Army Troopship Service
Her enforced idleness did not last long. A little under three months after the German invasion of Poland, triggering World War II in Europe, the Maritime Commission (the successor to the USSB) transferred American Legion to the War Department on 28 November 1939 for use as a troop transport. On 19 December 1939, the ship was formally transferred, and taken to New York for rehabilitation and conversion by the Atlantic Basin Iron Works of Brooklyn, New York.
USAT American Legion departed New York City early in February 1940, on her maiden voyage, bound for Panama. Over the next few months, the ship made five round-trip voyages to the Canal Zone, with stops at Charleston, South Carolina, and San Juan, Puerto Rico, carrying civilian and military passengers. The worsening situation in Europe, though, soon resulted in the ship's receiving a special mission.
Read more about this topic: USS American Legion (APA-17)
Famous quotes containing the words army and/or service:
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)