Around the 20th of March we sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge headed for the Western Pacific. About 21 men from the original crew had been transferred while we were in the states, so we had about 21 new crew members. There were 33 left from the original crew.

After we were underway the officers opened our secret sealed orders. Our destination was to be the Okinawa invasion. We were to pull damaged landing craft off beaches and lay nets with a Net and Buoy Unit. Persistent ship problems would prevent us from fulfilling this assignment.

We arrived at Pearl Harbor on March 26th, ending up in dry dock to repair the steering system and to be fitted with steel hull plates. We remained in Pearl Harbor for 2 months.

While at Pearl Harbor we saw many battle damaged ships arriving from Okinawa. Most of them had been hit by Kamikaze suicide planes. There were two ships that I have a vivid memory of seeing. One was an unknown destroyer going by us on its own power with its entire bow gone. The other was the blackened ghostly looking aircraft carrier, USS Franklin (CV-13), with a skeleton crew of 704 men. After the war it was reported that she was the most seriously damaged ship ever to survive and return to base. 832 men lost their lives on this carrier when it was bombed between Okinawa and the off shore islands of Japan.

Seaman Gillis Childers from our deck crew had a twin brother on the Franklin. Much to his relief he found out that his brother was OK.

We had missed out on the action at Okinawa, so received new orders. On May 26th we were underway for permanent duty at Ulithi, with stops at Guam to unload cargo and Tinian to lay gasoline tanker moorings.

At Tinian we had a ringside view, from our ship, of the B-29 bombers taking off and returning from their bombing missions on Japan. A few of the returning planes, low on fuel after about 12 hours of flying time, were seen with feathered or smoking engines.

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