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:
“The slanders poured down like Niagara. If you take into consideration the setting—the war and the revolution—and the character of the accused—revolutionary leaders of millions who were conducting their party to the sovereign power—you can say without exaggeration that July 1917 was the month of the most gigantic slander in world history.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)
“We too are ashes as we watch and hear
The psalm, the sorrow, and the simple praise
Of one whose promised thoughts of other days
Were such as ours, but now wholly destroyed,
The service record of his youth wiped out,
His dream dispersed by shot, must disappear.”
—Karl Shapiro (b. 1913)