POLLYWOGS & SHELLBACKS: the memoir of a young sailor crossing equator during top-secret government mission.

Upon graduating from Class A Radar School in early August 1958, I received orders to report immediately to the USS Bearss (DD 654) berthed at Pier 6 on the Norfolk, VA Naval Station. The usual two weeks of leave my classmates received were not possible as the ship was getting underway the following morning. Upon reporting aboard and contacting my future CIC (Combat Information Center) shipmates I learned that the ships mission was unknown. Upon leaving the harbor the following morning we soon realized we were heading South. Later that afternoon we joined a seven ship Task Force out of Newport, Rhode Island and crossed the equator two weeks later enroute to a position approximately eleven hundred miles Southeast of Cape Town, South Africa. Pollywogs and Shellbacks describe the Line Crossing initiation and the secrets kept from all but a few of the forty-five hundred men aboard the nine participating ships.