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Thread: Navy vessels on the Mississippi & Ohio Rivers

  1. #1
    Team Member Gene East's Avatar
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    Default Navy vessels on the Mississippi & Ohio Rivers

    Many people under the age of 60 are unaware of the contributions made in the war effort during World War II by inland boat yards.

    Hundreds of landing craft were built in Quincy and then sent down river to New Orleans and shipped to Europe or the Pacific.

    O.F. Christner was was a welding supervisor and trainer at the Quincy boat yard.

    Evansville Indiana employed 19,000 workers building LST's (landing ship tank)
    turning out 2 ships per week during the peak of the war.

    There are only 2 LST's in the world still capable of navigating under it's own power. One of those ships has been on display this week in Hannibal.

    I toured that ship with my 2 oldest sons and grandsons today.

    In 1961 this ship was de-commissioned and "mothballed" at Green Cove Springs, FL.

    In 1962 the US Navy sent me to Green Cove Springs to salvage equipment from LST's scheduled to be transferred to the Greek Navy.

    The ship I was on today was transferred to Greece in 1963 and was later purchased by a group of Americans who are creating a mobile historical museum.

    It is entirely possible that the decks I walked today, I walked 46 years ago.

    Even more ironic, as we were leaving we were delayed as the ship's crew lifted an elderly gentleman in a wheel chain onto the deck.

    A younger woman; presumably his daughter, said "He was at Omaha Beach, he got there on an LST". I got choked up when the officer of the deck said, "This ship was at Omaha Beach"!

    Could it be that he had walked these decks 64 years ago???

    My grandsons got to see two American heroes today. One was flesh and blood, the other was steel and gray paint

    To learn more about LST-325 go to www.evansvillecvb.org

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    Default LST's / What a ride!!

    My late Fathers only long trip on a "ship", if an LST can truly be called one, was from New York to North Africa just prior to the Allied invasion of that Continent in WWII. He landed in either Tunis or Bizirte ?(spelling) after the invasion in what would now be Lybia I believe. He was in the SeeBees and was responsible for one of the warehouses where supplies for the invasion were being stockpiled and then dispersed to the armies in the field.

    I will never forget him talking about the trip across the Atlantic on that ship. As Gene mentioned, LST stands for "Landing Ship Tank", and I'm sure most of you have seen the pictures of the LST's run up on the beach with the front of the ship swung open like two doors on a cupboard so the tanks and other wheeled equipment could drive down a ramp and up on the beach. The type construction that made the LST capable of this type landing, was it had a flat bottom, so as to enable it to run itself up on a beach or other relatively flat surface. I can only imagine what the trip across the atlantic must have been like. My Dad told me the LST's only had a cruising speed of about 15-20 knots, and the whole convoy had to go at the speed of the slowest ship. Because of storms in the Atlantic, and the flat bottom of the LST, it was a VERY rough ride. It took 30 days for the crossing and he never had any desire after returning home to take any type of sea voyage again. He also never ate Spam after that trip overseas. My mother attempted to serve it one time in the early fifties, and my Dad said if she ever opened a can of that in the house again, he was leaving. Only time I ever saw my Dad have a harsh word to my Mother about what was on the table for supper.

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    Default Truth Is as spoken!!!

    Gene , it's good to hear that you've gotten eveything in line , glad to hear that things seem to ok with your son .

    At any rate i read with int. what happens , tho i'm not a dem. or pub., i won't say i'm Apollitical, but close maybe, Pual scares me as much as i don't want to admit it , as i have a lot of animosity also but anyways , HI.
    RichardKCMO.

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    Default NO, BiGGa DeaL!!!!

    I aplligize for the out burst, didn't know thuought it was a private message, sorry for airing the laundry, anyhow hear i am , so i guess as my DaD said , i've got big shoulders.

    I'm going on from here, as i'm not 70 yet...
    RichardKCMo

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    People could follow him anywhere, but only out of morbid curiosity.

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    Team Member Gene East's Avatar
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    Correction:

    My original post stated the shipyard at Evansville built 2 LST's per day. That should have been 2 ships per week.

    That's still an amazing accomplishment considering the size (330 ft.) and complexity of these ships.

    Another thing I noticed on this ship was a number of Gardner-Denver pumps,
    built in Quincy, Illinois.

    Bill, thanks for your input. I have never sailed onboard an LST. I was a destroyer sailor, but we did operate with some LST's and you are correct. They were rough riding SOB's.

    BTW: I like Spam and so did Cliff Johanssen. Do you remember him??

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    Team Member Master Oil Racing Team's Avatar
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    My Dad was a carpenter working in the Panama Canal zone when WWII broke out. He enlisted in the navy. I'm not sure of all the islands he was on, but I do know he was at Guam, Siapan and Okinawa. His job was following behind the island hopping invasions and repair landing craft for the next move. I think he must have been on Saipan for awhile though like in a central repair docks because him and the guys in his unit were able to "soup up" one of the boats that took people around in the corner, and it was the fastest boat of its type on the base. After the commander saw how fast it was, it became the boat he used to be shuttled around in. I forget all the kinds of landing craft he worked on, but there are more different types than people may realize, from the great big ones to the ones you usually see coming up on the beaches. They each had their specialized uses. That's something else to think that you and that gentlman may have walked on that very LST Gene. My Dad liked spam and when he was first learning to cook for us kids, he did the easy to cook navy food including SOS.



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    A couple of years ago when I was in the Pacific on Kwajalein for work, I made a 150 mile trip on a LCT (~60' landing craft) for my duty on Gilligans Island, I don't envy anyone who had to travel far on any of that type of boat/ship. Although, it did look mighty good the morning it showed up to pick us up after a month in the field. One of the funnier stories (other than the night I woke up with a lizard walking across my chest and me standing on my cot laughing and swearing like a sailor) was the look on one of the guys I worked with face when he came up on the "bridge" to talk to the captain and I had the helm and there wasn't anybody else there.

    Some valuable resources for anyone researching the history of many US Navy ships are,
    http://www.hazegray.org/
    http://www.history.navy.mil/danfs/index.html

    LST 325 in particular
    http://www.hazegray.org/features/lst325/
    http://www.uslst.org/lst325.htm

    Dave

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    Team Member Gene East's Avatar
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    Can't you just see "Baldy" souping up a "Mike boat" and Wayne thought he got the "old man" started in boat racing. Finally the truth emerges.

    Spam was a staple on board ship and man, you can't believe how big the cans were. Must have been 15-20#. Olive drab of course. (Actually, they were about half that size).

    It was common practice to stash a can or two when loading stores for a midnight snack. If you were in tight with the cooks they'd slip you a loaf of bread fresh out of the oven. Spam on hot bread is very tasty at 02:00. That's 2:00AM for you non-military types.

    Wayne says "Baldy" fed him Spam and SOS as a kid. Nothing wrong with either of those.

    Norma and I were surprised when we went to Hawaii this spring to learn how popular Spam is there. The Hawaiians even were Spam tee shirts.

    I mentioned Cliff Johanssen earlier. He was a maintenance supervisor in the Hormel plant in Austin, MN. the home of Spam. Cliff raced A & B Hydros and runabouts. He was a big man, well over 6 feet tall and he drove in a very erect position. The wind drag must have slowed him down 2-3 MPH.

    Cliff had a young protoge, Frank Earl. I last spoke with Frank at Depue several years ago. I tried to contact him about the reunion last year but never was able to find him.

    If anyone knows how to contact Frank, tune him in to what we do here.

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    Team Member Master Oil Racing Team's Avatar
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    The funny thing about my Dad cooking Spam was, when I was on my own in college and didn't know how to whip up a quick meal, I cooked Spam in the way I saw my Dad cook it. The college friends liked it and they asked me what Spam was. In the tradition of my Dad, (as Bill Van would accuse), I told them it was made of chicken lips, pigs ears and stuff they didn't want to know. But Gene...what about SOS? You didn't like that?



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