World War II Atlantic Service
On 10 May, she departed Norfolk, with Army passengers, for the Mediterranean and her first assault assignment. After hurried conversion to accommodate equipment needed by a flagship, accomplished in 2 weeks by USS Delta (AR-9) at Mers el Kebir, she took on Army nurses as passengers for transport to Algiers. There, on 1943-06-20, Vice Admiral Hewitt and his staff came on board, and were joined 10 days later by Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. On 6 July, she departed for Sicily where she served as the command ship of the Western Task Force for Operation Husky. Arriving off the assault area on the 10th, she suffered slight damage to her engine room on the 11th when a Stuka loosed bombs which straddled the vessel with two near misses. After repairs at Algiers, she returned to the United States with Italian POWs, mooring at Portsmouth, Virginia, 4 August.
Read more about this topic: USS Monrovia (APA-31)
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“I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“... near a war it is always not very near.”
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“The shallowest still water is unfathomable. Wherever the trees and skies are reflected, there is more than Atlantic depth, and no danger of fancy running aground.”
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“Service ... is love in action, love “made flesh”; service is the body, the incarnation of love. Love is the impetus, service the act, and creativity the result with many by-products.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 3, ch. 3 (1962)