Haapalah / Aliyah Bet

Henry Gibbins, named after United States Army General Henry Gibbins, served the Army as a troop transport during World War II
Renamed: in 1959, Empire State IV;in 1973, Bay State
Built: by Ingalls Shipbuilding, Pascagoula, Mississippi
Laid down: August 23, 1941, as the fast banana boat, Biloxi, for the United Fruit Company, under Maritime Commission contract
Launched: November 11, 1942
Delivered: February 27, 1943, to the Army Transportation Service, commissioned as USAT Henry Gibbins
Identification: MC hull type C3-1N P&C, MC hull no. 164
Displacement: 10,556 tons
NavSource Online cites: displacement of USNS Henry Gibbins (T-AP-183) was 10,418 tons
Length: 489 feet
Beam: 70 feet
Draft: 26 feet
Engine: Turbine engines, single shaft, 8,500 ship horse power
Speed: 16.5 knots
Troops: 1,976

On July 20, 1944, Liberty ship, USAT Henry Gibbons, sailed from the Bay of Napoli. carrying wounded American soldiers and 982 refugees, of which 108 were not Jewish; President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not want the rescue mission to be perceived as a Jewish project.
She was part of a convoy of 16 troop and cargo ships escorted by 13 warships, plus two ships carrying Nazi prisoners of war which ran parallel to USAT Henry Gibbons as protection against Nazi attack.

On August 3, 1944, USAT Henry Gibbons sailed into Pier 84 in the Port of New York.
None of the refugees were permitted to disembark.
They spent the night on the ship and the next day the men and women were led to a hut on the wharf where they were separated.
The refugees were ordered to remove all their clothes, and march in front of American soldiers who sprayed them from head to toe with DDT to disinfect them, while their clothes were put into a chamber, disinfected, and then returned.
The refugees had no legal status under American lawand the Justice Department refused to permit them to register as aliens under the Alien Registration Law.
The United States Government had decided to house the refugees for the duration of the war with the intention of returning them to their own countries when the war ended.
The refugees had signed documents agreeing to their return, and they carried no passports, but were given cardboard identification tags to wear around their necks, that were labeled, "U.S. ARMY Casual Baggage".
Each refugee ID tag had an identification number, but not a name.
The refugees were transferred to two harbor ferries that took them across the Hudson River to Hoboken, and the terminal dock of a railroad line, guarded by 100 MPs, and were not permitted to contact any of their friends and relatives in America, as a war precaution.
A press conference was allowed, where a selected group of refugees told reporters their stories, after which, the refugees then boarded a train for Fort Ontario, a former army camp in Oswego.
The refugees were shocked when they saw that their new home was to be an internment camp surrounded by a tall chain-link fence, topped with three rows of barbed wire. The refugees were placed under quarantine for four weeks; no refugees were permitted to leave the camp and visitors were not allowed. at Fort Ontario, which was under the jurisdiction of the War Relocation Authority (WRA) of the Department of the Interior,

On March 1, 1950, USAT Henry Gibbins was transferred to the United States Navy, and placed in service with the Military Sea Transportation Service (MSTS) as USNS Henry Gibbins (T-AP-183)

In 1959, USNS Henry Gibbins (T-AP-183) was transferred by the Maritime Commission to the New York Maritime Academy at Fort Schuyler, for use as a training vessel and renamed TS Empire State IV.

In 1978, Henry Gibbons Bay State was returned to the Maritime Administration after her final training cruise.
Between the hull damage she had sustained in 1977, her age, and an increase in Massachusetts Maritime Academy's enrollment, she no longer suited the Academy's requirements.
According to the United States Maritime Administration, she was scrapped in 1983 after suffering an engine room fire.