Zaurak (AK-117)
1944-1946
A star in the constellation of Eridanus.
(AK-117: displacement 12,350 (limiting); length 441'6"; beam 56'11"; draft 26'4" (limiting); speed 12.8 knots (estimated); complement 202; troop 1,052; armament 1 5-inch, 1 3-inch, 8 20- millimeter; class Crater; type EC2-S-C1)
Hugh Young was laid down on 7 October 1943 at Houston, Texas, by the Todd-Houston Shipbuilding Corp. under a Maritime Commission contract (M.C.E. Hull 1964); renamed Zaurak on 13 November 1943 and classified as a cargo vessel, AK-117; launched on 18 November 1943; sponsored by Miss Betsy Colston Young; delivered to the Navy on 27 November; moved to New Orleans, La., where she underwent conversion for naval use at the Todd-Johnson yard; and commissioned on 17 March 1944, Lt. Cmdr. John S. Kapuscinski, (D),USNR, in command.
Zaurak, modified to serve as a “trooper” [troop transport], departed New Orleans on 5 April 1944 and arrived at Norfolk, Va., on the 13th. After shakedown training in the Chesapeake Bay, she loaded cargo, provisions, and stores at Norfolk and embarked passengers for a voyage to the South Pacific. She stood out of the Chesapeake Bay on 3 May, bound for New York, N.Y., whence she departed on the 5th. After a stop at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, she transited the Panama Canal on 19 May and headed independently toward Espíritu Santo in the New Hebrides Islands, crossing the Equator on 25 May when “all land-lubbers and polliwogs [those who not “crossed the line”] were introduced to the solemn mysteries of the Ancient Order of the Deep.”
On 14 June 1944, she steamed into Segond Channel, where she disembarked her passengers immediately, but Zaurak remained at Espíritu Santo for three weeks, during which time American forces invaded the Mariana Islands. On 2 July, Zaurak departed Espíritu Santo to steam via Nouméa, New Caledonia, to Eniwetok and thence to join in the Marianas campaign. She arrived at Eniwetok on the 18th and departed there three days later with a convoy bound for Saipan, Cmdr. Kapuscinski serving as commander of Task Unit 57.18.2.
A few days out, dysentery broke out on board Zaurak among the embarked troops, then likewise afflicted the crew. Sick soldiers and sailors soon filled sick bay and the no.5 troop compartment, filling every bunk of the 200 installed there. Lt. Cmdr. C. W. Lewis (MC), the ship’s medical officer, soon found himself confronted by an epidemic, but he and his three corpsmen (two of whom came down with the illness themselves) carried out a successful “gallant fight against heavy odds” that turned the tide. They “enabled these men to account for themselves creditably on Saipan shortly thereafter…”
Zaurak arrived in the anchorage between Saipan and Tinian on 25 July 1944 and remained there for 17 days. On 9 August, she embarked 812 battle-weary officers and men of the U.S. Army’s 27th Infantry Division and, two days later, departed the Marianas bound, via Eniwetok, for Espíritu Santo. The cargo ship stood in to Segond Channel on 24 August and disembarked her passengers, Lt. Cmdr. Lewis and his corpsmen having emerged victorious over a second epidemic of dysentery during the trip.
Over the next two months, Zaurak made a series of voyages between various islands in the Southwestern Pacific, visiting several of the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, Emirau, Manus, and New Caledonia. On 23 October 1944, she departed Bougainville in the Solomons with a convoy of 31 ships bound for the Philippines with reinforcements and supplies for the forces that had just invaded Leyte. She steamed into Leyte Gulf at the head of the convoy on 29 October, through heavy rain having that reduced visibility to 1,500 yards, and anchored in San Pedro Bay.
During her 11 days there, Zaurak received her baptism of fire. Initially, conditions in the San Pedro Bay anchorage were quiet enough; but, when she moved to the San Juanico Strait anchorage on the 31st, enemy air activity, occasioned by the proximity of Tacloban airfield, rose markedly. On 1 and 2 November 1944, she fired her first shots at enemy planes attacking the airstrip ashore but, due to darkness and extreme range, scored no hits. On the 3rd and 4th, Japanese began attacking the ships in the anchorage as secondary targets.
The ship claimed her first enemy plane on 3 November 1944 when a mixed formation of Aichi D3A2 Type 99 carrier bombers (Vals) and Mitsubishi A6M5 Type 0 carrier fighters (Zekes) attacking the airfield veered out of a searchlight beam and away from shore-based antiaircraft fire to attack the ships in the anchorage. Zaurak’s secondary battery opened fire, but the plane flew right through her field of fire to crash into the U.S. freighter Matthew P. Deady [American Hawaiian Steamship Co.], anchored about 500 yards east of Zaurak, in the vicinity of that merchantman’s number 1 hatch despite the intense antiaircraft fire put up by the imperiled Liberty Ship and other vessels in the vicinity. The crew of Zaurak’s Gun No.4, a 40-millimeter mount, later claimed that the kamikaze “seemed to fly into the tracers.”
Almost immediately, Zaurak went to Matthew P. Deady’s aid. One of Zaurak’s LCVPs, Sea1c Pinckney S. Webber, Jr., (LC), USNR, coxswain, who on his own initiative had organized a volunteer boat crew, rescued 20 men from the water around the blazing Liberty and five from a raft. For Webber’s “prompt and spontaneous action [and his] brave disregard for the flames and exploding ammunition…directly over his boat,” he later received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal. Dogged fire-fighting efforts proved successful, but two of the 27-man Navy Armed Guard detachment and 26 soldiers of the 300 on board, perished in the kamikaze attack.
A little later that same morning, another Japanese plane, flying north 1,000 yards away and at an altitude of 200 feet, ran afoul of Zaurak’s 40-millimeter Gun No.3, and fell in flames into the water, after which “the tired gun crews burst into cheers,” no longer feeling like they were “clay pigeons at the end of the [Tacloban] air strip.” Soon thereafter, two more intruders approached the ship but never came close enough to become a good target. Though she claimed hits on both, neither plane went down.
During her final five days at Leyte, she experienced several more air attacks, but her guns downed no more planes. On 8 November 1944 the ship, battered by heavy seas, had to get underway to ride out a heavy tropical storm which approached in typhoon force, maintaining 1/3 speed throughout the night, and she suffered the loss of one of her landing craft in the tempest. The following day, Zaurak embarked passengers and departed Leyte Gulf in a convoy of 20 ships, bound for Hollandia, New Guinea. Her men had gone to general quarters 40 times while at Leyte. She logged 22 separate air attacks, and proudly displayed two rising suns, signifying downed enemy planes.
After three months of voyages between such places as Guadalcanal [where Zaurak’s war diarist recorded a “terrific explosion in the vicinity of Lunga Point” at 2330 on 29 January 1945, a blast chillingly similar to that which obliterated the ammunition ship Mount Hood (AE-11) at Manus on 10 November 1944, but which proved in this case to be the destruction of the cargo ship Serpens (AK-97)], Espíritu Santo [where she received a new paint job that replaced her “dazzle” scheme with the overall application of Navy Blue, Formula 5N] New Caledonia, Bougainville, Green Island, Oro Bay, and Finschhafen, she voyaged to Munda in March 1945 to embark reinforcements for the Iwo Jima operation then in progress. She delivered elements of the 147th Infantry to Iwo on 29 March and remained there for a week, embarking the leathernecks – 60 officers and 1,031 men strong – of the 3rd Marine Division on the 27th. As Lt. (j.g.) Thomas H. Coley, USNR, Zaurak’s gunnery officer who doubled as her historian, later wrote: “These men had been living on field rations for weeks and had been fighting the enemy on ground that was soft, volcanic ash, affording no cover during the day and no comfort at night. They had suffered an appalling number of casualties and were utterly fatigued. Getting on board ship where clean bunks and three hot meals a day awaited them boosted their morale as nothing else could.”
Two days later, Zaurak sailed for the Marshalls and, on 1 April 1945 arrived at Guam where the marines disembarked. From there, she headed for Pavuvu in the Solomons, where she embarked Marine Corps and Navy men for passage back to Hawaii. Upon her arrival in Pearl Harbor on 3 May, she learned that most of the marines embarked, from the rear echelon, were in fact needed at Okinawa. She therefore departed Oahu on 6 May and, having loaded lumber (125,000 square feet of it) salvaged from a damaged vessel (for the marines to utilize in setting up camp on Okinawa), set a course via Eniwetok and Ulithi for the Ryūkyūs, leaving the latter place on 7 June in convoy with Cmdr. Kapuscinski as convoy commodore. She arrived off Okinawa on 13 June, where, because of the kamikaze threat, “urging lookouts to be diligent was not necessary,” and remained there for six days disembarking troops and unloading cargo. On 19 June, she got underway for Ulithi, on the first leg of the voyage back to the United States, there embarking two U.S. Navy utility (VJ) squadrons with their 17 planes to transportation to the Marshalls. After additional stops at Eniwetok, Kwajalein, and Honolulu, mooring near the Aloha Tower, where the “Zaurak crew had its first look at civilization in fifteen months,” she reached Seattle, mooring alongside Pier 91 on 9 August following the “eight day trip” from Hawaiian waters “that had seemed like a month.” The next morning, half of the officers and crew began 16-day leaves. Three days later, she entered the Todd Shipyard for her first major overhaul.
While she was in the yard, Japan capitulated. Zaurak’s repairs were completed in mid-September 1945, and, after embarking passengers, the ship departed Seattle on 21 September. Steaming via Pearl Harbor and Ulithi, she arrived in Buckner Bay, Okinawa, on 25 October. From there, she moved to Shanghai, China, where she traded replacement troops for men returning home to the United States. From there, she proceeded to Jinsen [Inchon], Korea, to make a similar personnel trade. Following that, the ship made a stop at Taku in North China and a return visit to Shanghai before getting underway on 1 December to return home. Following a non-stop voyage across the Pacific, receiving word in a dispatch one day out that she was to report to the Commandant, Twelfth Naval District, for decommissioning and disposal, Zaurak entered San Francisco Bay on 20 December, five days before Christmas. Two months later [20 February 1946], as decommissioning neared, Cmdr. Kapuscinski wrote in the ship’s commemorative history, “A fine ship, and a fine crew, to each and every one of you, ‘Well Done.’”
“The Flying Z” remained at San Francisco until decommissioned there on 12 March 1946, having steamed over 75,000 miles, having carried over 14,000 passengers and hauled about 25,000 tons of cargo to some 20 bases in the Pacific theater of war. Transferred to the Maritime Commission at 1:00 p.m. that same day [12 March 1946] for layup at Suisun Bay, Calif., with the National Defense Reserve Fleet, Zaurak was stricken from the Navy Register on 28 March 1946.
Resuming the name Hugh Young, the ship remained in the Reserve Fleet until sold on 14 May 1963 to the Union Minerals & Alloys Corp. She was withdrawn from the fleet at 11:00 a.m. on 19 June 1963, and was scrapped subsequently.
Zaurak earned one battle star for her World War II service, for her participation in the Leyte landings.
Commanding Officer Date Assumed Command
Lt. Cmdr. John S. Kapuscinski, (D), USNR 17 March 1944
Updated, Robert J. Cressman
21 March 2024
