USS Pleiades (AK-46), 1941-1945

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USS Pleiades, a, 8,185-ton cargo ship, was built in 1939 as the Romanian freighter Mangalia. King Carol of Romania fled to the United States on board this ship in late 1940. She was taken over by the Maritime Commission in June 1941 while lying idle at New York and was commissioned in the Navy in October 1941 as USS Pleiades. The ship then commenced an intensive period of service in the North Atlantic, completing seven convoy runs to Iceland and four to the United Kingdom between November 1941 and July 1943. After a few months of cargo service to Brazil, she returned to the North Atlantic in November for another seven months of duty.

In June 1944 Pleiades was fitted as a general stores issue vessel, and in July she departed for the Mediterranean to support naval forces there. Returning to the United States in October, she reverted to cargo duty, made a trip to Brazil, and then carried out a series of sugar runs to the Caribbean. Upon completion of the last of these in November 1945, she was decommissioned and returned to the Maritime Commission. She was renamed Sceptre for mercantile service but was laid up in the Maritime Commission reserve fleet in 1946 and sold for scrap in 1966.

  
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