The navy hastily converted many of its warships into temporary transports, including aircraft carriers, where three-to five-tiered bunks were installed on the hangar decks to provide accommodation for several thousand men in relative comfort. Stopping at Okinawa, they embarked thousands more Tenth United States Army troops. Vice Admiral Forrest Sherman’s Task Force 11 departed Tokyo Bay early in September 1945 with the battleships USS New Mexico, USS Idaho, USS Mississippi, and USS North Carolina, and two carriers plus a squadron of destroyers filled with homeward-bound servicemen. With the surrender of Japan, the navy also began bringing home Sailors and Marines. By the end of February, the ETO phase of Magic Carpet was essentially completed. Between May and September 1945, 1,417,850 were repatriated.īetween October 1945 to April 1946, another 3,323,395 were repatriated. Returned to Europe were more than 450,000 German prisoners of war, in addition to 53,000 Italian ex-POWs. Former Axis POWs had to be repatriated from Europe and Japan and occupation forces had to be dropped in Germany, China, Korea and Japan. The Magic Carpet fleet also included 48 hospital ships these transported more than half a million wounded. The WSA and the army also converted 29 troopships into special carriers for war brides, for the almost half a million European women who had married American servicemen. One of the ocean liners, the British RMS Queen Mary, the US obtained the use of in exchange for 10 smaller US vessels. Some would carry as few as 300 while the large ocean liners often squeezed 15,000 aboard. The European lift now included more than 400 vessels. She was joined in November by the battleship USS Washington. In mid-October 1945 the United States Navy donated the newly commissioned carrier USS Lake Champlain – fitted with bunks for 3,300 troops – to the operation. Whereas American shipping had averaged the delivery of 148,000 soldiers per month to the European Theatre of Operations (ETO) during the wartime build-up, the post VE-Day rush homeward would average more than 435,000 GIs per month for the next 14 months. The first homeward-bound ships left Europe in late June 1945, and by November, the sealift was at its height. There were 3,059,000 service men and women in Europe, Africa and the Mediterranean on VE-Day. Adequate port and docking facilities were also serious considerations along with the transportation necessary to take the veterans to demobilisation camps after they reached America’s shores. The WSA ordered the immediate conversion of 300 Liberty and Victory cargo ships into transports. The Navy was excluded from the initial European sealift, as the Pacific War was far from over, and the task of returning the troops was the sole responsibility of the Army and Merchant Marine. Eligibility for repatriation was determined by the Adjusted Service Rating Score. Eventually, organisation of the operation was given to the War Shipping Administration (WSA). Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall established committees to address the logistical problem. More than 16 million Americans were in uniform and more than eight million of them were scattered across all theatres of war worldwide. PlanningĪs early as mid-1943, the United States Army had recognised that, once the war was over, bringing the troops home would be a priority. Refer to Adjusted Service Rating Score and Selective Service System. The European phase of Operation Magic Carpet concluded in February 1946 while the Pacific phase continued until September 1946. Warships, such as aircraft carriers, battleships, hospital ships, and large numbers of assault transports were used. Beginning in October 1945, over 370 navy ships were used for repatriation duties in the Pacific. Hundreds of Liberty ships, Victory ships, and troop transports began repatriating soldiers from Europe in June 1945. Operation Magic Carpet was the post- World War II operation by the War Shipping Administration to repatriate over eight million American military personnel from the European, Pacific, and Asian theatres.
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