A Family's 1944 Christmas-- Part 2

Even though his mother was extremely upset that he had not written, the fact was that Joe Barrington had been ordered not to write. It was pre D-Day and no one involved with it was allowed to write home for fear that vital information might leak to German spies. So, he had an excuse. According to Joe in a recent interview, he got on a ship bound for England on Thanksgiving Day, "We went on a British luxury ship, Brazil, that had been transformed into a troop ship. We were in the hold. Six bunks were stacked in rooms eight feet high. There were 15,000 men on the ship. It took us 14 days to get to England, zigzagging as part of a convoy." He remembers standing at the Brazil's rail and watching thosands of frozen turkeys loaded and imagined the feast in store for him, instead, "we had baloney sandwiches for dinner. We never saw those turkeys again until we reached the dock in Southampton" where the turkeys were offloaded. Joe still thinks they were destined for the black market to the advantage of corrupt quartermasters or to woo Englishwomen. The Case of the Missing Turkeys. --GreGen