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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Janine John of the Cumbria volunteers on behalf of Arthur Sproad and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

After training, my first trip to sea was on the Russian convoys in 1942. It wasn’t a very pleasant experience I might admit. Going through the Arctic, the ship’s guard rails had thick ice hanging from the rails all the way round. The ships were only balanced to take a certain amount of weight so every now and again we had to go round with hammers and knock it all off to make sure the ship kept an even keel.

Christmas 1942, I spent in Murmansk in Russia. We were told that we were going to get our Christmas dinner when we were back in the UK - I’m still waiting for mine…

In 1943 we went to Gibraltar and were on the motor convoys from Gibraltar to Malta getting food and everything through for the starving Maltese. From there we went across to Sicily when Sicily was released by the army and then went out to meet the surrender of the Italian fleet. We were there for the surrender and we escorted them back into Malta.

After that, we went up into the Adriatic Sea, to the west side of it and we had what they called a FOO - you never knew his name. He was just a man that took on the name FOO. FOO stood for Forward Observation Officer. We used to take him up to the far end of Italy, drop him into a dinghy and he went behind the enemy lines to get all the information he could. We used to go and pick him up at a set time. One night we dropped him off to go and do observations and he did not come back. Whether he was shot or taken prisoner we never did know. It wasn’t very pleasant; the Adriatic was full of German submarines at that particular time but we had to get very close so that he didn’t have far to go with the dinghy. You were watching for movements all around and for German submarines. We were on HMS Raider; they usually built the destroyers in blocks of five at a time, in this case, Raider, Relentless, Racehorse, Rapid and another that I cannot remember - what they called the R class.

From there we went back through the Mediterranean to the Suez Canal, through the Suez Canal and out to Burmha. Our job there was to keep the water near to the mainland and if any of the aircraft got into trouble when they went over, they knew that we were in a certain location. If they couldn’t get back to the base they would land just near to us and we could pick the pilot up. That was our main base. When the army was in a forward retreat you used to have to go into land and what they call bombard, using all our guns, shooting in from the sea.

I left my ship out in Bombay - it’s not called Bombay now as it’s got another name - and I came home on the Queen Elizabeth. I had seven weeks leave, then went back. I went all the way from Windermere to Plymouth and when I got there they said ‘you’ve got a ship up in Rosyth, HMS Raider’, which was in Scotland, so I had to go all the way back to Scotland by train. I was on there until I got demobbed.

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