Note that Port Said is in Egypt, not India.
I have found Information about Alphonso Marquez on the U.S. Liberty ship SS EDWARD PAINE but some of the details are at variance with your information.
I found a record for an Alphonso Marquez by searching Ancestry.com (www.ancestry.com), which is more commonly used for genealogical research. However Ancestry.com has databases of the names of crew members of ships that arrived at various U.S. ports of entry, from the early 1800s through 1957. Records for arrivals at the port of New York are particularly extensive.
Alphonso Marquez is listed not as a member of the Armed Guard contingent but rather as a fireman-water tender. That is, he was a member of the civilian merchant marine crew, not the Armed Guard crew. He was aboard EDWARD PAINE upon its arrival in New York on February 24, 1945, with the ship having sailed from Port Said, Egypt, on January 26. He was listed as age 28, with four years of sailing experience, and was 5’3” tall and 123 pounds. He had joined the crew of EDWARD PAINE on October 27, 1944, in Baltimore. The master (captain) of the ship was a Paul B. Dittmann, who was just 25 years old. (The first mate was age 24 and the second mate was just 19; these were remarkably young ages for men in command of a ship.)
There is a separate listing of the Armed Guard crew aboard EDWARD PAINE for this voyage but Alphonso Marquez is not listed therein, nor is there any other name remotely close to his name.
A list of the movements of EDWARD PAINE while Alphonso Marquez was on board is available at http://www.convoyweb.org.uk/ports/index.html?search.php?vessel=EDWARD%20PAINE~armain. The ship sailed from Baltimore to Hampton Roads (i.e., Norfolk), Virginia, in late October 1944. She sailed from Hampton Roads to Port Said in convoy UGS-59 between November 1 and November 27, 1944. From there the ship sailed independently (i.e., not as part of a convoy) to Suez, Egypt; then Aden, Yemen; Bombay, Karachi and Cochin, India; back to Aden, Suez and Port Said, then to Oran, Algeria. In Oran she joined convoy GUS-70, leaving Oran on February 6, 1945, and arriving in New York on February 24. The Ancestry.com record shows that Alphonso Marquez was discharged from the ship in New York.
Ron Carlson, Webmaster
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