Page:My 1102 days of wwii.djvu/13

 pick us up. On one trip we rode into town on top of a load of 500 pound, live bombs.

Our main job was what we had been trained for - handling cargo from ship to shore, shore to ship and ship to ship. As there were not any loading docks on the island large enough for ships to dock by, nor that had an area on land for storage nearby, all cargo had to be moved by barge from one place to another.

Everything the troops used on the island from toothpicks to 32-ton Sherman Tanks had to be brought in, as well as supplies for the fighting ships. These ships wanted a supply base as near as possible to the front line or where their action was to eliminate travel time for supplies.

The cargo ships carried these supplies from the statesStates [sic] to wherever necessary. Some arrived completely loaded with gasoline and oil (50 gallon drums), some ammunition (shells and bombs), others with mixed or general cargo, trucks, jeeps, guns (90, 105 mm and 5-inch), canned food and all the other supplies necessary to conduct a campaign of this magnitude.

It is inconceivable how much work is involved in unloading an average size Cargo Ship, for it is capable of carrying about 7000 tons (depending on the type of cargo) in her 5 Holes or Hatches - two of which are forward of the Bridge and the other three aft. When necessary we could assign around the clock a crew (18 or 20 men) to each hole to move a lot of cargo.

For a while I was assigned as coxswain on a LCM (landing craft medium 25 tons capacity), that was used to move cargo in the Fiji. The difficult part