered as an Army transport before being formally commissioned into the U.S. Navy in April 1918. Her civilian accommodations were stripped out and her decks reinforced to carry dense formations of soldiers bound for the Western Front.
Her Navy career was brief—lasting only from April to October 1918—but it coincided with the height of the American troop surge. Lenape made three rapid round‑trip voyages to France, transporting infantry regiments, artillery detachments, medical units, and the U.S. Army’s 80th Field Artillery Regiment—ordinary young Americans whose service helped shape the final campaigns of the Great War. After her decommissioning in late October 1918, she returned to Army control and later resumed coastal commercial service. She never survived to see a second global conflict; on November 18, 1925, a catastrophic fire forced her to be beached in Delaware Bay, where she was declared a total loss. This 1918 photograph preserves Lenape at the exact moment her short but essential military service helped deliver the American Expeditionary Forces toward victory in World War I.
