The correct designation for this ship is not “USS” BLADENSBURG but rather “SS” BLADENSBURG. “USS” means “United States Ship” and designates a commissioned vessel in the U.S. Navy, generally but not exclusively a warship. A merchant ship typically is denoted “SS” meaning “steamship.”
BLADENSBURG was a type T2-SE-A1 tanker constructed by the Kaiser Swan Island shipyard in Portland, Oregon, USA, in 83 days between June and September 1943. As noted, she survived World War II; I could find no evidence that she was damaged during her wartime career. She was sold into private service in 1948, resold and renamed several times, and was finally scrapped in Brownsville, Texas, in 1981. See
http://shipbuildinghistory.com/shipyards/emergencylarge/kswanisland.htm and scroll to hull number 26. Also see
http://www.mariners-l.co.uk/T2B.html and scroll to the name of the ship.
The Australian Navy website includes images of ship movement cards for vessels operating in the Pacific during World War II. There is one card for BLADENSBURG, listing what appears to be a single lengthy voyage from October 1943 to March 1944, with numerous ports of call. The ship departed on another voyage on April 23, 1944, but there is no additional information of interest. See
https://www.navy.gov.au/media-room/publications/wwii-merchant-ship-movement-records-australia and go from there. Much of the pertinent information on ship movement cards is handwritten and sometimes difficult to decipher.
Additionally the subscription website Fold3 (
https://www.fold3.com/) has images of war diaries that apparently reference BLADENSBURG. A free seven-day subscription is available.
As to logs of U.S. merchant ships, the United States National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) maintains original “official logs” of merchant ships from World War II. Official logs are not the day-to-day operational logs (e.g., deck logs) showing the ship’s position, course, speed, etc. Instead official logs contain primarily “administrative” information, so to speak, concerning a voyage. Among other things, official logs include the names and ratings of the merchant crew and inclusive dates and destinations of a voyage. See
https://www.archives.gov/research/military/logbooks/merchant-vessels.html for a description of the contents of official logs. Masters of merchant ships were required to turn over their official logs to the U.S. Coast Guard at the end of a voyage. Note, however, that there is no central repository of official logs of U.S. merchant vessel. Rather they are maintained by the National Archives facility nearest the port in which a given voyage ended. The voyage noted above ended March 23, 1944, in San Pedro, California. Presumably the official log for that voyage, for instance, would be found in the National Archives facility in San Francisco.
Was your father a merchant mariner or was he in the U.S. Navy Armed Guard that supplied personnel to man defensive weapons on merchant ships? If the latter, NARA maintains other records that would be of interest.
