America in WWII - (Page 24) then engaged heavily in war contracts). The Brewster was loaded with 83,000 bushels of wheat headed for England to aid that starving nation. Bound upriver during a heavy rain squall at the same time was the steamer W.D. Calverly. The ships collided, puncturing a fatal hole in the Brewster, which immediately took on water. The Brewster’s captain, realizing the consequences of a blocked channel, veered his doomed ship to the Canadian shoreline, where it gracefully hove partially on its side like a beached whale. Within hours the wet wheat swelled, causing hull plates to buckle. My parents took us by car nearer the mishap scene, a spectacle still very much in focus after all these years. There were many other sights and sounds of war all around us. US Coast Guard vessels regularly patrolled the waterway, their small forward deck guns a vivid sign of war. Algonac and Marine City in Michigan carried out nighttime blackouts—the siren signals are still stored in my memory. By this time, too, German prisoners of war were being put vivid. Gradually we warmed up to them and exchanged waves, eradicating the “monster” image we first imagined. Many US service personnel in snappy military garb frequented the area, too. Although the horrific aspects of war must be remembered, to a youngster, it was a time of memory-making. Alan Mann, Wallaceburg, Ontario, Canada A SOLDIER WHO DID IT ALL I Robert Paulson (right) poses with his brother Roger, a fellow 5th Division GI, in Paris in 1945. to work at local agricultural tasks. Daily about 4 P.M. an open truckload of prisoners would pass by our location, their identical shirts with a big red circle quite WISCONSIN. In our family there were seven brothers in World War II, including me. My brother Roger and I enlisted in October 1940, and were sent to Fort Custer, Michigan. After one year in the States we were sent to Reykjavik, Iceland. We arrived in September 1941, three months before Pearl Harbor. We were under attack by German submarines on the way to Iceland, and were bombed while we were there. After two years in Iceland we were sent to Bristol, England. The Germans were sending what we called buzz bombs—they WAS BORN IN COURTESY OF ROBERT PAULSON 24 AMERICA IN WWII OCTOBER 2007
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