USS STOKES (AKA-68)
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Salvaging a Ship: Retiree spends years uncovering history of vessel named for county
By Lisa R.
Boone
Ken Brown was sifting through a 1944 edition of The Danbury Reporter when he first found out about the U.S. Navy attack and cargo ship named after Stokes County. Brown, of Sandy Ridge, retired from the life of an active-duty naval senior chief petty officer in August 1977, but if it has to do with the Navy, he’s interested, he said. And the article connected the Navy to his county. In that moment, he decided to research the ship’s history. He’s been at it for 15 years and plans to donate his findings to the county’s public library in Danbury. He’s learned, for example, that the Stokes played a large role in the battle of Iwo Jima and received two battle stars for service during World War II. “A lot of people in Stokes County don’t know about this ship,” Brown said. “I thought it was great that I found a ship named after Stokes.” A common practice Attack and cargo ships were named after counties when the Stokes was commissioned, said Jack Green, a public-affairs officer with the Naval Historical Center in Washington. “All your attack transports, which transported troops to invasions, were named after counties,” Green said. Brown, a proud former Naval officer turned history buff, has done a lot in an effort to bring light to the history of the ship named for Stokes, the county he grew up in and eventually returned to. He has contacted Navy officials for detailed information, created a Web site with the history of the USS Stokes and even contacted sailors who served on the ship. Robert Ellis of Las Vegas served on the Stokes from November of 1944 to December of 1945. “What I remember mostly, when I went aboard it, was that the crew was basically all green,” Ellis said. “Very few of them had ever seen any action at all.” Ellis and fellow crew members were in one of the waves that stormed the beach at Iwo Jima, he said. “We were too young to be scared,” Ellis said. “It was just so intense with the troops and everything. We’d go in with a little cargo and bring out wounded and the dead." “For anyone who says it was glory or whatever, it wasn’t, believe me." “The Stokes was very fortunate - we never got hit. We came close a couple of times, but we were very fortunate.” The Stokes AKA-68 was built in June 1944 by the North Carolina Shipbuilding Co. in Wilmington and commissioned as the USS Stokes on Oct. 12, 1944, according to Naval Historical Center records. The Stokes arrived at Pearl Harbor in January of 1945 and was assigned to a transport division that assisted in the assault against Iwo Jima, the records show. The ship arrived at Iwo Jima in February of 1945, according to the Naval Historical Center Web site, and her sailors supplied Marines with rockets, ammunition and gasoline while evacuating casualties. After the war ended, the ship operated between the Philippine Islands, Guam and Japan until returning to the states in 1946 to be inactivated and disposed of, records show. Brown’s research follows the ship as a commercial carrier that was sold twice and eventually scrapped in Taiwan in the 1970s. Ellis said he hopes that Brown will be able to set up an exhibit displaying the history of the Stokes. “I think it’s a very good idea because the history of World War II ships is dying,” Ellis said. “After the war was over and everything, they sold a lot of the ships and scrapped a lot of the ships - they just started getting rid of them." “I realize that we couldn’t maintain a fleet the size that we had before, but I think that they should have saved mementos of the ship.” Though Brown doesn’t have any parts from the ship to exhibit, he plans to do all that he can to preserve the ship’s history. “It seems like you always come back to the place you were born,” Brown said. “I want to bring the history of the ship back so people can know about it.” Lisa Boone can be reached at 727-7232.
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