Voyage Three
SS Charles J. Finger - Page 3
They said that the crew and the Navy Armed guard shouldn't fraternize but you'd make friends anyway. A ship is not a big place and after weeks a sea there is no way to keep sixty guys from running into each other and we worked together in gunnery practice. I got to be good friends with several Navy sailors on different voyages. I was drinking in this pub with one of them. He was a big guy about twice my size. I don't know what he said to these English sailors but one thing led to another. You'd have guys from all different countries and different branches of the services drinking in a bar and sooner or later something would be said. I saw it coming and all these guys a head taller than me and I'm thinking what the hell is this sailor getting me into. This Navy guy says something like my shipmate here can whip any of you Limey bastards. "Oh yeah?" said the English. Here I'm the smallest one in the pub, but then you can't back down. I figured I might as well get in at least one punch - the first one. So I sucker-punched the biggest of the lot. Those Limey sailors nearly beat the crap out of us - we were lucky to get out of there alive.
The Navy Armed Guards had it made from what I could see. I called them "passengers". They cleaned their guns and had a daily drill but mostly they ate and slept. They didn't have anything to do with running the ship. We were working when they were sun bathing and laying around. Their work would come defending us, of course we would be helping them do their work, too. But it was good to have gunners aboard and like I said, I made good friends with several of them.
The SS Charles J. Finger departed Liverpool at 1030 April 7, 1944 in a convoy of eighty vessels with a heavy escort of ten destroyers, destroyer escorts and corvettes and two aircraft carriers. No contact with the enemy occurred and the convoy speed was 11 knots. The Finger arrived New York at 1330 April 24, 1944. Two days later the crew got discharged and paid off at the Overlakes Freight Corporation in New York City. Danny caught the train and started south and west for Texas and home.