All, I have located several HAER reports/surveys of cargo ships, tankers, tugs, even an APA ship here: http://www.marad.dot.gov/about-us/m...historic-american-engineering-record-surveys/ The PDF files here have the ship specs and history along with photos. Most (but not all) are WWII era ships. Most, but not all, the files include multiple plan sheets in 1/192 scale, including hull lines and stations. Enjoy!
All the links at that site work except for the one for the repair vessel Vulcan. That file can be found here: https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/50292156/uss-vulcan-ar-5-maritime-administration/5
Pretty cool. I found another HAER report at the Library of Congress website. This is for the USS Husky, LCI(L) 653. The report is not fully digitized (the photos are missing), but the ship specs/history/drawings are all there as individual files. The plans are available as low and medium res jpegs and as high res tiff files: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ak0557/ Looks like the Library of Congress also has a full catalog of all the HAER reports/surveys (most are of buildings, bases, etc, only some are of ships). It will take a lot of time to dig thru it all. Will post back here later if/when I find more. The Library of Congress website does state that more HAER reports/surveys are done each year, and will be put online as they are completed. Expect a large lag time, though -- the USS Husky report was done in 2011 and the photos still are not available online.
Hmmm, after some searching I've determined that the Library of Congress website only has a partial catalog of the HAER reports/surveys. In fact, the LoC site only has a few of the ships that can be found at the Marad site. However, the LoC site does have some stuff the Marad site does not: - photos of USS Arizona, before Pearl Harbor - photos and drawings of USS Arizona after Pearl Harbor - photos of USS Olympia - photos of SS Red Oak Victory - photos and drawings of Civil War Ironclad USS Cairo - drawings of USS Turner Joy The latter is a Forest Sherman class DD. Out of our time period, but I include it here because some of our members may have served on DDs of this class.