Life on the Ship
Heroes Remember
Life on the Ship
Went over on the Louis … Louis or the Britannica ship … the
Britannica. And it took us about two weeks to get there
on convoy. And I think on the way over, I think there was a
couple of ships hit. There were eight … the bunks,
the hammocks, were eight high. You just had to kind of
straighten yourself out and then slide in because that’s all
the room there was. So if you ever got hit by a torpedo,
you’re gone you know. But we were all right. We did all right
and the food wasn’t that great on a ship. Well, it’s gruel
that’s about what it is, gruel. There’s nothing tasty about
it. You got your potatoes and maybe gravy or, well, real
thin gravy. We called it gruel. And you didn’t get eggs or
anything like that on the ships. It was rough, it wasn’t ...
you could eat it. Well, you had to eat it, eh, that’s the
only thing. Well, when we left we were pretty happy.
Everybody was cheering and hollering on the sidelines
and we thought it was going to be a real big deal.
Once we got on the boat there, there was always these
‘night black out’ drills and you couldn’t smoke outside and no
lights to be shone and they give us lifesavers to wear.
One of the guys threw his lifesaver over and it went right to the
bottom, didn’t float. It was the big cork ones, so we didn’t
have too much faith in those. I think we were about
week, a week or maybe a little more on the boat going over. But
it was all drills, lifeboat drills and stuff like that.
They didn’t have enough lifeboats anyway. Now I don’
many men would be on one of those ships, probably eight or ten
thousand, you know, the way they stack them in. You wonder wher
you are going, you know, what’s ahead of you, but you don’t
worry about it, not then. There was no beds at all.
Like, say the wall would be this high, the room, there may be six
bunks or hammocks all in a row and you’d have to get a hold of
the edge of the bed and kick your feet up and slide in.
Once the guy got in the one on top of you, if he was a big
guy he didn’t get out.
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