 Before
the war started, I was working at Bethlehem Shipyard in San Francisco
as a marine machinist. This job qualified me to enter the merchant marine
without any sea time as a deck engineer on freighters or a chief pump
man on tankers.
I was fortunate to sail a variety of different ships - 5 in all. One
tanker was so old that it was a converted coal burner from WWI - a real
rust bucket.
On the other end was a brand new T2 gasoline tanker right out of the
shipyard. This was by far the worst ship of them all - nothing worked;
everything leaked. We ended up limping back into port.
Another interesting tanker was a liberty ship that had been converted
into a tanker. There were only two of them made this way.
I sailed a C3 troop ship in the Saipan invasion. We had over 2000 troops
on board, landing craft, trucks, and all of their ammunition. You might
say Saipan was a pretty exciting place with all of the bombers and torpedo
planes running around. But we survived without a scratch. I did all of
my sailing in the South Pacific where it was nice and warm, and except
for a few Japanese submarines that always seemed to be stalking us, it
was usually pretty peaceful.
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