"Somebody on our transport said that a transport ship was like a moving van. Somebody else said it was more like a freight car. But the Supply Officer, a short, skinny man who wrote poetry for the ship's daily paper, gave us the best description. He said that a transport was like a tenement house. That, I think, was the best I heard that day. A troopship is like a tenement house in many ways... For eight days on the way into battle we were a tenement, a moving van, a freight car. Then we reached the battle lines and we dropped the troops into tiny little boats that took them to the beaches... [Then] the transport - that big, awkward thing so recently full of young men eating, sleeping, playing - suddenly stopped being a moving van, freight car, tenement house, and became, almost before we knew it, a hospital."
