USS LST 1077

Renamed USS Park County after WWII

This is the World War II history of the LST 1077 from the time she was built and first commissioned into naval service until she was decommissioned in 1946 and mothballed for later service.

Twenty of us who served aboard her over the years are listed in Classmates and many have contributed a fine collection of photographs. I hope others reading this saga of her WWII years will put together the later details of her travels so we will have a complete story of her life as a U.S. naval ship. I have included 26 photos from the over 100 I took and gave to every member of our ship as they were released from active duty.

I was a member of the original Prospective Ships Company (PSC) while the 1077 was being built in Hingham, MA. I stayed aboard her throughout the Pacific, into Japan and then back to the states for decommissioning at the end of WWII. I served as the Communications Officer throughout the Pacific.

After Yale University, I was a 20 year old Ensign, just out of Midshipman’s School at North Western, when I joined the crew of LST 1077. I trained for communications duty at the Amphibious Force Base at Camp Bradford, Little Creek, VA.

In March of 1945 our entire PSC crew traveled by train to Boston to take LST 1077, as she was known during all of WWII, for shakedown. On arrival we discovered that only the keel had been laid so for 62 days we commuted daily from Boston's Fargo Building to the Bethlehem Shipyard in Hingham, MA and prepared all things necessary to move on board when she was commissioned on May 8, 1945.

After her formal commissioning ceremony on May 8, 1945, we took her for her shakedown cruise in Chesapeake Bay, then to the Naval Ammunition facility at Perth Amboy on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River. Next we proceeded to a West side Manhattan pier where we loaded 4,500 barrels of oil marked for code named Fray (Pearl Harbor) and two LCTs on her main deck, We then got underway for the Pacific transiting the Panama Canal and arriving at Pearl Harbor three weeks later.

With many other LSTs and APAs, we were sent immediately to train every day for thirty days for an amphibious force mission by practice landings on Maui with 40,000 Army troops. With operational training completed we loaded 500 Marines in Hilo, HA. We had so many Marines aboard that they created a bivouac on the main deck for those that could not be accommodated below. The Marines slept in shifts and ate the same way. Our galley operated virtually 24 hours a day.

We were combat loaded and headed for the invasion of Japan although at that moment our true destination was secret.

The Okinawa campaign was just finishing. Our skipper, LT I. W. Matthews, USN, and I, as Communications Officer, were the only ones aboard who attended two days of tactical operational briefings at Pearl and who knew we were headed for Japan. After we got underway and secured the special sea detail we made the announcement of our destination to the officers and crew.

Shortly after getting underway our task force of a hundred amphibious ships heard that a big bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. In those days no one knew anything about atomic bombs. A few days later a second one was dropped on Nagasaki and Japan immediately surrendered on August 14, 1945.

Thus, while we were underway, instead of our original designation as an invasion force, we were redesignated as an occupation force. We were the first to land on the western side of Japan at their historic naval base at Sasebo. LST 1077 was the third ship in the task force to enter the harbor where we discovered much of the rusting remains of the once powerful Japanese Navy at anchor. We offloaded tanks, jeeps and Marines at the bombed out remains of their Naval Air Station.

The Mobile Riverine Force Association record of 1077's subsequent journeys is not accurate as it reported our arrival in Sasebo on September 11, 1945. We actually arrived on August 29th. I have written them to correct their subsequent history since it also leaves out the story of the next assignments of the 1077. We left Sasebo a few days later and went to Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines for supplies and then up to Lingayen Gulf to load the Army's I Corps for duty in Japan, now that the Marines had secured the area.

When we backed off the shore at Lingayen Gulf, the water was shallow and we had a two hour effort to back off the beach because of the extreme sand suction on our bow. We came loose suddenly and the operators of the stern anchor were unable to rewind the cable fast enough. The cable wound around the starboard propeller bending and damaging the shaft and screw, making it inoperable. However, on the port engine we still were able to transport the Army troops to Wakayama, Osaka and Nagoya at a reduced speed of six knots.

We were then ordered to Okinawa for repair in a floating dry-dock ARD-27. While enroute, our task group encountered Typhoon Louise, the infamous 3rd Typhoon off Okinawa, which seriously damaged, sank or beached 202 Navy ships, landing craft and merchant ships. We went through the eye of the typhoon and we experienced seas over 100 feet high. Later reports recorded winds on other ships well over 134 knots. It was a terrible 36 hours, with a single main engine operative, in which sheets of corrugated steel blown off Okinawa's Army Quonset Huts hit our ship 60 miles off the coast. In WWII we had no satellites to predict weather and relied solely on the on board barometer plus Fox broadcasts of the best predictions, usually available from visual sightings from passing aircraft.

We were in Okinawa for the month of November 1945 while repairs proceeded. We departed Okinawa and had an eight day crossing to Guam where CinCPac/Poa forward headquarters was based. We received a dispatch (enclosed with the photos) which told us we were going back to the US mainland for overhaul and decommissioning. Sadly, however, we had to leave 50% of our crew behind. With the war over, many personnel were being discharged early and some members of newer crews such as ours were being reassigned.

We had another eight day crossing to Pearl Harbor. We spent Christmas 1945 at sea and spent New Years at Kawalo Basin in Honolulu. We started back to Conus on January 3, 1946, arriving January 11, 1946. In San Francisco we swung at a buoy for several months off Hunter's Point, waiting for yard availability at Mare Island.

In April 1946 we were again underway, this time for Astoria, OR for several days and then up the Columbia River to the Swan Island Shipyard at Portland, OR. We spend the next two months mothballing the 1077 and preparing her for decommissioning. With six weeks left, I was given command of LST 761 but my heart always stayed on the 1077. I was released from active duty on July 7, 1946. She was decommissioned later that month.

After the war I joined the active Naval Reserve in New Haven, CT where I served as Executive Officer and later as Commanding Officer of a Naval Reserve Surface Division. I had eight two week training cruises on Submarines and qualified for Command of Destroyer class ships before transferring to my original interest in Naval Intelligence as a Communications specialist in the Naval Security Group. I completed 23.5 years active and reserve duty and retired to the inactive reserve in 1967 as Commander USNR (Ret).

Howard M. Benedict, CDR, USNR (Ret)