[1] The Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company of Chester, Pennsylvania worked around this problem by designing a T2 variant which used turbo-electric propulsion; that is, the steam turbine ran a generator, which in turn powered electric drive motors without the need for gearing.

The War Shipping Board requisitioned the last remaining T2 and T2-A tankers still in commercial service, Catawba and Aekay, and, with reservations given their limited speed, two nearly-complete Sun T2-SE-A1s, Harlem Heights and Valley Forge.

In August, with the fourteen repeats of the big 18-knot (33 km/h) Cimarron class still a year from completion, the Navy took over the next two T2-SEs off Sun's ways, Oriskany and Stillwater, renamed Pecos (AO-65) and Cache (AO-67).

In response, on 27 July the Maritime Commission decided that the new Marinship yard at Sausalito, California, created to produce Liberty ships, would construct T2-SE tankers instead, with an initial order of 22.

On 16 October 1944 the Chief of Naval Operations recommended that the Maritime Commission building program for the last half of 1945 be modified to provide for the construction of nine additional oilers for the Navy.

The Escambias were retired to the National Defense Reserve Fleet by the end of the 1950s, while the somewhat more economical Suamicos soldiered on through the Vietnam War; Cowanesque struck a reef and foundered off Okinawa in 1972.