Whenever the marines would head out on the ocean to go to battle, there would be 100 or more ships in the convoy. Battleships, aircraft carriers,\u00a0etc. Dad’s group, the 5th Amphibious Corp – Reconnaissance Battalion, rode\u00a0on a Destroyer escort, rebuilt and souped up from World War I, small and very fast. Their job was to circle the convoy, looking for subs, and dropping charges on them. There were 25 of them, all recon. \u00a0No bunks, only the bare necessities. When it would go fast, the rear end of the boat would dip in the water. They had to tie themselves to the deck to keep from washing off, while they guarded the convoy. \u00a0And it just about threw them all off into the water.<\/p>\n
Their mess kits would get quite\u00a0dirty and there was no water to clean them with, so they used sand, and it got their dishes as clean as could be. When they got through with their mission on Siapan, and after they joined the 4th Division, they got on their ship, and convoyed back to Hawaii.<\/p>\n
The ships had no goodies on them, all the best food was gone. \u00a0They were starving for a decent meal, especially fruit. As they docked, right before them stood a warehouse. They were instructed to get their belongings and get ready to return to camp. Somebody said, “That warehouse is full of pineapple”. \u00a0Then he broke into the building with a crowbar. \u00a0There were maybe 1000 cans of pineapple in there, and Dad worried they might all go to the brigg. \u00a0But like everyone else, he filled his poncho and pockets full. They absolutely wrecked the place. \u00a0And they ate and ate, until they almost died from eating pineapple.<\/p>\n
No one ever said a word, including the grower! And we still can’t get Dad to eat pineapple.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Whenever the marines would head out on the ocean to go to battle, there would be 100 or more ships in the convoy. Battleships, aircraft carriers,\u00a0etc. Dad’s group, the 5th Amphibious Corp – Reconnaissance Battalion, rode\u00a0on a Destroyer escort, rebuilt and souped up from World War I, small and very fast. Their job was to … Continue reading The Pineapple Invasion<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-war-ii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldschooltrail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldschooltrail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldschooltrail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldschooltrail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldschooltrail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/oldschooltrail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":120,"href":"https:\/\/oldschooltrail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions\/120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oldschooltrail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldschooltrail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oldschooltrail.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}