War Service
The United States Army acquired her on 26 October 1940 and had her converted into a military transport. She was renamed J. Franklin Bell after General J. Franklin Bell, US Army Chief of Staff 1906–10. She was transferred to the United States Navy on 26 December 1941; and commissioned in ordinary before commissioning in full at San Francisco on 2 April 1942 under the command of Captain H.J. Grassie.
After shakedown, a round-trip voyage to Pearl Harbor, and more than 2 months of amphibious training along the California coast, J. Franklin Bell left San Francisco 13 August and headed via Kodiak, Alaska to Adak. She carried some 1,500 troops and a full load of cargo to strengthen American defenses in the Aleutian Islands, then threatened with invasion.
Read more about this topic: USS J. Franklin Bell (APA-16)
Famous quotes containing the words war and/or service:
“It was the most ungrateful and unjust act ever perpetrated by a republic upon a class of citizens who had worked and sacrificed and suffered as did the women of this nation in the struggle of the Civil War only to be rewarded at its close by such unspeakable degradation as to be reduced to the plane of subjects to enfranchised slaves.”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)
“We could not help being struck by the seeming, though innocent, indifference of Nature to these men’s necessities, while elsewhere she was equally serving others. Like a true benefactress, the secret of her service is unchangeableness. Thus is the busiest merchant, though within sight of his Lowell, put to pilgrim’s shifts, and soon comes to staff and scrip and scallop-shell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)