The troopship USS David Branch met the young black soldiers of the 97th at the Port of Seattle. They got off their trains at Ft. Lewis and one company moved directly to the port to deliver their few small trucks for loading on the ship.
Through the day on April 22 the rest of the regiment moved to the port and crammed their twelve hundred bodies and barracks bags into the fetid hold. “Each man followed the man in front of him through a maze of hatches and companionways.”
The David Branch left port in the evening on April 22, headed out into Puget Sound. From the Sound, it made its way north into Canadian waters along Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia then on north through the North Pacific, the Gulf of Alaska, Prince William Sound… Officers who got to go up on deck enjoyed spectacular scenery.
A few of the enlisted men aboard got up on deck during the trip. Most of them didn’t, remained confined below in “a forest of steel pipes supporting canvas strips stretched tightly with ropes.” Hammocks, the canvas strips, “tiered three high.” The face of the man on top grazed “a tangle of pipes… The men below had to contend with the indentation made by the bodies of the men above.”
They ate twice a day, lined up for hours to get to the food. “Food was dumped unto the mess tray and you proceeded to a chest high table running the width of the ship. Once there, you moved along the table, eating as you went…”
The ship left Seattle in spring. A week later, sixteen hundred nautical miles north, approaching the Arctic Circle, winter still gripped Valdez, Alaska. Young men from the Carolina’s and Georgia poised on the edge of a very different world.