Watching the Ships Go to War-- Part 2

Continued from April 30th entry.

In the park across the street from the railroad, Willard Steinield saw a wooden structure with steps going up and a platform on top which had an anti-aircraft gun and a machine gun.  He always thought the thing was so rickety that if a German plane flew too close it would fall down of its own accord.

His home was close to where the Hudson River flowed into the Atlantic Ocean.

One morning at Fort Hamilton (Fort Wadsworth was across from it), he "aw two destroyers steaming back and forth across the entrance to the harbor like metallic sentinels.  That evening I visited at Shore Road alongside the Hudson River.  You could not have any cameras or binoculars in this area.

I counted 60 merchant ships strung haphazardly across the harbor.  I remember marveling how the ferry boat from Brooklyn to Staten Island would thread its way among them.

The next morning there wasn't a single ship in the harbor.  They had all left in the night as part of a convoy headed for England.

We used to get warnings in school to keep our windows open when they would try out the big guns at Fort Hamilton.  They were afraid that the concussion would break windows."

A Great Account of Life On the Homefront  --GreGen