Voyage Two
SS Edwin W. Moore - Page 7
I went on to the wharf in Augusta, Sicily where this vendor was selling oranges. I bought one and was surprised that when I cut it open it was purple. It was the sweetest orange I had ever eaten. I went back to the ship and got a pillow case and returned to the vendor and bought enough oranges to fill the pillow case. They called these "blood oranges" and I had never seen any like them. They were large like a small grapefruit and sweet as sugar. I went to put them into the walk-in refrigerator. Walker asked "what do you plan on doing with them oranges?" I told him that I was going to take them home. The he shook his head and told me that they would go rotten long before we got home. So we, the crew, ate them. I've been told that they can be bought at some of the supermarkets here in town but I haven't seen any. That was the only time that I have ever eaten that type of orange. ( Harold Light also remembered, "We traded Hershey bars for delicious blood red (Tarocco) oranges - had never tasted them before." )
We stayed just a day in
Sicily and then sailed South in convoy towards the island of Malta. It was late
that day that we had an air raid alert. The alarm went off and we all went to
battle stations. I was at one of the 20mm's on the bridge. I heard the engines
before I saw the airplanes. I can still clearly remember the sound. The planes
were high in the sky. I can't tell you how many they were but it was a number
of them. I could see that they flew in formation. Somebody said that they were Stuka dive bombers. I couldn't tell what kind they
were but it sounded like a bunch of them. We thought they were going to attack
us but they kept out of range and kept on going somewhere else.
( Mr. Light,
who was in the Navy Armed Guard mentioned in his letter watching German dive
bombers. )
We heard that German planes attacked ships on the other side of our convoy and that some ships were damaged. But we never knew for sure what rumors were true or just scuttlebutt. We were on alert several times during the next couple of days and some of the gunners were nervous because they thought we might be attacked. They told us some German spotter planes shadowed us while we were on our way to Gibraltar but there wasn't another attack.