There were ships all around us and I could count twenty
plus destroyers for escort as there were still German subs operating.
At about the middle of the Atlantic we ran into very stormy weather
with high seas. When you were an deck it sometimes looked as though
our ship was alone and the other ships would come up from behind the
swells only to disappear again. While laying in the hammocks trying
to sleep at night we would hang on to keep from falling out. The bow,
where I was, would come way up out of the water, shudder quite
violently, then fall to hit the water hard. The force was so hard
that it gradually broke all the light bulbs in the ceiling. This
weather was probably normal for the Navy, but airmen were not used to
it and worried about what might happen. After a few days like this
the weather improved for the remainder of the trip home.
When we emerged from the storm there were only about one third of the
ships left in the convoy and we wondered what had happened to all the
rest. We later learned that they had turned off for other ports. The
guys from the South were heading for southern ports and those of us
from the Northeast were going to New Jersey ports. As we neared the
U.S. the seas were much calmer and for a couple of days we enjoyed
sitting on deck and watching the porpoises swim around the ship. We
landed in New Jersey and were taken to Camp Dix from which we had
departed a year and a half before.
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