World War II North Atlantic Operations
After her shakedown out of Great Sound, Bermuda, from 9 January to 10 February 1944, Wilhoite underwent post-shakedown availability at the Charleston Navy Yard from 11 to 21 February. She then got underway for Gibraltar with Convoy UGS (United States to Gibraltar) 34 on 23 February. On two occasions during the voyage, the destroyer escort depth charged presumed submarine contacts with inconclusive results. After turning the convoy over to British escort vessels once she had passed through the Strait of Gibraltar, Wilhoite returned to the United States with Convoy GUS (Gibraltar to the United States) 33 and arrived at New York City on 3 April.
After a 10-day availability at the New York Navy Yard, the destroyer escort operated briefly with submarines and PT boats and conducted antiaircraft firing practice in Block Island Sound, Brooklyn, New York, before shifting south to the Tidewater area to pick up Convoy UGS-40 in Hampton Roads late in April, led by the 2.
The transatlantic passage proved largely uneventful; but, as the Allied ships transited the Strait of Gibraltar, the British antiaircraft cruiser HMS Caledon, the destroyer Benson, and two minesweepers equipped with special jamming apparatus, Steady and Sustain, joined the convoy. A recent increase in German air activity had prompted concern over the safety of UGS-40, a large and important convoy consisting of some 80 vessels.
Read more about this topic: USS Wilhoite (DE-397)
Famous quotes containing the words world, war, north, atlantic and/or operations:
“At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the world with his understanding alone. He lives in it, and masters it by a penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a half-man, and whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“You went to meet the shell’s embrace of fire
On Vimy Ridge; and when you fell that day
The war seemed over more for you than me,
But now for me than you the other way.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Come see the north wind’s masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“‘Society’ in America means all the honest, kindly-mannered, pleasant- voiced women, and all the good, brave, unassuming men, between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Each of these has a free pass in every city and village, ‘good for this generation only,’ and it depends on each to make use of this pass or not as it may happen to suit his or her fancy.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)