World War II Pacific Operations
Escorting PCS-1396 and PCS-1W, the new minesweeper departed San Diego, California on 4 May, bound for Hawaii. Upon her arrival at Pearl Harbor on 11 May, Vigilance delivered 111 bags of mail to the Fleet Post Office and, three days later, got underway with Triumph (AM-323) for the Marshall Islands. The two minesweepers screened William Ward Burrows (AP-6), Fortune (IX-146), and Boreas (AF-8) to Majuro which they reached on 25 May.
Vigilance departed Majuro at 0800 on the 26th to return to Hawaii, intercepted Megrez (AK-126) en route, and relieved PC-548 of escorting that cargo ship for the remainder of the voyage to Oahu. After arriving at Pearl Harbor on 2 June, Vigilance underwent upkeep and maintenance before moving to Brown's Camp, Oahu, for experimental minesweeping evolutions which she conducted into mid-June.
On 14 June, Vigilance weighed anchor as part of the screen for convoy 4313-A, a group of three Navy cargo ships, three civilian merchantmen, and refrigerator ship Arctic (AF-7). Crouter (DE-11) and Pursuit (AM-108) joined Vigilance in escorting the convoy to Eniwetok where they arrived on 25 June.
During the second of two more round-trip runs from Pearl Harbor to the Marshalls, Vigilance suffered an engine casualty - a damaged exhaust manifold - that was beyond the capacity of the ship's force to handle. Accordingly, she went alongside Zeus (ARB-4) at Eniwetok on 24 September for repairs.
Read more about this topic: USS Vigilance (AM-324)
Famous quotes containing the words world war, world, war, pacific and/or operations:
“If the Third World War is fought with nuclear weapons, the fourth will be fought with bows and arrows.”
—Louis, 1st Earl Mountbatten Of Burma Mountbatten (1900–1979)
“All gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in this world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed, must begin in blood.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“In peacetime, they had all been normal decent, cowards, frightened of their wives, trembling before their bosses, terrified at the passing of the years, but war had made them gallant. They had been greedy men. Now they were self-sacrificing. They had been selfish. Now they were generous. War isn’t hell at all. It’s man at his best, the highest morality he is capable of.”
—Paddy Chayefsky (1923–1981)
“It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone.... It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It may seem strange that any road through such a wilderness should be passable, even in winter, when the snow is three or four feet deep, but at that season, wherever lumbering operations are actively carried on, teams are continually passing on the single track, and it becomes as smooth almost as a railway.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)