chillywilly
I served aboard USS Mills (DER 383) and circumnavigated twice in her in 1967-'68 Mills was an Edsall Class Destroyer Escort built for N Atlantic Convoy duty. Built in 1943, she crossed the Ocean protecting Merchant ships bound for England all through WWII after the war was mothballed til reactivated for use in the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line in the cold war. The black oil engines were replaced by 4 Diesel Motors and the resulting excess tankage made her a long-distant cruiser her construction made her able to handle heavy weather, so she was assigned to Task Force 43 (Operation Deepfreeze) Antarctica support. I did two seasons aboard Mills doing weather pickets on the 40th parallell off the Ross Sea. We did a circumnavigation each deployment, transiting the Panama canal and crossing the Pacific on the way there and returning via the Indian Ocean and thru the Suez Canal to the Med and the Atlantic stopping in Egypt, Spain Italy England Denmark and Germany before returning home to Key West. |8B