Shipping Out

 

Note to the reader: Thank you for joining me on my journey to share my father's journey! New posts to the blog here appear at the top of the main page, pushing the previous posts down below. Please be sure to check out the earlier posts and work your way up to the top. 

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From Training to Train-ing

Their furloughs over, the men of the 129th returned to Fort Bliss and boarded trains for their designated Port of Embarkation, Camp Shanks, New York. From the HistoryNet.com article, "Camp Shanks: Last Stop, U.S.A:"

IN THE DARKEST HOURS of many nights from April 1943 to May 1945, people living on the outskirts of Orangeburg, New York, awoke to the heavy footfalls of soldiers on their final march on American soil. Division by division—from the 6th Armored to the 101st Airborne—nearly 1.3 million uniformed men and women filed from the Camp Shanks staging area to railcars and ferries that would transport them 30 miles south to ocean liners waiting at the mouth of the Hudson River.

For many of the soldiers who passed through in 1943 and '44, Camp Shanks was the last glimpse of the United States they would ever see.