USS Tazewell, one of 117 Haskell-class attack transports, was built to a modified Victory ship design at Richmond, California. She was commissioned in October 1944 and, after shakedown training, left the West Coast in January 1945, embarked garrison troops for the Palau Islands at Hawaii, and arrived off Peleilu at the end of the month. She steamed to Leyte in early February to begin training there with the forces preparing for the invasion of Okinawa. Some of her troops participated in the initial assault on Kerama Retto, near Okinawa, at the end of March. Tazewell put her remaining troops and cargo ashore in mid-April but remained off Okinawa until the end of the month. She returned to San Francisco in June and moved to Seattle for repairs. In July she made a voyage from Seattle to Tinian with troops and cargo, returning to San Francisco at the end of the month.

Tazewell was in drydock at San Pedro when the Japanese capitulated in August. In September she transported troops and cargo to the Philippines, and in October she carried occupation forces from the Philippines to Japan. Tazewell arrived back in San Francisco in early November with Marines from Sasebo, Japan. In late November 1945 she left the West Coast on the first of many voyages under Operation "Magic Carpet," returning veterans from the Philippines and Japan to the United States. The last of these trips ended in San Francisco in August 1946. Tazewell was decommissioned in December 1946 and placed in reserve. Retained on the Navy list for the next decade as a mobilization asset, she was transferred to the Maritime Administration in September 1958 for further retention and was stricken from the Navy list in October. The Maritime Administration sold Tazewell for scrapping in December 1972.