Ships
- USS American Legion (AP-35) In command, 7 August 1942
Captain Thomas D. Warner, Thomas Dickens Warner in full, graduated from the United States Naval Academy in the class of 1916. He was a commander when the Navy placed him in command of the transport American Legion. He and his wife, Lucy Carney Warner, had a son, Thomas D. Warner, Jr., and a daughter, Elizabeth.
The ship had been laid down at Camden, New Jersey, in 1919 as the passenger liner Badger State and was delivered in July 1921. She ran in commercial service between New York and South America from the mid-1920s, later lay idle, and then served the Army as a transport. Still under the Army, she left New York on 27 July 1941 in a convoy whose escort included the carrier Wasp. She carried equipment for the 33d Pursuit Squadron, whose fighters flew from Wasp, and she reached Reykjavik, Iceland, on 6 August. The convoy sailed on 12 August and was back in New York on 21 August. The Navy acquired her the next day, classified her as a transport, and designated her AP-35. On the afternoon of 26 August 1941 she went into commission with Warner in command.
The white Army paint was replaced with dark gray. On 12 September four tugs moved her to the embarkation pier at Brooklyn, where she began loading cargo and soon took civilian passengers. She loaded ammunition in Gravesend Bay and reached Charleston, South Carolina, on 18 September. In February 1942 she was assigned to the Naval Transportation Service and started toward Halifax, but unreliable machinery turned her back to Boston. Repairs kept her there until late March.
On 9 April 1942 American Legion sailed from New York for the Panama Canal and Tongatabu, in the Tonga Islands. She arrived on 8 May with Army passengers, including nurses, sent to open a field hospital. She went on to Wellington, New Zealand, later that month and joined the ships gathering for the first American landing in the Solomon Islands. Just before she sailed, twelve 20-millimeter guns were added. The executive officer, Commander Ratcliffe C. Welles, and the gunnery officer directed the ship's men, who mounted the battery on the old sun deck and had it ready to fire after about two days of bad weather. American Legion left Wellington on 18 July.
She sailed with Task Group X-ray, the transports and cargo ships assigned to the Guadalcanal landing. On the morning of 7 August 1942, Warner still in command, American Legion went to general quarters at 0545 and manned her landing stations about fifteen minutes later. At 0614 the cruisers and destroyers opened fire on the beaches. American Legion and the transport Fuller put the first troops ashore on Guadalcanal. That afternoon her guns joined the barrage against the first Japanese air attack on the invasion fleet, and they fired again the next day. Warner remained in command through the early months of the fight to hold the island. Commander Ratcliffe C. Welles relieved him on 1 January 1943. The next month the ship was reclassified an attack transport and numbered APA-17.