"Hey, Bill, land!" shouted Jim Hurley. "God, at last," I said. "Let's go up.''
It was the thirteenth
day, and the morning was bright with sun shine. The heavy pounding of the
engines slacked off, and our speed was cut to a few knots. Word passed quickly
through the ship, and men swarmed all over the decks. Land was visible on the port
side. Danny Moore, who worked in Supply, ran for his field glasses. Hurley and
I climbed upon a hatch, watching other men work their way up higher and higher
on anything available and unguarded. No one knew where we were, but all could
see what it was like.
What we saw was a long
yellow streak of sandy shore with mountains rising behind it. Through Danny's
binoculars we picked out white houses with roofs of red, orange, blue, yellow,
and cream. Jim Hurley and I jumped down and found a place at the starboard rail
from which we could see a French word on a half-sunken cruiser.
I said to Jim, "I
guess that's what the French lessons were for. What's the name?"
"I can't read
it," he said, "but look." He was pointing to three or four U.S.
and foreign battleships that lay in our path. We steered around them, steamed
into the harbor, and touched land, the engines stopped, and we dropped anchor.
It was May 10, three days before the war in North Africa ended a thousand miles
east in Tunisia. Our port was Casablanca.
There was no mistaking
the excitement on board. The sight of land was infectious; it sprung us out of
lethargy and boredom; it released a flood of conversation. It stirred rumors;
it quickened imaginations regarding
the port and the country and what we were going to do there. We ran back and forth
from port to starboard trying to catch all the views. We reacted like children
to the wondrously strange sights.
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