S4-SE2-BE1. The is unrelated and was built on the Victory ship hull. All 32 vessels of the class were built under a MARCOM contract issued on 25 May 1943 to the Consolidated Steel Corporation of Wilmington, California. The first of the ships, , rolled off the Wilmington ways on 28 March 1944 and was commissioned on 1 August 1944. The rest rapidly followed, with a new Gilliam-class vessel being launched at an average of roughly one per week until April 1945. The speed of their construction was notable, with Consolidated Steel's contract of 32 vessels being fulfilled three months early. This was all the more impressive considering that this was an all-new design which had never been constructed anywhere previously. World War II service The first of the Gilliam-class ships entered service late in 1944, seeing initial action at either the Battle of Luzon or the Battle of Iwo Jima. Many ships of this class were present at the Invasion of Okinawa, which as it turned out was the only campaign where the later vessels saw combat. Regardless, all of them were engaged in a variety of cargo and transport missions throughout the Pacific during the final year of the war. Postwar missions In the immediate postwar period, the Gilliams, like most other classes of attack transport, were initially utilized to transport US troops for occupation duties - in Japan, China, Korea and other Far Eastern locations formerly occupied by the Imperial Japanese Army - and later as participants in Operation Magic Carpet, the giant sealift organized to bring hundreds of thousands of demobilizing soldiers back to the United States. Operation Crossroads At the end of the war, the US Navy found itself with far more ships than it required in peacetime. An assessment of the then unknown effects of atomic weaponry upon a naval fleet was a high postwar priority, resulting in the formation of a Joint Task Force to plan and execute atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in the summer of 1946. Known as Operation Crossroads, these tests were to be conducted on a large array of unmanned target ships to determine the effects of atomic explosions on a variety of vessel types. The Gilliams were identified as being well-suited to the tests, not because of any perceived inferiority or lack of value (they were in fact relatively new, well-constructed vessels) but rather because they were designed