Transatlantic Troop Ship
Lejeune was fully commissioned in April or May 1944. On 11 June 1944, she began her wartime service in her new role as a US Navy troop transport with a voyage from Norfolk to Glasgow, Scotland with 4,460 soldiers aboard. Her troop capacity would later be increased to 4,650. Beginning on 12 July, she then made a trip from New York to Glasgow, with 207 officers and 4,307 Navy personnel. In December, she made an Atlantic crossing with elements of the 69th Infantry Division, which was destined to meet Soviet troops on the banks of the Elbe River deep within Germany five months later, in April 1945.
Lejeune made a total of ten round-trip transatlantic crossings before the end of the war, and a further nine crossings were made to the United Kingdom, France or Africa in the months immediately after, until she returned to Norfolk 9 May 1946 for overhaul.
Read more about this topic: USS Lejeune (AP-74)
Famous quotes containing the words troop and/or ship:
“Is a man too strong and fierce for society, and by temper and position a bad citizen,—a morose ruffian, with a dash of the pirate in him;Mnature sends him a troop of pretty sons and daughters, who are getting along in the dame’s classes at the village school, and love and fear for them smooths his grim scowl to courtesy. Thus she contrives to intenerate the granite and the feldspar, takes the boar out and puts the lamb in, and keeps her balance true.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Positively I sit here, and look at Europe sink, first one deck disappearing, then another, and the whole ship slowly plunging bow-down into the abyss; until the nightmare gets to be howling. The Roman Empire was a trifle to it.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)