Carriers Take GIs and P-47s to CBI

USS Mission Bay (CVE-59) and USS Wake Island (CVE-65) steamed from Staten Island on February 20, 1944, loaded with Army personnel and one hundred P-47 pursuit planes bound for the China-Burma-India Theater. Accompanied by destroyer escorts USS Trumpeter, USS Straub, and USS Gustafson, the convoy formed Task Force Group 27.2. At sea for a biblical “forty days and forty nights,” according to recollections of my father, then-Cpl. James H. (“Hank”) Mills, Mission Bay went down and around the coast to South America, crossed the Atlantic, and then steamed around the coast of Africa and up to the Arabian Sea. Men aboard the carriers were assigned to cramped quarters with little to keep them occupied other than to read, play cards, and sleep. The monotony was interrupted when the carriers crossed the equator, and a traditional line-crossing ceremony got under way to commemorate the occasion. Hank remembered stops for refueling and fresh provisions at Recife, Brazil, at Cape Town, South Africa, and at Cape Diego, Madagascar, before docking at Karachi, India (now part of Pakistan) on March 29.