The Unsung Maumee

Some 110 years ago this week at the New York Navy Yard, Brooklyn, the 15,000-ton, 455-foot USS Maumee (Fuel Ship No. 14) was commissioned. She was not very appealing in profile. USS Maumee (Fuel Ship # 14, later AO-2) photographed circa 1917 in her original configuration with the bridge near the bow. The unusually small smokestack is for her early-model Diesel engines. In both this ship and her near sister Kanawha, the bridge soon had to be moved aft of the foremast. Collection of Hubert C. Rickert. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph NH 93088 Her skipper was LCDR Henry Charles Dinger (USNA 1898), an engineering whiz and destroyerman with some good ideas on anti-submarine warfare. Meanwhile, her XO and Chief Engineering Officer was a young LT Chester W. Nimitz (USNA 1905), a submariner and, at the time, the Navy’s foremost diesel expert, who had studied the curious engines at the Maschinenfabrik-Augsburg-Nürnberg (M.A.N.) plants in Europe before the Great War. Dinger,…