The accounts of the day said that an “awesome silence” so unnatural to Manhattan fell over the waterfront after the big guns of the battleship Missouri fired off blank charges from the Hudson River in tribute to the returning war dead.
The silence then greeted the U.S. Army Transport ship Joseph V. Connolly as she sailed up the Narrows past the Statue of Liberty and eased into the berth at Pier 21 off W. 21st on Manhattan’s West Side on Oct. 26, 1947.
The converted Liberty ship carried a cargo of 6,248 caskets bearing the remains of troops from the European theater of World War II, including many who fell in the Battle of the Bulge…