The dangerous job began secretly in the first empty days of the war. It was a gallant thing thendirty old "rust buckets" from West Coast bone yards taking aboard the tag end of a nation's aged and faulty munitions, bound for Pearl Harbor, Melbourne, the Philippines. But the munitions-loading grew. Slingloads of shells and high explosives were turning dozens of the new grey Liberty ships into floating bombs in scores of American harbors. Thousands of men & women spent their days & nights making and handling cordite and TNT.
It was a secret job. Only the cabled accounts of vast...