USS Bridgeport, a 7175-ton (displacement) destroyer tender and repair ship, was built in Germany in 1901 as the commercial steamship Breslau. When the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 made the high seas unsafe for German shipping, she took refuge in the United States. Seized at New Orleans, Louisiana, when the U.S. entered the conflict in April 1917, she was taken over by the U.S. Shipping Board. Soon transferred to the Navy, the ship was renamed Bridgeport in June 1917, while undergoing modification to suit her for Naval service.

Bridgeport was placed in commission in late August 1917, but required further work before she could be actively employed. Assigned the registry ID # 3009 during the war, she joined the Atlantic Fleet's Destroyer Force at the beginning of March 1918. Bridgeport assisted in the movement of smaller vessels to the Azores, and in August 1918 went to Brest, France, where she served for more than a year as a repair and supply ship. These duties continued after she returned to the U.S. in the Fall of 1919. When the Navy implemented its system of hull numbers in mid-1920, she was designated AD-10. In September 1920 she assisted in rescue efforts on the sunken submarine S-5. The ship was also employed during the first part of the 1920s as a flagship for destroyer squadrons operating along the U.S. East Coast and in the Caribbean. USS Bridgeport was decommissioned in early November 1924 and remained in reserve for nearly two decades. Transferred to the War Shipping Administration in February 1942, she was later taken over by the Army and became the hospital ship Larkspur and, in 1946, the transport Bridgeport.