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Show Rose (1 /2 5/83 ) page 21 ~ r. K Mr. R were just hulls. ge was t urning one out every week or every 2 weeks or 10 days. That was the bi gge s t s hi p t he Unit ed States ¢i¢t used. I don't mean b1g in size, I mean in terms of numbers ••• cargo, men, a nything. On that ship we s le pt 5 bunks in th;se hold, and this was summer, and you talk about stink, God, all ~1gh~ some- ... ., times you wonder how neonle could live ~ they have to live. I was compelled to do it, it wasn't like I was in GerT.Dany and people were T.Daking ~e do it. How many men were there in that hold? \r-1 " Too God damn many. Oh, I don't know, 1./~r/>i!t/Ur/>t!/ ! ~ think the ship carried more than about 2500, and there were 3 or 4 holds like this. Anyway, I ended up in New Calidonia, and I was attached r \. ..... . to what was apparently an abandoned ~ artillery national guard, National Guard Field Artillery outfit. It's history was something like when the war first started they started throwing everything they could muster overseas, and when they got all these battalians and regements isolated, they weren't parts of any units, so they took a whole bunch of units and formed the Americal Division, and set it up as a division, trained it as a division, and shoved that into combat in places like Bougainville, another island up there in the russels of Del of Lavelles. I don't know which group of the islands they were in, but there they were in that line up. They left this whole bunch of isolated units behind that they never combined and they made them New Calidonia defense troops and things like that. So, here you had a field artillery battalian, here you~ have an infantry regement, and you might have a signal corps out-fit, and then they used them ••• hell, I even ran troops building |
