Brazilian Navy Service
Assuming control of the vessel at Tampa on 16 July 1945, the Brazilian Navy renamed the veteran transport Duque de Caxias (U-11), the second ship of that navy named in honor of Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, Duke of Caxias, the patron of the Brazilian Army.
Duque de Caxias headed to Naples and on 28 August 1945 departed there with elements of the returning Brazilian Expeditionary Force. The ship arrived at Rio de Janeiro for the first time on 17 September 1945. The ship then loaded American military stores from US bases in Brazil and sailed for New York, arriving on 10 November 1945, with plans to repatriate wounded Brazilian soldiers who had been recuperating in the US.
On 31 July 1947, a day after sailing from Rio de Janeiro for Europe, oil spilled on the ship’s boilers, causing an engine-room fire that quickly spread through the first class cabins and killed 27. The ship was towed from its position off Cabo Frio into Rio de Janeiro on 1 August 1947. The ship had been carrying 1,060 passengers bound for Lisbon, Naples, and Marseille, along with 500 crew members, and had been scheduled to carry Italian refugees on its return voyage.
In 1953, Duque de Caxias was converted into a training ship, and in August of that year began a European and Mediterranean training cruise, which included a 12-day visit to New York in March 1954 as part of its homeward leg. The ship visited the United States again in December 1955, with midshipmen aboard touring the United States Naval Academy and honored at a cocktail by the Brazilian Ambassador, Joao Carlos Muniz, at the Brazilian Embassy in Washington, D.C. In October the following year, Duque de Caxias called at Philadelphia, and the new Brazilian Ambassador Ernani do Amaral Peixoto—also an Admiral in the Brazilian Navy—and his wife sponsored a tea dance in honor of Captain Antonio Andrade, other officers of the ship, and the midshipmen aboard the ship; Peixoto had traveled to Philadelphia to greet Andrade, a former naval attaché at the embassy. The ship was decommissioned 13 April 1959, and finally scrapped in 1963.
Read more about this topic: USS Orizaba (ID-1536)
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