Qualla: USS Mount Hood (AE-11)

USS Mount Hood (AE-11): Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Susan Bogden-Fraser, CC BY-SA 4.0. Lt. Lester Wallace and seventeen enlisted men walked off USS Mount Hood at 8:30 in the morning on November 10, 1944, heading for the base post office. Two of them were headed to the brig for court-martial. Others wanted mail from home, or a few minutes with the base chaplain. Twenty-five minutes later, at 08:55, a blast knocked Wallace and his men off their feet 4,600 yards from where their ship had been anchored. They scrambled into a boat and turned back toward the harbor. There was nothing to return to. Mount Hood was gone. Three hundred fifty men were gone with her. Those eighteen shoregoers were the entire surviving crew.

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Image: Susan Bogden-Fraser | CC BY-SA 4.0

USS Mount Hood (AE-11): From Marco Polo to Mount Hood

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit U.S. Navy., Public domain. She had started life as a Maritime Commission cargo ship called Marco Polo, built by the North Carolina Shipbuilding Company in Wilmington. On November 10, 1943 - exactly one year before she would destroy herself - the Navy renamed her for the Cascade volcano in Oregon, conversio...

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Image: U.S. Navy. | Public domain

USS Mount Hood (AE-11): Berth 380

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Standard procedure for an ammunition ship was to moor well away from other vessels - far out in open water where a worst-case detonation would mostly hurt empty sea. Mount Hood was not moored that way. She lay at Berth 380 in the central harbor, near the entrance. The logic was c...

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Image: Public domain

USS Mount Hood (AE-11): The Two Explosions

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit U.S. Navy, photographed by a photographer of the 57th Construction Battalion, who had set up his camera to take pictures of the Battalion's camp., Public domain. The first blast at 08:55 sent flame and smoke above masthead height from amidships. Within seconds, the rest of her cargo detonated. The second explosion was the larger of the two. A mushroom of smoke obscured the harbor for hundreds of yards in every direction. When it cleared, ...

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Image: U.S. Navy, photographed by a photographer of the 57th Construction Battalion, who had set up his camera to take pictures of the Battalion's camp. | Public domain

USS Mount Hood (AE-11): The Damage Around Her

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The blast tore through the anchorage. Twenty-two smaller craft were sunk or damaged beyond repair. USS Mindanao, a repair ship lying broadside-on about 350 yards away, took the worst of it. Every man on her topside was killed outright. Metal fragments from Mount Hood penetrated M...

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Image: Public domain

USS Mount Hood (AE-11): What the Navy Carried Forward

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Mount Hood was struck from the Naval Register on December 11, 1944, little more than a month after she vanished. The charges against the two men who had been headed for the brig were quietly dropped - they were suddenly the luckiest defendants in the fleet. The West Loch disaster...

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Image: Public domain