Granddad blogging: Shipped to war

This is the second in a series of weekly posts of oral history recorded with my grandfather.

Post 2
And I got there on June 6 which was D-Day and unbeknownst to any of us that it was D-Day for some reason we were told to get on a train we were gonna be transferred out west. Why we didn’t know. We later found out that there weren’t any ships to take us across because they were all being used on the D-Day invasion. They transferred us to a Camp in Mississippi. I can’t think of the name of it offhand. I guess it was Camp VanDorn. There were lots of big mosquitoes there – I remember that.

Just before I was to get shipped overseas they examined us physically and they found out that I had one less than the number of teeth that I was supposed to have, so while I was on the East coast they made me a partial bridge, but I was shipped to Van Dorn, before they got my partial bridge to me. So I go to Van Dorn and they examine me again and the bridge doesn’t come so they fuddle around with me and make another bridge and ship it to the East coast when we go back the second time and neither one of the bridges caught up with me then. I thought I was going to spend the war waiting for a bridge.

But finally they shipped us out to go to England and this was in August or September I guess it was. We went on the Mauritania, which was a very large ship. I believe they said it had twenty thousand people on it. We were crammed in just like sardines. We had to take about 150 pounds of gear with us including our rifle and the bandolier, ammunition, overcoat, extra pair of shoes, shelter half, tent pegs, mess kits, and a whole bunch of stuff. All together it weighed about 150 pounds. You could barely carry it. And we were assigned to a place and got very unhappy with the room that we had. They assured us that they were going to give us more room in a little while, but they didn’t, that’s where we stayed.

We ate twice a day on the ship going over. It was run by the British and somewhere out in the ocean we saw a bunch of whales or porpoises or some kinda big fish and everybody started running to one side of the ship and the blare came over the address system. “Now hear this, now hear this. Get back on other side of the ship.” Everybody had run to one side of the ship and we were about to capsize the ship, they thought. Maybe we were, I don’t know.

We didn’t have any escort. This was a pretty fast ship and it zig zagged every seven minutes. They said it took something over seven minutes for the Germans to site their submarine torpedoes on a ship so we zig-zagged all across the ocean to the left and the right every seven minutes.
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