Chapter 20 - Going Home

About the  middle  of June we received  new orders, and  preparations were made to begin our journey somewhere, hopefully home, but rumors persisted that we  would  be sent  directly to the Pacific. We  enlisted men did not, as usual, know  where we  were going. We merely did  as we were told and we were not told very much.Anyway we traveled by truck convoy for the harbor and boarded a new looking, clean  little Liberty ship called the Santa Maria.

A far cry from that big old stinking "limey" ship that we came over on. It was a much smaller ship than the Sythia, but the comparison does't stop there. It was clean and new looking and even smelled good. We had a large mess hall, I don't remember how many it would feed at once, seems like one battery at a time. The mess hall was immaculate and the food was exceptional, and you could even have seconds which was something great to us. We seemed to have a lot of seniority about boarding this ship, leaving units that had been waiting many days for shipment.

We found out later that it was because Col. Clay had volunteered us again for KP and guard duty and some boarding sergeant had made another army SNAFU. In other words we had "bucked the line". This all came out later, and we were just very happy to be going home, at least we thought, but the lingering doubt persisted that we could still by-pass the States, and go direct to the Pacific. I'm sure the officers already knew, but we regular GI's were never sure of anything.

We really did come directly to the United States and landed in Boston Harbor, Mass. one year and one day from the time we left New York. That is almost like a judge sentencing you to a "year and a day in prison." We were met in Boston harbor by a tugboat bringing the pilot to steer us in and a little later by another tugboat loaded with rather pretty WAC's dancing to music to welcome us home. This was a very happy occasion and especially when we arrived at Camp Miles Standish, and were told we could have as many T-bone steaks and as many servings of ice cream as we could possibly eat.

By the way we had a good many boys sea-sick on the Santa Maria probably because it was a much smaller ship, and tended to roll and pitch more than a bigger vessel. I'll have to admit I turned a little green about four or five days out and was off my feed but never got sick enough to throw-up. I forgot to tell I believe we were about nine days on the return trip. We did not receive passes the first night back for some reason, which didn't bother me a bit since I was so happy to be back in the good old United States. I was real happy to go to bed that night with a belly-full of steak and ice cream.