Career
USS West Avenal (ID-3871) was commissioned into the Navy on 1 February with Lieutenant Commander Franz Patterson, USNRF, in command. West Avenal took on an initial load of flour and departed San Francisco on 17 April for New York. She soon developed a steering gear problem and put in at San Diego for repairs. After getting underway again, she transited the Panama Canal and, cutting short her journey, arrived at Norfolk, Virginia, on 4 April. There she was decommissioned the next day and returned to the USSB.
West Avenal departed Norfolk on a voyage to Leith, Scotland on 9 April 1919, but was forced to return to port after suffering an engine breakdown. Following repairs, she made several voyages between the East Coast of the United States and various destinations in South America, Spain, France and England. A few mentions of the ship crop up in contemporary news accounts. In August 1919, for example, The New York Times shows West Avenal slated for departure to Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 12 August. The following January, the newspaper reported that West Avenal was rammed by the British Leyland Line cargo ship Lacastrian. Departing New York in a dense fog on the morning of 9 January 1920 for Antwerp, Lacastrian rammed into the port side of West Avenal, which was inbound with a load of onions from Valencia, Spain. The damage was severe enough that West Avenal's captain ordered her grounded to avoid sinking in New York Harbor. More than two weeks later, The Washington Post printed a photograph of West Avenal, still grounded off the Red Hook flats. Another report in the Times a year later showed her arrival in Saint-Nazaire, France, on 13 August 1920.
In January 1921, The Atlanta Constitution ran a travelogue of a local man who had sailed on West Avenal to South America in August 1919. During his travels, West Avenal had departed the US on 27 August and called at Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands; Rio de Janeiro (where the ship arrived on 24 September) Santos in Brazil; and Montevideo, Uruguay. Another report in The New York Times the following year listed West Avenal's arrival in Genoa, Italy, on 19 January 1921.
West Avenal underwent further repairs in 1921, after which she was laid up by the USSB in the Staten Island Reserve Fleet 3 Section 1. The vessel was delivered at New York to the Union Shipbuilding Company of Baltimore, Maryland for scrapping on 29 August 1929.
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