hundred US Navy personnel to Brazil to fit her with a new diesel engine. The work was not completed until March 1943, when she made a thirty-day voyage to Norfolk, Virginia for further work and conversion to a troopship. When she arrived in Norfolk, she had been stripped of most of her elegant furnishings such as mahogany and teak wood paneling. She was refitted as a troop transport, which took about a year to rectify all the sabotage by the German crew. While at Norfolk she was named USS Lejeune (AP-74), after USMC General John Archer Lejeune. Transatlantic troop ship Lejeune was fully commissioned in April or May 1944. On 11 June 1944, she began her wartime service in her new role as a US Navy troop transport with a voyage from Norfolk to Glasgow, Scotland, with 4,460 soldiers aboard. Her troop capacity would later be increased to 4,650. Beginning on 12 July, she then made a trip from New York to Glasgow, with 207 officers and 4,307 Navy personnel. In December, she made an Atlantic crossing with elements of the 69th Infantry Division, which was destined to meet Soviet troops on the banks of the Elbe River deep within Germany five months later, in April 1945. Lejeune made a total of ten round-trip transatlantic crossings before the end of the war, and a further nine crossings were made to the United Kingdom, France or Africa in the months immediately after, until she returned to Norfolk 9 May 1946 for overhaul. Postwar troop service On 28 September 1946 Lejeune resumed service. From 19 October 1946 to 1 August 1947, she made a total of four trips to the Pacific, from San Francisco to Shanghai and Tsingtao, China, and to Yokosuka, Japan. She then sailed back to New York City, reaching her destination 29 August, and from there returned to San Francisco 25 September. Decommissioning USS Lejeune departed San Francisco for Bremerton, Washington on 2 October 1947, where she was decommissioned 9 February 1948 and placed in the Pacific Reserve Fleet at Tacoma, Washington. She was struck from the Naval Vessel Register in July 1957 and scrapped at Portland, Oregon 16 August 1966. Her ship's bell however was preserved, and in 1971 it was mounted on the flagstaff at Marine Base HQ Camp Lejeune. During her US Navy career Lejeune transported more than 100,000 troops. German former crew During internment in