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, pacific and/or operations:
“Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It’s another part of the twentieth-century mind. It’s the world seen from inside. We’ve come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film.... You have to ask yourself if there’s anything about us more important than the fact that we’re constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)
“The dead have been awakened—shall I sleep?
The world’s at war with tyrants—shall I crouch?
The harvest’s ripe—and shall I pause to reap?
I slumber not; the thorn is in my couch;
Each day a trumpet soundeth in mine ear,
Its echo in my heart.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“We, the lineal representatives of the successful enactors of one scene of slaughter after another, must, whatever more pacific virtues we may also possess, still carry about with us, ready at any moment to burst into flame, the smoldering and sinister traits of character by means of which they lived through so many massacres, harming others, but themselves unharmed.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)