Point Cruz (CVE 119) - Naval Cruise Book

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. . . About the middle of the cruise there was a shakeup of all the yeomen aboard. I was rated now, but that gave me little priority. I was pulled out of engineering and loaned to operations for a couple of months before I was fi- nally settled as Captain's Yeoman in the ship's office. Feeling some- thing like an old library book, I resigned myself to learning new records, histories, and logs and the Operations Department routine. The operations office was ideally locate-d in the after part -of the Commander L. R. Hardy, Jr. Operations Officer LCDR. R. F. Craig Air Intelligence Officer I I I I ship. Here it was away from everything- from everything concerned with operations: the compartment, CIC, main comm, the signal bridge, the Operations IOfficer's stateroom were all up forward-a half of a city block forward. In a way this was nice, since it afforded me some good coffee breaks every time I had to go find someone or deliver a message up forward. Air intelligence was nice: it was won- derfully air conditioned against the hot weather, but a lot of brass hung around there so I usually wandered through the door to CIC and watched the radarmen reading the scopes, charting the contacts they picked up on their status boards, and pass- ing the information and recommendations for courses and speeds up to the OOD on the bridge. All around were speakers that blabbed out encoded messages, and there always seemed someone to take each one and interpret it and pass up the word: col- lection evaluation and dissemination they called it, so I looked intelligent and headed for main communications. It was as bad there as in CIC, except it was warmer. All

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operatrons round was the sound of morse code and back In a lIttle closet the watch offlcer smoked a crgarette whIle he encrypted a message to be sent out There were so many spaces that seemed busy the aerographers out on the forward elevator fIllIng up bal loons to carry up Instruments to check the weather or back In aerology they would be drawrng long lmes across the charts the postal clerks down In the post offIce sorting out the latest mall brought over by helrcop ter or the slgnal brIdge The slgnal brldge was nIce the perennlal coffee pot and fresh aIr The slgnalmen were up there too but they were a qulet sort Hour after hour theyd stand up there and talk to them selves In semaphore n between runnrnq up flag slgnals sent up from the brIdge below Sooner or later l d grve up the one way con versatIon and go back to the offrce and the Inevrtable operatron plans to mrmeograph would stIll be waItIng X w vt if V ' Qsikifilsf - . . ' 3 X . K ,E . flaw 5 . . wr I My . . - . . . . . , . - I . I Q . . . ! , . .