The Cruise of the Kronprinz Wilhelm

xiv, 304 pp. Memoirs of a German Naval Reserve officer, illustrated with black-and-white photographs. SS Kronprinz Wilhelm was a German passenger liner built for the Norddeutscher Lloyd, a former shipping company now part of Hapag-Lloyd, by the AG Vulcan shipyard in Stettin, Germany (now Szczecin, Poland), in 1901. She took her name from Crown Prince Wilhelm, son of the German Emperor Wilhelm II, and was a sister ship of SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. She had a varied career, starting off as a world-record-holding passenger liner, then becoming an auxiliary warship from 1914–1915 for the Imperial German Navy, sailing as a commerce raider for a year, and then interned in the United States when she ran out of supplies. When the U.S. entered World War I, she was seized and served as a United States Navy troop transport until she was decommissioned and turned over to the United States Shipping Board, where she remained in service until she was scrapped in 1923.