On the Way
to England

We are still taking life easy, nothing to do but get up when we feel like it, go to chow, go to the noon show, then monkey around the rest of the afternoon. It will all end very suddenly though and we will find ourselves having to get down to business. There are only a few planes to be worked on before they get to ours so I imagine we will be pulling out of here the end of the week.

All our ratings came through and it was a surprise too. I guess it doesn't pay to listen to rumors. We were sure we wouldn't get them. I am now a Technical Sergeant. Now if I only don't get busted I will be sitting pretty.

We practiced ditching a couple of days ago and were all out of the ship, including 4 passengers, in about 50 seconds.

We are leaving in the morning. We are going to have an interesting trip over. We will get to see some country around the equator, etc., some African desert too. Our ship is in the hangar now being worked on and I have to stand guard over it tonight.

We were going to leave around 9 this morning and get clear to our destination in Florida, along the eastern coast, but the automatic pilot wasn't working right and by the time they got it fixed it was 11 AM. We finally took off at 11:15. Planes can't land at night at our Florida destination so we only came this far today, this field is 18 miles out of Macon, Georgia. It took us 6 hours to get here.

We had a nice trip except for one thing which caused a lot of excitement. We were going along with the automatic pilot doing the flying when it went haywire all of a sudden and threw us into a violent dive. I was sitting down and the plane snapped over so suddenly that I raised up a bit and it threw a gallon thermos of coffee off the flight deck and back into the bomb bay. The guys in the back of the ship really got it though. They went flying all around--clear up to the roof. They had all kinds of bumps and bruises. After it was all over it was very funny, because there really was nothing serious. All the pilot had to do was press a button which released the automatic pilot so he could take over.

This is a much different place than we have ever been at. We are staying in a kind of hotel on the base, showers, towels, soap, etc, furnished. We pay for our rooms out of our $7.00 per diem pay which we get from now til we get to our overseas base. So we are going to live like kings. We also have to buy our own meals. We had a big beefsteak tonight for supper.

We got here yesterday and have had quite a busy time since. At 11 I have to go out and stand guard on our plane til morning. One of us is on guard all the time because we have a lot of our personal stuff aboard. Our mail is censored from now on.

I got to see the Atlantic coast for the first time in my life yesterday. We flew down it for a ways. It was too hazy to see far out though.

We looked at the US for the last time for awhile, today. This is the first time I've ever flown over water. It is very interesting. We flew along at 10,000 feet, over clouds part of the time and sometimes it was nice and clear.

This Puerto Rico sure is an interesting place. A guy told me the temp. never varies over 5 degrees the year around. We had some fresh home grown pineapple for supper and was it good! They also raise sugar cane and some bananas. There are coconut palms all around here with green coconuts on them. It is very green and beautiful.

We each got a little bag from the red cross before we left the states and in it was this stationery, a pack of camels, a deck of cards, a sewing kit, a soap box with soap, and some other things.

We got in here today in the midst of a tropical rainstorm. It is very hot and sultry here and they say it rains nearly every day this time of the year. There was about 2 inches of water on the ramp where we parked the plane.

We passed the equator day before yesterday as we were crossing the Amazon river. It goes right across an island in the river. I have seen a lot of jungle. It looks very thick from the air. The tops of the trees look like a bunch of green cauliflower. It busts loose and rains once in a while. The people don't seem to mind though as it's so warm. They play right out in it.

This part of Brazil we are in now doesn't seem to be too rainy for which I am glad. I guess it isn't the rainy season yet. The nights are cool so it is nice to sleep. We sleep in tents with the sides rolled up and last night I had my pants tied to the ceiling and when I woke up this morning my pocket was unzipped and I found my billfold had been emptied. I was minus $11.00. Next time I will keep it in my bed with me.

You should see what we are living in now. It is very different from what we've been used to. We are at an old French Foreign Legion post and we are in tents in an olive grove. We just have a dirt floor and it gets very cold at night here in Africa so we build a fire on the floor in the middle of the tent. There is a hole in the top where the smoke goes out. Our tent smells just like a smoke house, from the kind of wood they have here. We sleep on army cots with no mattress.

We put 2 blankets under and 2 over but it is still hard to keep warm. You can't imagine until you've seen it, how filthy and primitive the natives are. They are kind of Arabs I think, and speak French. They dress in any kind of rags they can find and most of them go bare-footed and some of them wear sandals. I don't think they ever wash.

At chow time they line up outside the mess hall and when the soldiers come out they beg our scraps that are left in the mess kits, and we dump it into their cans. They don't care what you put in. Everything gets mixed up and looks worse than pig slop. We have been in some bad malaria districts and have had to take atabrine pills, and sleep under netting and rub mosquito repellent on our face, neck, hands, etc.

We are still camping in our tent like the rest of the Arabs around here, and we smell like well cured hams by now, as we have had our bonfire in the middle of the tent going night and day. We are still weathered in here in Morocco. It has been raining quite a bit the last couple days. It's a good thing our tent doesn't leak.

We went into town today. It is a very interesting place but there isn't much to do. There are a few French women around and the rest are the Arab women, who wear veils, so we don't know what they look like, maybe they wear them because they are so homely, I don't know. They certainly don't wear beautiful gowns and silk veils like you see in the movies.

I am glad that I am getting a chance to see all these countries and people. I wouldn't take a million for this trip.