In June of '43 I went aboard Levy after her return from shakedown to Bermuda and north to Maine. I was a Seaman 1/c radio striker having graduated Fleet Radio School at Bedford Springs, PA. There were four or five other men accompanying me.  We had no berths aboard for about a week and slept wherever we could plop down our seabag and rest our head. We were allowed, no ordered, to shower each day however. 

We left Boston for Staten Island, N.Y. and in that first night in that darkened vessel out at sea I could not sleep, a dream of my boyhood was coming true...I was on a ship, out of sight of land and headed for harm's way. We took on torpedos (useless in a 21 knot flank speed vessel) at Staten Is. and headed south for Norfolk where there were more exchanges of officers and crew and leaving took up station to escort 11 LST's whose decks were loaded with dismantled F4U Corsairs for Henderson Field on Guadalcanal.

The Carribbean was a dangerous place in 1943 (as was the coast of the United States) and somewhere off Haiti we were attacked by German U boats, my first terrifying action as my assigned battle station was two decks down in a magazine under the number one 3"50 gun above. The compartment rang with exploding depth charges from us and other escorts. The entire convoy zigged and zagged but we did lose two LST's and other DE's were assigned to pickup survivors.

At daybreak we made Coco Solo and began our traverse of the Panama Canal. After a few days in Balboa on the Pacific side we again formed up to deliver our charges to the Solomons with an enchanting few day hold over for refueling at Bora Bora, one of the Society Islands. However, we were to have one more encounter with submarines, either Japanese or German....we never found out.

We had no underwater or surface contact but a starboard look-out, Joe Redding Soundman 3/c saw a spread of four torpedos approaching us from 1 o'clock - the general alarm went off a little late as all four passed beneath us and continued harmlessly on their way. Whoever set the depth of those "fish" thought they were firing at a Destroyer....since we were the first DE in the Pacific they did not have specs on us yet.  DE's draw five or six feet less water than destroyers and we figured the "fish" passed under us by about 2.5 feet. They set them at that depth for destroyers to try to blow the bottom out. One of the good memories.

John (Mac) McCullough