Salerno Bay was laid down as Winjah Bay on 7 February 1944 by Seattle-Tacoma at Tacoma. She was launched on 26 September 1944. Mrs. Ward Gilbert sponsored her. On 29 September she went to the Commercial Iron Works at Portland to be finished, and Captain W. C. Holt commissioned her on 19 May 1945.
At the end of June she embarked her first air group, a Marine fighter squadron and a Marine torpedo-bombing squadron, and trained off southern California. Two days after Japan capitulated in mid-August she sailed west with Composite Squadron 68 embarked as passengers. She trained further in Hawaiian waters, including night qualification of the Marine air group, and on 21 September anchored in Buckner Bay, Okinawa. She later shifted to the Hagushi anchorage. In early October she put to sea to ride out a typhoon, returned on the 12th, and on the 14th sailed to support the occupation of Formosa by troops of the Chinese Army. From there she went to Saipan.
She then carried veterans to Pearl Harbor and San Diego, passed the Panama Canal, and joined the Atlantic Fleet, where her work was qualifying carrier pilots along the east coast and in the Caribbean. In the spring of 1947 she was ordered inactivated. In June she sailed from Norfolk to Boston, and she was decommissioned on 4 October 1947.
She was recommissioned on 20 June 1951 and decommissioned a second time, at Boston, on 16 February 1954. Redesignated AKV-10 in 1959, she was struck on 1 June 1961 and sold on 30 October 1961.