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AH-10 Samaritan

USS Chaumont, one of twelve 13,400-ton (displacement) Hog Island Type B (Design 1024) transports built for the U. S. Shipping Board at Hog Island, Pennsylvania, was laid down in November 1918 as the Shipping Board's Shope, launched in March 1920 as the U.S. Army's Chaumont, and completed a few months later. Excess to Army needs, she was transferred to the Navy and commissioned in November 1921. From her home port at San Francisco, Chaumont commenced a career of trans-Pacific troop service that initially consisted of voyages between California and Manila via Honolulu. Two or three voyages in 1925-26 took her to Shanghai instead of Manila, and she continued to stop at Shanghai at least once during most subsequent years. In August 1926 she sailed from San Francisco through the Panama Canal to Annapolis. The return trip took her to Norfolk, where she was drydocked for routine maintenance, and then to Guantanamo. Such voyages between the East and West Coasts also became near-annual events. Chaumont's voyages to Shanghai provided important assistance to U.S. Far Eastern diplomacy during the 1920s and 1930s by supporting the Marine Corps units deployed to the International Settlement in that city to protect U.S. nationals there.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Chaumont was on one of her regular voyages from Hawaii to Manila. She was diverted to Darwin, Australia, and then sent back to the West Coast. After two runs to Pearl Harbor, the now elderly transport was assigned to service between Seattle and Alaska, bringing men and supplies to assist in the defense of the Aleutians. Selected in March 1943 for conversion to a hospital ship, Chaumont was decommissioned in August at Seattle.

Following her August 1943 decommissioning, the elderly transport Chaumont (AP-5) was converted to a hospital ship at Seattle, Washington. Renamed Samaritan (AH-10), she was recommissioned in March 1944. After two round-trip voyages between San Francisco and Hawaii, she arrived at Kwajalein in June to treat casualties from the Saipan invasion. In July she came to Saipan to embark patients for evacuation to Noumea, and she returned to Saipan in August for duty as a receiving hospital. Samaritan then served as base hospital at Ulithi from late 1944 to February 1945.

Samaritan was off Iwo Jima a day after the inital landings there in February 1945 and soon left for Saipan with over 600 patients. She made two more trips to Iwo Jima to evacuate casualties to Guam. The hospital ship arrived off Okinawa in mid-April and through the end of June alternated stays off that island with evacuation voyages to Saipan. In July she steamed from Saipan to Pearl Harbor, then delivered patients from these locations to San Francisco.

Postwar, Samaritan sailed from San Francisco in September to Sasebo, Japan, where she provided hospital facilities to occupation forces until March 1946. She returned to San Francisco in April and was decommissioned there in June. Stricken from the list of Naval vessels in July, she was turned over to the Maritime Commission in August 1946 and was delivered to a scrapping firm in January 1948.