Antelope II (IX-109)
1943-1946
Large, fast, ruminant mammals which generally resemble deer except for their two single-prong horns.
II
(IX-109: displacement 14,245 (full load); 1ength 441'6"; beam 5611"; draft 28'9" (full load) (limiting); type EC2-S-C1)
M. H. DeYoung was laid down on 15 June 1943 at Richmond, Calif., by the Permanente Metals Corp., under a Maritime Commission contract (M.C.E. Hull 1587); launched on 6 July 1943; sponsored by Mrs. George T. Cameron; and delivered to the Maritime Commission at 3:15 p.m. on 19 July 1943
Operated under a general agency agreement by R. A. Nichol & Co., Inc., M. H. DeYoung was torpedoed by the Japanese submarine I-19 (the celebrated Cmdr. Kinashi Takakazu, commanding, who had torpedoed and sunk carrier Wasp (CV-7), damaged battleship North Carolina (BB-55) and caused catastrophic, mortal, damage to O’Brien (DD-415) in one spread of torpedoes on 15 September 1942) on 14 August 1943 about 1,000 miles east of Nouméa, New Caledonia, less than a month after being completed. Brought into Espíritu Santo in the New Hebrides, the Liberty ship was partially repaired and taken over by the Navy under a bareboat charter at 12:01 a.m. on 4 October 1943. She was renamed Antelope (IX-109) and placed in service the day she was taken over, Lt. L. G. Elsell in charge.
Antelope had her engines removed and spent the entire war as a non-self-propelled dry cargo storage vessel assigned to Service Squadron 8. Scanty records make it impossible to compile a list of locations at which Antelope served, but Espíritu Santo appears to have been her first duty station and Subic Bay in the Philippines was her last known location while still a naval vessel. It is also possible that she saw some duty at Leyte when support forces established a base there after the invasion. In any event, she was inspected at Subic Bay and found to be beyond economical repair and surplus to the needs of the Navy.
Antelope was placed out of service and laid up at Subic Bay at 11:00 a.m. on 3 May 1946 and was simultaneously delivered to the Maritime Commission’s War Shipping Administration. Her name was stricken from the Navy Register on 21 May 1946, and, along with 14 other vessels, she was sold for scrapping to the Asia Development Corp., Shanghai, China, on 3 March 1948.
Raymond A. Mann and Robert J. Cressman
24 August 2020
