Oral History Interview with Lawrence Warren, April 17, 2011 Page: 47

                                
MZ: Yes. Yeah, I read that, too. Wow. Let's see. So after
the damage at Santa Cruz you pull into Noumea, New
Caledonia, for repairs?
LW: Yeah, after Santa Cruz we went to Noumea, New Caledonia.
It was a French island, had a bunch of French people on it.
MZ: What was that like?
LW: Well, it was a pretty good liberty. It was interesting to
go in there and talk to some of those French people. Some
of them could talk a little English. Some of them would
get in trouble. They told us some of them would get in
trouble over in France, and they'd send them to that
island.  (laughter) But they had a lot of girls on there,
too, you know. You can cut some of this out if you have
to. But they had a line a mile long.  (laughs)
MZ: Well, that's a lot of men. How many men were there on the
Enterprise?
LW: They say when they were pretty well loaded they had about
2,800 plus the air groups.
MZ: The air groups and like their mechanics and so forth?

LW: Aviation, machinist mates, yeah, and aviation ordinance
men. The aviation ordinance men are the ones that loaded
the bombs and stuff. And the machinist mates would work on
it. They had aviation mechanics, too, that worked on the
planes. A lot of those guys were assigned to a certain

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