The ship
SS Lewis L. Dyche was an EC2-S-C1 Liberty ship, one of 2,710 of the type. She was named for Lewis Lindsay Dyche, a Kansas naturalist and taxidermist at the University of Kansas, who died in 1915. The Maritime Administration vessel card spells the middle name Lyndsay. She was a cargo ship, not a Navy ship. The War Shipping Administration owned her. The Inter-Ocean Steamship Company operated her under a general agency agreement.
The Oregon Shipbuilding yard in Portland built her in 1943. The yard list numbers the hull 2532, between Simeon G. Reed and John Straub, and marks her USAT. The Maritime Administration card gives her as a general-cargo ship: 441 feet, a beam of 57 feet, 7,176 gross tons, and 4,380 net tons. The card does not give a keel date, a launch date, or a delivery date.
A Liberty in a war zone carried a merchant crew and a Navy Armed Guard on the guns. Her master was John Warren Platt of Oakland, California. The Armed Guard officer named on the casualty list is Lieutenant (jg) William H. Abbott of Kansas.
4 January 1945
She was on the way from Leyte to Mindoro with a cargo of ammunition. Mindoro had been landed on 15 December 1944, and the resupply ships were still running. John Burke, another ammunition Liberty from the same Portland yard, had already been lost on 28 December in the Mindanao Sea. This was a later day, and a different ship.
Samuel J. Cox, in Naval History and Heritage Command H-Gram 040, puts the hit at 1730 on 4 January. A kamikaze struck her. The ammunition detonated. She blew up, as John Burke had. Cox writes that the blast killed all 71 merchant mariners aboard and damaged two PT boats a quarter mile away. He does not name the boats.
The Maritime Administration card records the same day and the same cause: struck by a Japanese kamikaze while en route from Leyte to Mindoro, in use as cargo transportation. It places the loss in Mindoro Strait, off the west coast of Mindoro Island, and records 82 lives lost. The card gives no latitude. The figure of 71 merchant seamen is also the count in the War Shipping Administration Pacific report. The card's 82 is the larger total. The two numbers are left as the two sources give them.
Everyone aboard was killed. Among the merchant crew was messman Leslie Vernon Roberts, an Australian whose name is on the Australian War Memorial commemorative roll. Platt was lost with the ship. So was Abbott.
No photograph of this hull has turned up. The Maritime Administration card says it has no images for the vessel. The portrait below is Lewis Lindsay Dyche, the namesake, not the ship.
