The General class transports

Thirty ships of one design

The published specifications for the class give a displacement of 9,950 tons light and 17,250 tons at full load, a length of 522 feet 10 inches and a service speed of 17 knots. Troop capacity is quoted between 2,173 and 6,086 according to the fit of each ship. Twenty-six of the thirty were transferred to the United States Army Transportation Service in 1946, which is why the refugee sailings are usually recorded with the prefix USAT rather than USS. Twenty-four passed again in 1950 to the Military Sea Transportation Service and became USNS ships.1

The wartime fit was never used at full capacity for refugees. A contemporary account of the American refugee sailings notes that these C4 ships were built to carry 3,485 soldiers but usually sailed with fewer than 700 displaced persons, the difference reflecting family accommodation, hospital space and the length of the passage rather than any generosity of quarters.5

A handbook of troopships published in April 1947 applies the name more widely than the thirty Kaiser ships. Roland W. Charles lists the General G. O. Squier as the first of the C4 type transports, built in 1943 by Kaiser Co., Inc. at Richmond, California, and lists the General John Pope as the first of the P2 'generals', built in 1943 by the Federal Shipbuilding & Drydock Co. at Kearny, New Jersey. The P2 ships came from a different building programme and are not among the thirty C4-S-A1 transports described here.113

From troop transport to refugee transport

The first American troopship to carry European refugees to a resettlement country was USAT General S. D. Sturgis, which sailed for Rio de Janeiro in 1947. In the same year the class began the two movements that mattered most to Ukrainians. On 7 October 1947 General Stuart Heintzelman loaded 835 people at Bremerhaven for Canada, reaching Halifax on 16 October with 855 aboard; among them were 125 Mennonites, described at the time as the largest single group to leave Bremerhaven. On 30 October the same ship left Bremerhaven again with 843 displaced persons from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and reached Fremantle on 28 November 1947. That was the first of about 150 chartered refugee voyages to Australia, and the first time the Australian government paid the passage of non-British migrants.26811

A third route opened in 1948. When the United States Displaced Persons Act came into force, the first sailing under it was made by General W. M. Black, which left Bremerhaven on 21 October 1948 and came up New York harbour at the end of the month. A film held by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records the embarkation, with banners on the quay reading “Welcome to the first DP Emigrants to the US, Bremerhaven Port of Embarkation” and “Ship to freedom”, passengers in overcoats and identification tags, and a military band playing as the ship left.57

What a voyage was like

Bremerhaven was the usual port of embarkation, with Naples serving the Italian and Mediterranean movements and, for a few sailings, Shanghai. Emigrants reached the quay through staging camps: the Wentorf Resettlement Centre outside Hamburg for the British zone, and the Funk-Kaserne Transit Centre in Munich for the American zone. Reporting from 1948 describes people boarding in cast-off clothing and carrying very little, orphans first, then the aged, then families. Families were not quartered together: on one sailing 193 family groups were aboard, but the 374 men slept aft and the 316 women forward, with cabins kept for the elderly and for mothers with small children.5

Passengers ran much of the ship's domestic work. Meals were eaten standing at high tables, apart from mothers with young children who were seated in the former officers' dining room. Women were assigned to the galley and men to cleaning details on deck and in the engine room, and the sleeping quarters were swabbed by the passengers themselves. Crossings were rough: one passenger remembered that about half the bunks were folded away and it was still crowded, that many were seasick, and that the deck vents gave off fumes that made it worse. A North Atlantic storm extended one ten-day passage on General R. L. Howze by four days.5

Ukrainians aboard

Ukrainians were rarely the largest group on any one sailing, and the classifications used at the time make them hard to count. The first sailing under the American Displaced Persons Act is an exception, because the nationalities were listed as the ship docked. Of 813 passengers there were 388 Poles, 178 Lithuanians, 59 Czechs, 32 Latvians, 17 Ukrainians, 14 Estonians, 10 Yugoslavs, 10 Romanians, 6 Hungarians, 16 Germans and 83 recorded as without country, with 63 orphans among them and ages running from a seven-week-old baby to a woman of seventy-nine. Those numbers describe one voyage of General W. M. Black in October 1948 and nothing wider. The museum catalogue for the film of that embarkation names one boarding passenger, John Poliszczuk.57

The wider movements give the scale. About 34,000 Ukrainians reached Canada between 1947 and 1954 and about 21,500 reached Australia between 1948 and 1951, in both cases mainly from the camps in Germany and Austria and by no means all on General class ships. Many Ukrainians travelling to Australia were entered on manifests under Polish or Soviet nationality, which is one reason ship-by-ship Ukrainian totals are seldom recoverable from the sailing lists alone.109

Arrival and what followed

In Canada the ships discharged at Pier 21 in Halifax, and in some seasons continued to Quebec, Montreal or New York. In Australia the arrival ports were Fremantle, Melbourne and Sydney, and the arrivals were sent on by train to reception centres, above all the Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre and later Bathurst Migrant Reception and Training Centre and Greta Migrant Camp. Australian entry carried an obligation to work for two years wherever the government directed, without the right to change job or place, before permanent residence followed.6810

The refugee charters were a short episode in the ships' lives. Most of the class passed to the Military Sea Transportation Service in 1950 and went to Korean War trooping. General W. M. Black carried more than 65,000 troops between 1950 and 1953 and was laid up in 1955. General Stuart Heintzelman was deactivated in 1954, sold in 1968, rebuilt as the container ship Mobile and scrapped in Taiwan in 1984. General W. C. Langfitt carried Hungarian refugees after 1956, became the container ship Transindiana in 1969 and was scrapped in Texas in 1983.234