S.S. Lurline-- Part 1: Fast Ocean Liner That Carried Ray Merrick to War

From Wikipedia.

Last month, I wrote about World War II veteran Ray "Pops" Merrick, a member of our Fox Lake, Illinois, American Legion who was posted during the war over in the India-Burma area and part of the effort to keep the Chinese Nationalist forces fighting the Japanese over "The Hump."

He went across the Pacific Ocean onboard the S.S. Lurline and had some vivid memories of the voyage.  Not ever hearing of this ship, I decided to do some more research on it.

The SS Lurline was the third vessel in the Matson Lines to have this name and was the last of its four  fast and luxurious  ocean liners built for their Hawaii and Australia runs from the U.S. West Coast.

Its sister ships were the SS Malolo, SS Mariposa and SS Monterey.  All became fast troopships during the war., operated by the War Shipping Administration.

After the war, it went back to taking passengers around the Pacific until put out of service in 1980 and scrapped in 1987.

--GreGen