ORIGINAL: Joe D.
If you think that's bad (and it is), merchants carrying ammo were alone in a crowd; they were avoided by the other ships in the convoy like the plague 'cause if they got hit ...
I was able to go aboard one of the few Liberty ships afloat today; the rationale for these vessels was that we could build 'em faster than the Axis could sink 'em, which must have been little comfort to those who had to sail 'em.
For what it's worth, at least they dedicated a film to the merchant marine, Action in the North Atlantic, w/Humbrey Bogart and Raymond Masey.
For what it's worth.
Tankers were pretty rough too, no-one wanted to be around one of those when it went up.
I grew up with the stories my Dad used to tell about his Merchant days. Mostly it was about the comic stuff, like the time someone smuggled a monkey onboard while they were in Africa, and it escaped and the crew spent two days trying to catch it, or how during a air attack the ships cook got so enraged that he ran out of the cook-house and started throwing potatoes at the german planes.
Everynow again though he would let slip about the darker stuff he had seen. Half burnt survivors from a sunken ship screaming for help in the freezing waters of the Atlantic or seeing men being strafed off the deck of a ship by a enemy plane.
Its a pity that the men of the Merchant Marine remain the "Forgotten Arm" of WW2.
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