Georgetown Victory was laid down on 8 March 1945 at the Bethlehem-Fairfield yard in Baltimore. She was launched on 28 April that year, the same week the war in Europe was ending, and completed on 22 May. She was a VC2-S-AP2 type, hull number 653, one of the new Victory ships designed to replace the wartime Liberty Ships. Where the Liberties had been deliberately disposable, intended to last only as long as the war, the Victory ships were faster, longer and meant to keep running after it. Named for Georgetown University, she joined a fleet of ninety-eight Victory troopships pulled into Operation Magic Carpet, the great repatriation that ferried American soldiers home from the war's far edges. Her cargo holds had been gutted and refitted with three-tier bunks, hot-bunked between watches, and mess halls knocked together in the spaces between. She carried American Merchant Marine officers and crew. The US Merchant Marine had taken proportionally heavier losses than any of the American armed services during the war, ships torpedoed in convoys from Murmansk to the Caribbean, and these were the men who now had the quieter job of bringing everyone else home.

By 1946 Georgetown Victory had taken the 326th Glider Infantry Regiment home to New York, delivered troops to Port Dickson in Malaysia and Rabaul in Papua New Guinea, and called at Brisbane in February. In November 1945, while she was tied up in Saigon, her merchant seamen met aboard the Taos Victory with the crews of three other Victory ships and voted to oppose the transport of French colonial troops to Indochina, on the grounds that what the United States had signed up to at Tehran and Yalta did not include putting down a Vietnamese independence movement. It was the kind of conscience the wartime Merchant Marine had been known for. In April 1946 she loaded 1,400 British servicemen in Sydney for the long run home to Glasgow, stopping for fuel and water at Fremantle, Colombo and Aden, then north through the Suez Canal. She came up the Irish Sea on the final leg. Just before midnight on the 30th, perhaps in fog, perhaps in a navigational mistake nobody ever fully resolved, she drove hard onto the rocks south of Killard Point at almost her full eighteen knots.

Eric Bownes was a young constable in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, posted to a stretch of coast where the busiest night was usually a poacher. He was the only police officer on the scene. The wreck lay close enough to shore that men could be waded in across the broken water, and Bownes spent the rest of the night and most of the next day moving them up the beach and toward the aerodrome at Bishopscourt. From midnight until five the next afternoon he kept at it. By the time the Irish Cloughey and Newcastle lifeboats launched on the afternoon of 1 May, the worst of it was over. All 1,400 men were ashore. The following morning a different drama played out. Local fishing boats came out to the stranded ship in numbers and began, in the careful phrasing of the contemporary accounts, to loot her. The RUC and the salvage authorities eventually contained what was left of the inventory. Winter storms later broke the wreck into two pieces. The sections were salvaged in 1951 and consigned to the ship-breakers at Troon. The men of the rescue, the British servicemen and the American merchant seamen alike, scattered to whatever came next.

Pieces of the Georgetown Victory are still there. The wreck site, a hundred yards off Killard Point in shallow water, is a dive site now, the kind of place that local divers know in detail and the rest of the country has forgotten. Eric Bownes, the constable who never set out to be a hero, was interviewed in old age for a BBC Ulster Scots series and told the story plainly, the way the men who do this kind of thing usually do. The ship that ran ashore was American. The men she carried were British. The constable was Northern Irish, and the people who came out in the fishing boats the next day were neighbours of the ones who had waded the soldiers in. The whole thing happened in less than a day, and everyone went home.