I called Lettie and she agreed to marry me so I went to San Francisco and we were married the next day, the 23rd of November, 1943. I had to get special permission to 1eave the base to get married because we were now on alert to be shipped overseas. We were married by a judge in the Court House and stayed the night in the St. Frances Hotel. Early the next morning I had to get back to the base. Our orders had come through and I could not leave the base again. We were going to England and I was glad of that because it meant we would not be flying over water all the time. This was the way the Army did things: the ones trained on the West coast went to England and the ones on the East coast probably went to the Pacific.
We were shipped by train across the country to Camp Kilmer in New Jersey. We were crowded in the train and it was a long hard trip due to all the stops we had to make to wait for trains going the other way. Most of the guys played poker in California and on the train. Al Johnson was always borrowing money from me to play poker. He would always pay me back at payday and a week later he would start borrowing again. I didn't play poker so always had money and didn't mind lending it to him as he never failed to pay me back. We arrived in Camp Kilmer the first part of December and it was very cold there with a damp ocean wind blowing. We really noticed the cold having been in California. We all bought coonskin hats to keep our heads warm. We were fortunate in the Air Corps be able to wear almost anything without being out of uniform. I had a chance to get into New York City with Neil Ullo for a few hours. It was not enough time to get to see much ... just enough time to eat and buy Lettie a watch.
Chapter 6 England and Missions
After a few days at Camp Kilmer we were moved out to board ship in the middle of the night. All I can remember is going up a very wide gangplank into a big black opening about 20 foot square in the side of the ship. The U.S.O. girls were there passing out coffee and doughnuts and I think there was a band playing. The ship was the Queen Elizabeth, owned and operated by the English, and there were thousands of us on this trip. I believe there were about 12,000 troops and a crew of 1,700 on the ship, but am not certain of the figure. We sailed at night and by daylight we were at sea. I will note that we never did set the Statue of Liberty then or when we returned.
The entire ship had been altered to carry troops and the staterooms that originally were for two people now held twelve of us. there were four bunks with just a narrow aisle in the middle and one small shower. We didn't take many showers as it was salt water and left you so sticky. As I recall we had Just a little fresh water to rinse off with. The only open areas were the lounges and the large ballrooms of peace time. In these the almost continuous poker games took place. I spent very little time on dock except for the abandon ship drills. It was December and the weather was not very good. On the few good days we could go up on the stern and shoot skeet. The shells were free and we could shoot all we wanted. We usually found an enlisted man to run the machine to shoot the clay targets. It gave us a little more practice in 1eading a moving target.
I didn't get seasick, but in the morning when I went to the dining room and saw the fish for breakfast I did not feel so well. I took a couple of rolls and bacon for sandwiches and went back to my room to eat them in my bunk. This being an all English crew we got very English food. About half way across the Atlantic the ship began to take a zigzag course and the direction was changed every three minutes. It took longer this way but was the only protection against the German submarines as we were alone with no escort ships. When walking down the corridors we would feel the ship 1ean one way and then the other. We soon got used to that and the thing which bothered us the most was at meal time. The tables had a board along the edge and all the plates would slide from one side to the other. When you wanted salt, pepper, etc. you would grab it when it came to your side of the table. We had to hang onto our plates as we ate, but that didn't seem to hurt our appetites. As it was such a large ship the movement was slow and not violent unlike the small ship I came home in.
The normal four day crossing took us seven days and we landed at Gloucester, Scotland, harbor in the middle of December. As we disembarked we looked back at the ship and that was the first time we saw the Queen in its entirety. It was huge in the brilliant sunlight. We next had our first experience with an English train. The aisle runs down the side of the car with small compartments on the side. We were packed in so tightly with all our luggage that the aisle was full and prohibited any walking around. We made part of the trip in the daytime so we saw some of the Scottish and English country side.
On December 23 we arrived it Keevil, England in the southwest not far from Bath. This was not an airfield, just a place to stay until we got a base and planes. Keevil was horrible and the worst of places to spend your second Christmas away from home. We lived in board shacks covered with tar paper and the weather was cold and damp. We had little stoves in our shacks but nothing to burn in them. The only tools we had were knives so we used them to cut branches of trees and bushes. It was green wood so we would coat the twigs with shoe polish to make them burn. We had one large building for a mess hall with one stove in the middle of it. Here we were served powered eggs for breakfast every morning and they were terrible... tasteless, smelly and a sickly green color. Instead of the eggs we would get a couple of slices of bread and toast them on a stick in the one stove in the middle of the room.
Neill and I made one trip to Bath where we went through the old Roman baths and walked through the rest of the city. We made one trip to London by train and walked around the city. Trafalger Square remains in my memory. It was a long trip by train from Keevil so we only went once while stationed there. Later we were closer to London and went more often. I remember once getting a cup of coffee while waiting for a train back to base. The English were unfamiliar with coffee making and it was so hot and strong that the train arrived before it was cool enough to drink. One of the interesting things at Keevil was how we would take a bath. The bath house was a long narrow building with openings at either end and had a cement floor. Partitions separated bathtubs set up on higher concrete slabs in each stall. It was winter and there was no heat in the building but the water was always hot. We would hang all our clothes, including our shoes up high, fill the tub with water, jump in and leave the water running the entire time. The tubs would run over and the water would run down the aisle and out the doorways at either and. The building would fill with steam and we would lay in the tubs for one to three hours as it was the only place we could get warm. I have no idea how they heated the water, but it was always hot. I was in the same shack as Ullo and Bruce so we all suffered that place together. While we were overseas we asked Lettie and Ullo's girl friend Dolores, who lived in Oakland to get together and they became friends.
After a couple of weeks we moved to Riverhall, near Colchester. Here we lived in metal nissan huts and conditions were a little better. We still didn't know what kinds of planes we would get, P-51 or P-47s and were very happy when we got the P-51s. it was January, still cold and we had one small stove in the center of the metal building and we were still trying to burn green wood. The mess building used soft coal to cook and it came in big blocks some chunks over a foot square. We would go down there and steal a chunk when the cooks were not looking and run like hell. We broke it up for burning, and would keep warm for awhile. I had about ten Army blankets on my cot. First I covered the cot with a thick layer of newspapers and then put all the blankets on, tied a rope around to hold everything on and never made my bed the entire time I was there. I crawled in Just like it was a sleeping bag. You had to watch out lest someone from another hut come in and put a hand full of shells from our 45 caliber revolvers into the stove when no one was looking. They made quite a noise, but would Just rattle the stove and not really hurt anyone.