Following British lead, the U.S. Navy made use of several Q'ships—armed merchant vessels intended to lure German submarines to destruction—during World War I but achieved no successes. Anticipating heavy merchant ship losses in the Atlantic because of a lack of escort ships, on 19 January 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed to Admiral Ernest J. King that a Q-ship effort be mounted. Six ships ultimately were involved in “Project LQ,” all but one assigned to the Atlantic. They sank no submarines, and the Atik (unofficially AK-101) was torpedoed and sunk with no survivors by the U-123 on 26 March 1942.
The largest and longest-serving of the Q-ships, and the only tanker, was the 7,096-gross-registered-ton Big Horn (AO-45), delivered as the commercial Gulf Dawn in July 1936 by Sun Shipbuilding, Chester, Pennsylvania. Taken over by the Navy on 31 March 1942, the 442-foot ship was converted for her clandestine mission by the Boston Navy Yard and was commissioned on 15 April under Commander Joseph A. Gainard, a former merchant skipper made famous by his role in convincing the Germans to release his ship, the City of Flint, after it was captured in Norwegian waters in the fall of 1939, for which he received the Navy Cross. The destroyer Gainard (DD-706) was named for him.
The Big Horn operated from July 1942 to January 1944 as a Q-ship, mostly in the Caribbean, using her old name as a disguise and trailing legitimate convoys in hopes of inviting attack. By the end of 1943, however, the Navy had adequate numbers of convoy escorts, and it was evident German subs were not falling for the Q-ship ruse. The surviving Q-ships were assigned to new duties, with the long-legged Big Horn transferred to the Coast Guard (as WAO-124) on 17 January 1944 and operated from Boston and Halifax as a North Atlantic weather-reporting ship. Returned to U.S. Navy control on 1 February 1945, but still operated by a Coast Guard crew, the Big Horn was redesignated “Miscellaneous-Unclassified” ship IX-207 and assigned to Service Forces Pacific, for which she operated as a shuttle tanker. From May to July 1945, she made four runs between Ulithi and the Philippines, delivering fuel to fleet oilers. With the ending of the war, the Big Horn became station tanker at Nagoya, Japan, until returning to home waters in February 1946. Decommissioned on 6 May 1946, she was transferred to the Maritime Commission and sold into commercial service in 1948, operating under the U.S. and Liberian flags for four different owners and under four different names until scrapped in 1960.
The Gulf Dawn, seen nine days prior to acquisition by the Navy as the Big Horn, was a typical product tanker of 1930s design. Her twin screws were powered by Westinghouse double-reduction steam turbines that produced a total of 3,808 shaft horsepower as late as 1945 and gave her a sustained speed of 11.5 knots.
Although several of the Q-ships received concealed armament, the Big Horn—seen here as AO-45 on 22 July 1942 on completion of her conversion to a Q-ship—appears to mount only a single 4-inch/50-caliber gun aft and two machine guns on her lengthened forecastle. The plated-in areas on the poop and bridge superstructures were to provide space for accommodations for her greatly enlarged crew of 15 officers and 224 enlisted personnel rather than to conceal hidden weapons. The ship’s very odd new appearance, however, may have made German submarine commanders suspicious, contributing to her lack of success.
The Big Horn as IX-207 on 11 March 1945, just prior to departing for the Southwest Pacific, was armed with single 3-inch/50-caliber dual purpose guns fore and aft, two single 40-mm antiaircraft guns on the forecastle, and eight single 20-mm antiaircraft guns—and with the bridge area restored to a more normal appearance. She could transport some 7,900 tons of fuel as a shuttle tanker.