World War II North Atlantic Operations
The destroyer escort left Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 30 December 1943 for shakedown training off Bermuda and returned to Philadelphia on 9 February 1944 for post-shakedown repairs before steaming to Norfolk, Virginia, for duty as a training ship for prospective destroyer escort crews. After less than three weeks, she received orders to New York City to await assignment to her first convoy.
On 27 February, the warship sailed for the first of 16 transatlantic crossings. In company with Marblehead, Milwaukee, four destroyers, and seven other destroyer escorts, Burrows sailed through the cold and stormy North Atlantic and arrived safely in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She proceeded to Derry to join Escort Division 28 (CortDiv 22); and, on 17 March, Burrows began her return voyage to New York. Upon arriving there on 28 March, she entered the navy yard for an overhaul.
Burrows' typical cycle for escort duty was to steam overseas, return to New York for overhaul, undergo brief refresher training, and then steam back to New York to join another convoy. She served in the screen of a convoy to England in April and, upon return to New York, she interrupted her convoy-escort routine to conduct experiments at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, with the Navy's FXR (foxer) gear, an underwater noise-making device that trailed behind ships as a defense against German acoustic torpedoes. Back in New York by early June, Burrows stood out of port on the 13th with her longest and largest convoy, more than a hundred ships bound for Bizerte, Tunisia. The voyage took the convoy through the Strait of Gibraltar, where reports of Luftwaffe attacks prompted Burrows and the other escorts to lay smoke screens twice daily over the ships. Although German bombers passed within two miles, they did not strike; and the convoy arrived on 1 July. Burrows sailed on 10 July for the United States.
Following overhaul, the warship steamed to Casco Bay, Maine, for extended training in torpedo evasion techniques. On 20 August, the destroyer escort got underway for New London, Connecticut, where she put this training to good use during service as a practice target for American submarines. For 34 days, dummy torpedoes passed under Burrows while prospective commanding officers and submarine crews sharpened their fighting skills.
Read more about this topic: USS Burrows (DE-105)
Famous quotes containing the words world, war, north, atlantic and/or operations:
“If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don’t speak, it’s because everything’s perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“Long accustomed to the use of European manufactures, [the Cherokee Indians] are as incapable of returning to their habits of skins and furs as we are, and find their wants the less tolerable as they are occasioned by a war [the American Revolution] the event of which is scarcely interesting to them.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now!
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.”
—Li Po (701–762)
“In clear weather the laziest may look across the Bay as far as Plymouth at a glance, or over the Atlantic as far as human vision reaches, merely raising his eyelids; or if he is too lazy to look after all, he can hardly help hearing the ceaseless dash and roar of the breakers. The restless ocean may at any moment cast up a whale or a wrecked vessel at your feet. All the reporters in the world, the most rapid stenographers, could not report the news it brings.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)