From: Robert Swanson, webmaster, ship@internet-esq.com
Date: 21 Oct 1999
Time: 22:07:45
Remote Name: 167.206.13.53
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The following is a transcription of an article which appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch many years ago. (this article will be posted to the USS Augusta website at: http://www.internet-esq.com/ussaugusta/farewell.htm)
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GOODBYE, OLD GIRL!
-by Robert Morrison*
She was lying in the dark and gusty waters of the Norfolk roadstead when we said goodbye to her before dawn. She lay black and silent and waiting while the gang heaved sea bags and chests over her side and scrambled down the ladder into the bobbing of the motor launch. In a moment it was finished and we were done with our wartime home.
The deck officer leaned over into the light at the top of the ladder, yelled down at us in the launch, "Much obliged, fellows, good luck. Shove off, cox'n." And that was it.
The launch nosed into the wind, the cold spray came over the bow and made us turn back and take a last look at the old Augie Maru, the cruiser Augusta on which we'd been sweating it out, waiting for just this moment.
Yes, it was what we had been wanting for a long time. So what the devil was that wee, small tug of affection we felt at leaving that big hunk of iron? You have me, mate; I don't know. It must have been something that happens to everyone who goes to sea.
That was some ship for brass hats, wasn't it, mate? Captains and kings and Presidents all over the place half the time, it seemed. Nice trip, that last one we took, to carry President Truman to Antwerp and the Potsdam Conference. He was a good guy all right.
Instead of staying up forward, sitting in those wicker chairs beneath the awnings they had rigged up next, to the eight-inch turret, he'd be back on the well deck wearing a white sailor hat and shooting the breeze with the seaman when he had time.
It brought back a sort of old times the day the President had the King of England aboard in Plymouth. Last time we had seen the King was in Portsmouth up the channel a way. That was the year before, a few days before the invasion, and the ship was really loaded with brass then. It got so a man could hardly carry on his work without stumbling over a few generals and admirals.
But to you and me, mate, I guess there are other more ordinary things than Presidents and kings and short, hard spells of action that will make our time difficult to forget.
There was the clean fresh wind topside, the sun that glitters and dazzles your eyes on the water, the throbbing of engines below, the creak and sway of rigging and masts.
There was the raging headache of seasickness, the awful lurch between a pitch and a roll in rough weather. There was the chow the army boys envied us. Why didn't we feel well off? Appetite does funny things in a steam-sweating mess hall below decks.
There were the general quarters alarm that used to roll us out at 4 or 5 a.m. every day submarine alerts, the sudden shocks of destroyers' depth charges against the hull, sounding and feeling below as if we'd hit something. There was the endless authority of the loud-speaker, and the shrill bosun's pipe that, by tradition, had to accompany it.
Baths came out of buckets - showers were only for chiefs and officers aboard the old Augie. In the Mediterranean were white uniforms to be eternally scrubbed of grease and dirt. Cleaning, scouring, scraping, painting; gunners, tenderly oiling their charges against the salt air - that was our life ordinarily.
Then, too, there was the hot, close air of compartments battened down for battle condition. The days on end at general quarters in the invasion. Tense, red-eyed and haggard men going off watch and wait in line for a plate of beans. Endless nights of vigilance, of look-outs above, and of watchers below with eyes glued to the thin green jittery lines of electronic scope indicators, while the steel band of heavy battle phones made a crease in your skull with the hours that passed.
Maybe you'll remember too your first night aboard when you stepped outside and lit a cigarette; how the deck watch growled at your forgetting you were in a war. And the first time you heard the man overboard alarm and saw how easy it was to lose sight of a man in the water when the ship was making twenty knots. And remember the lad that slipped over in the heavy tideway at Normandy, and another lost in the gray rolling waters of Hampton Roads?
Those things aren't easy to forget. Somebody said it'll seem in the years to come like a small slice out of your life..I guess that's what it was, mate, if it wasn't your whole life.
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*Robert Morrison served as Chief Radio Technician aboard the cruiser Augusta during the war and saw duty in both the Atlantic and Mediterranean waters. He recently received his discharge. (Condensed and published by arrangement with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
Date: 03 Nov 2007
Time: 16:39:23 -0500
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