Please see this web page from the American Merchant Marine at War website for sources of photographs of World War II-era merchant ships: http://www.usmm.org/photosource.html. The list includes a Mr. Hultgren who may be your best source as his collection concentrates on Liberty ships. I know enough about his collection to be able to say that he apparently has an image of ROBERT LEWIS STEVENSON. Mr. Hultgren is quite elderly but at last report he is still actively managing his collection. There will be a charge for copying and mailing any photos and I don't know how much although likely nothing extravagant.
SS ROBERT LEWIS STEVENSON was built by the Kaiser Permanente Shipyard No. 2 in Richmond, California, in just 26 days in October-November 1943. Her keel was laid 21 October, she was launched 9 November, and she was completed and delivered for service on 16 November, 1943. See http://shipbuildinghistory.com/history/shipyards/4emergencylarge/wwtwo/kperm2.htm and scroll to hull number 2184.
She apparently had an uneventful wartime career as I can find nothing of great interest on the Internet. She operated primarily in the Pacific and Indian Oceans; her first voyage was from Los Angeles to Colombo, Ceylon, and Calcutta, India, between December 1943 and May 1944. Another voyage began in June 1944 in New Orleans, went as far as the Philippine Islands and New Guinea, and ended in San Francisco in April 1945. These may be the only two wartime voyages she made. Thereafter she may have been mothballed for many years and may have never sailed on her own again. If anything, her only real claim to fame was the unusual way in which she met her end in August - September 1967.
A detailed and highly technical report of the scuttling of SS ROBERT LEWIS STEVENSON is found at http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=AD0830742.
I also include below an extract from Time Magazine, dated September 15, 1967, after the initial scuttling attempt but before a final determination of the ship's fate was made.
Good luck.
Ron Carlson, Webmaster
Armed Guard / Merchant Marine website
www.armed-guard.com
************
TIME Magazine
Friday, September 15, 1967
The High Seas: Ahoy?
South of the Rat Islands, beneath the grey-green greasy Pacific swells off Alaska and close to the International Date Line that keeps Thursday from being Friday, an American submersible is missing. Shrouded in a fog bank, the S.S. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON started on her first—and presumably last—underwater cruise on Aug. 10. Ever since, the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard have kept five search vessels and a gaggle of aircraft looking for the ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON — to the intense interest of Russian trawlers in the area.
It is not that the Navy wants the ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON back. It was trying its best to sink her when she escaped. A superannuated World War II Liberty ship taken from the mothball fleet, she had been ballasted with concrete and topped off with a cargo of 2,000 tons of overage torpedo warheads, mines and other obsolete ammunition, becoming in effect a floating bomb. Then she was fitted with six SOFAR [SOund Fixing And Ranging] charges with hydrostatic fuses set to shiver her bulkheads automatically under the pressure of 4,000 ft. of water. One purpose of the planned undersea blast was to help the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency sharpen scientific techniques for detection of bootleg underground atomic tests. It was also a convenient way to dispose of munitions that become unpredictable with age.
But SOFAR proved not so good. When a demolition crew opened her sea cocks, the unmanned ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON drifted out of sight before a brisk sou'easter and lingered for 16 hours instead of disappearing from radar screens in four hours, according to schedule. Where she finally came to rest, nobody is quite sure, and the waterlogged hulk of the ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON is almost "transparent" to sonar blips used to locate submarines. But it seems likely that she lies in about 3,500 ft. of water—not deep enough to activate the fuses. Because the added pressure of a vessel passing overhead might detonate her, all shipping was ordered to keep clear. But early attempts to explode the lost ship with bombs dropped by Navy Invader jets were in vain. The special fuses fitted to three 1,000-lb. bombs did not go off.
Late last week a magnetometer towed by the U.S.N.S. SILAS BENT, a 285-ft.-long floating oceanographic laboratory, transmitted a suspect blip. But more than a score of wrecks litter the ocean floor off the Rat Islands; until a special camera synchronized to a high-powered strobe light can be lowered over the spot, the sea is guarding its secret.
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