"Argonne" was leased by the U.S. Navy from its owner and commissioned in Norfolk, Virginia. The steel-hulled single-screw freighter Argonne – built as "Taifuku Maru No. 1", the lead ship in the Dai-ichi Taifuku Maru class, in 1916 at Kobe, Japan, by the Kawasaki Dockyards – was operated prior to World War I by the Argonne Steamship Co., of New York. While undergoing voyage repairs by the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co., in January 1918, "Argonne" received an armed guard.