MULLER, CARL

CARL MULLER

NAVY

Carl Muller

Before entering the service Carl Mueller was living in Yaphank. Muller, a Lieutenant Commander served on a mine sweeper and a troop transport. He made 9 voyages across the ocean to Europe. The following account of his service appeared in the Patchogue Advance on April 26, 1918, “Lieutenant Commander Carl G. Muller, U. S Navy has been paving a short visit to Yaphank, while on a weeks leave of absence. He has, during the past seven months, been going across to France as first lieutenant on the U. S. S. Agamenon, formerly the Kaiser Wilhelm II, having made three round trips this winter with soldiers for Uncle Sam’s Army. On the 24^th of March he was promoted to lieutenant commander and placed in command of the U. S. S. Norlina, a 7,000 ton ammunition ship, which is to leave shortly for France from an Atlantic port.

USS Agamenon in dry dock at the New York Navy Yard

Ship History for the USS Agamenon

For more than two and a half years, as armies exhausted themselves in the European trenches, Kaiser Wilhelm II remained inactive. She was seized by the United States Government when it declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917, and work soon began to repair her machinery, sabotaged earlier by a German caretaker crew, and otherwise prepare the ship for use as a transport. While this work progressed, she was employed as a barracks ship at the New York Navy Yard.

The U.S. Navy placed the ship in commission as USS Kaiser Wilhelm II (ID # 3004) in late August 1917. Her name was changed to Agamemnon at the beginning of September and active war work commenced at the end of October, when she left for her first troopship voyage to France. While at sea on 9 November 1917, she was damaged in a collision with another big ex-German transport, USS Von Steuben, but delivered her vital passengers to the war zone a few days later. Following return to the United Stated in December and subsequent repair work, Agamemnon again steamed to France in mid-January 1918 and thereafter regularly crossed the Atlantic as part of the massive effort to establish a major American military presence on the Western Front. The routine was occasionally punctuated by encounters with real or suspected enemy submarines and, during the autumn of 1918, with outbreaks of influenza on board.

In mid-December 1918, just over a month after the Armistice ended the fighting, Agamemnon began to bring Americans home from France. She made nine voyages between then and August 1919, carrying nearly 42,000 service personnel, some four thousand more than she had transported overseas during wartime. USS Agamemnon was decommissioned in late August and turned over to the War Department for further use as a U.S. Army Transport. Laid up after the middle 1920s, she was renamed Monticello in 1927 but had no further active service. Too elderly for use in the Second World War, the ship was sold for scrapping in 1940.