Tacoma class. The Navy crewed all of the Tacoma-class ships with United States Coast Guard personnel. The Consolidated Steel-built ships, thanks to their superior reliability and performance, all saw service in the Pacific war zone where one, , teamed with the minesweeper to sink the Japanese submarine I-12 in November 1944, but the US Navy generally relegated the patrol frigates to local training and escort responsibilities, and to duty as weather ships, for which the aft mounted 3-inch gun was removed in order to allow the installation of a weather balloon hangar. The United States built an additional 21 Tacoma-class ships for the United Kingdom for service in the Royal Navy, where they were known as the Colony class, and all but one of them initially received British names, rather than the names of small US cities, while still US Navy ships; they were returned to the United States between 1946 and 1948. Eighteen of these were quickly scrapped, but two were sold to Egypt, for use as civilian passenger ships, and one to Argentina, for service as a warship in the Argentine Navy. As a part of Project Hula, a secret 1945 program that transferred 149 US Navy ships to the Soviet Navy at Cold Bay, Alaska, in anticipation of the Soviet Union joining the war against Japan, the US Navy transferred 28 Tacoma-class ships to the Soviet Navy between July and September 1945. They were the largest, most heavily armed, and most expensive ships transferred during the program. At least some of them saw action in the Soviet offensive against Japanese forces in Northeast Asia, in August 1945. The transfer of two more, and , was cancelled when transfers halted on 5 September 1945. One of the transferred ships, EK-3 (ex-), ran aground and was damaged beyond economical repair in a November 1948 storm off Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, but the Soviet Union returned the other 27 frigates to the United States in October and November 1949. The US Navy quickly decommissioned 23 Tacoma-class ships after the end of World War II, after only very brief US Navy careers, and sold them for scrap in 1947 and 1948, although one, the former , was saved from the scrapyard to become a Brazilian merchant ship. The 27 ships the Soviet Union returned in 1949 went into the US Navys Pacific Reserve Fleet in Japan; 13 of them were recommissioned for US Navy