大象传媒

William Roy Bromage served as a young sailor on a corvette, protecting the convoys in the Atlantic.
The convoys were made up of merchant ships which transported food, weapons, fuel and raw materials through the U-Boat blockade. The work of the convoys was vital to the survival of Britain.

鈥淔or three months before I joined the convoys I was part of a degauzing party based in Plymouth. This involved wrapping a cable around a ship, then charging it up. This demagnetised the hull, preventing it setting off magnetic mines.

In 1942 I joined the crew of the corvette HMS Woodruff at Falmouth where she was being refitted out. She was part of the Freetown Escort Force whose base ship was HMS Philocletis. HMS Woodruff was painted on the side with a blue outline of a ship much smaller than the actual hull. This was designed to give the impression from a distance that the ship was further away, along the lines of the Dazzle Ships.

We sailed in the first convoy to Freetown, losing two ships. One was torpedoed during the night but didn鈥檛 sink. We picked up the survivors. One of them was a young lad who was crossing into our ship when he fell and was crushed to death between the ships. We then sunk the ship (which I think was an oil tanker) to prevent it falling into enemy hands.

Like all corvettes, HMS Woodruff was only a small ship, but it was packed out with survivors. We had a sick-bay attendant who looked after them before we dropped them off at Milford Haven.

We went to Falmouth after the first convoy for a refit. We set depth charges for the four depth charge throwers on the sides of the ship, along with four inch guns and bofors.

We escorted our second, forty strong convoy in October 1942 when we were attacked for seven days and nights 鈥� we lost a lot of ships. We never saw any submarines, but somewhere, in the middle of the convoy, was U509. SS Stentor was the lead ship and the torpedo hit her on the starboard side killing many. The sea was aflame. We picked up a lot of badly burned men. We used mattresses to carry them on board, though when the mattresses folded as they were lifted the men were in agony. I think we may have been a decoy convoy on that occasion 鈥� we saw lots of British troopships before we were attacked. We continued on to Hull for a change of boiler tubes and a small refit, before returning to Freetown on convoy duties in the South Atlantic.

In the summer of 1943 we had to sail over to Brazil as part of a convoy, along with HMS York and another corvette, an armed merchant cruiser HMS Astorius, and two ocean going Dutch tugs, the Zeider Zee and one other. We were to pick up a huge floating dock, capable of holding a 10,000 ton cruiser. We were escorting it slowly across, en route to Trimcomlee in Ceylon, when the Astorius was torpedoed 400 miles from Freetown. She was severely damaged and several crew were killed, but didn鈥檛 sink. She was towed to Gibraltar, made seaworthy, then to Belfast for permanent repairs, where I heard she caught fire.
HMS Egret was also sunk, in August 1943, by the first radio-controlled, rocket propelled glide bomb which cut her in half, killing the whole crew of two hundred men.鈥�

William Bromage
October 2004

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