My Father's Navy Service -- Part 4 -- Ship's Log

I was recently able to locate many of the monthly ship's logs for the ship my father was on in the Navy - the APC-101.  By marking all the places he went in Google Earth and matching them up to the places that the log said they were each day, I was able to reconstruct all his ship movements.

He joined the APC-101 on June 18 when they were docked at Espiritu Santo in what was then the New Hebrides (now called Vanuatu).  This was not the ship's home port, but was a facility that they sometimes visited.  Their home port was Noumea in New Caledonia.

For the next nearly four months the ship steamed between three locations: Noumea, New Caledonia; Fiji; and the New Hebrides.  In both the latter places they had two different islands in the group that they might visit.  The legs were: NH, F, NH, NC, NH, F, NC, F, NC, NH, F, NC, NH, F.  Each leg was between 2-3 days.  The cargo was only mentioned a few times, being cases of cigarettes on the way to Fiji and Bananas/Pineapple from Fiji.

After stopping at Fiji for the last time on the 11th of October (1945), their port assignment was changed and instead of steaming back west to Noumea, the steamed farther east to Pago Pago in American Samoa.  After a week off, they began a new set of routes. One route was toward the NW and consisted of British Samoa, Wallis Island, Ellice Island, and Nukafetau (a small atoll).  The other route was to the east to the Cook Islands, Bora Bora (Society Islands), and Penryhn.  They ran each of those routes a couple of times over the next three months.  The legs of these routes could be as much as 4 days, so a complete trip around was about two weeks.

Beginning around the first of December, there were rumors that their time in the South Pacific was coming to an end and they would be going home soon.  However, this was not a trip that the APC-101 could do on their own.  It was about a week to Palmyra, another week to Pearl Harbor, and nearly two weeks from there back to San Francisco.  So these longer trips needed to be done in company with other ships going the same way.  Not until the end of January did they finally start the trip back to the US. After a layover for several weeks in Palmyra, they were in Hawaii around the middle of February.  After another two week layover, the finally arrived in San Francisco around the 10th of March.

My father's time with the APC-101 was not over however.  He remained with the ship, but with a skeleton crew as they went up the coast to Bremerton, WA.  He was finally granted leave to return to Connecticut on April 15th.  The ship was decommissioned two weeks later on the 26th.  By then my father had returned to Connecticut and proposed to my mother.