In March 1926, due to an oil leak from inside the ship, near the end of one of her periodic refits, America suffered a fire that raged for seven hours and burned nearly all of her passenger cabins.

Easily one of the most luxurious passenger vessels to sail the seas, Amerika entered upper New York Bay on 20 October, reaching the Hamburg America piers at Hoboken, New Jersey, in mid-afternoon.

It was managed by the famous hotelier César Ritz, while the renowned chef Auguste Escoffier was responsible for creating the menu, organizing and staffing the kitchen and restaurant.

[3][2] French architect Charles Mewès was responsible for designing the interiors of Amerika, while the English firm of Waring & Gillow was contracted to decorate the main public rooms.

"[6] The Sphere wrote of the interiors that "the whole of the vessel is planned on such a scale that the various rooms do not any longer partake of the nature of ship's cabins but are rather a series of sumptuously-furnished and comfortably-contrived apartments such as one would find in a costly house on shore.

The room was paneled in oak "of the roughly-fashioned style of the sixteenth century" and along the walls of the upper-level was a carved frieze illustrating scenes from the life of Saint Hubert.

[3] On 6 April 1917, in anticipation that Congress would declare war on Germany, Edmund Billings, the Collector of Customs for the Port of Boston, ordered that Amerika and four other German ships (the Cincinnati, Wittekind, Köln, and Ockenfels) be seized.

On 18 October 1917, America departed the Boston Navy Yard and, two days later, arrived at Hoboken, New Jersey, which would be the port of embarkation for all of her wartime voyages carrying doughboys to Europe.

Met on 12 November off the coast of France by an escort consisting of converted American yachts and French airplanes and destroyers, the convoy reached safe haven at Brest, America's only wartime port of debarkation.

Just before midnight on the 14th, while the convoy steamed through a storm that limited visibility severely, a stranger, SS Instructor, unwittingly wandered into the formation and ran afoul of America.

In spite of attempts at radical course changes by both ships, America struck the intruder near the break of her poop deck and sheared off her stern which sank almost immediately.

America stopped briefly to search for survivors, but the danger of lurking U-boats limited the pause to the most abbreviated of durations, and the storm added other obstacles.

After embarking passengers for the return trip, she got underway on 25 July in company with Matsonia, Manchuria, Aeolus, Sierra, Martha Washington, Powhatan, and SS Patria.

Stone was credited with leading to safety many soldiers and sailors who had been blindly plunging through various compartments (the flooding of the engine rooms had put the lights out aboard the ship) seeking some means of escape.

Rear Admiral Gleaves arrived at the dock soon after the ship sank, the water covering her main deck, to see personally what had happened to one of the largest transports in the Cruiser-Transport Force.

Foreshadowing the Magic Carpet operations which would follow World War II, a massive effort was made after the armistice to return the veterans of the American Expeditionary Force to the United States.

The communist leaders quickly negotiated with Germany the treaty of Brest-Litovsk which took Russia out of the war and allowed the Central Powers to concentrate their resources on the Western Front.

Allied leaders hoped to use these dedicated and highly disciplined fighting men to bolster their own embattled troops on the western front and encouraged the Czechs to move east on the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Vladivostok where they could be embarked in transports for passage to France.

However, before this could be accomplished, the Czechs, who had tried to remain aloof from Russia's internal struggles, incurred the hostility and opposition of the Bolsheviks and found themselves involuntarily embroiled in the Russian Civil War as something of a rallying point for various counterrevolutionary forces.

On 30 December 1919, a representative of the War Department contacted the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations stating that Army transports America and President Grant "were to go on a long secret trip as soon as possible."

For the next eleven years, America plied the Atlantic, ranking third only in size to the United States Lines' ships Leviathan and George Washington—the latter running mate from the Cruiser-Transport Force days.

In June 1924, the America transported the United States Olympic team to Cherbourg, France, for the summer games held in Paris, making the return leg to New York in August.

The fire burned for seven hours and eventually consumed most of the passenger cabins as it swept the ship nearly from stem to stern, causing an estimated $2,000,000 worth of damage, equivalent to $33,027,796.61 in today's money.

Guided by her radio direction finder, the American ship homed in on the Italian and, late the following afternoon, finally sighted the endangered vessel through light snow squalls.

Taking a position off Florida's weather beam, America lowered her number one lifeboat, commanded by her Chief Officer, Harry Manning, with a crew of eight men.

After the boat had been rowed to within 50 feet (15 m) of the listing Florida, Manning had a line thrown across to the eager crew of the distressed freighter One by one, the 32 men from the Italian ship came across the rope.

By the time the last of them, the ship's captain, had been dragged on board the pitching lifeboat, the winds had reached gale force, with violent snow and rain squalls, with a high, rough, sea running.

As a result, in October 1940, America was acquired by the United States Army and towed to Baltimore, Maryland, to undergo rehabilitation in the Bethlehem Steel Company yard.

Edmund B. Alexander sailed from New York in early[Note 1] January 1941 for Newfoundland, escorted by Coast Guard Cutter Duane, with 58 officers and 919 enlisted men.

Altered in February and March 1946 to carry military dependents (904 adults—possibly war brides—and 314 children) back from Europe, she performed such duty for the next three years, including a similar voyage from Brooklyn Navy Yard through the Caribbean and Panama Canal to Hawaii and finally to Yokohama.