大象传媒

I joined the Leicester Sea Cadet Corp a few years before the war. In 1941 we received information that the R N badly needed wireless operators and would accept cadets who could transmit and receive morse at least 10 w.p.m.. I suppose that they had commandeered hundreds of fishing and small boats that needed wireless operators and trained cadets. So at the end of 1941, I was seventeen,I volunteered. About the 28th December 1941 I joined T.S. Bounty (an old wooden sailing ship) moored on the River Severn at Worcester. On 30th January 1942, I officially joined the R.N. at HMS Collingwood 鈥� a signal school. Having passed exams at 24 w.p.m., and all coding requirements, I was posted to join the Royal Naval Patrol Service at Lowestoft. There, I gained sea experience mine sweeping. I then took passage on an Australian Destroyer to Freetown. We escorted the reinforcement for the eighth army for the eventual victory in North Africa. Freetown was the assembly port for ships from all over the world, to form convoys to U.K. I was posted to HMS Morris Dance, an escort trawler. We were in convoys up and down the African coast and across to the West Indies. We had various engagements with U -Boats, including helping a large tanker U.S. convoy decimated by a pack of U-Boats in the Caribbean. We then helped to escort a floating dock across to North Africa after that invasion. This was the third attempt to get a dock across the Atlantic, the two others had been sunk by U-Boats. We received a congratulation telegram from Churchill and Roosevelt.
My time in West Africa was now completed, so I joined a troopship back to the U.K.. From Lowestoft I was posted to Hull to commission a new ship, a Dam Layer, HMS Hannaray. We sailed to Portsmouth to await D-Day. We joined a flotilla of fleet sweepers. We set sail on the 4th June, only to be recalled about 20 miles in the Channel. We again set sail on the 5th June at midday, sweeping from an assembly area just south of the Isle of Wight. We, as a Dam layer, marked the swept channel with a dam (a pole standing upright to which we fixed a light on top), the invasion vessels following (about six hours) during the night. We arrived at the French coast about midnight 5th/6th June. Our job was then to sweep along the coast of France to make the waters safe for the bombarding warships. Each night we formed a defence line around the beach head to prevent the Germans attacking from the sea. There was one unfortunate situation when we were called upon to go to the help of another minesweeping flotilla which had been attacked by our own rocket firing typhoons, all the flotilla was lost. We then moved to Harwich to sweep lanes from the North and South Downs across to Ostend. In fact we first got there too soon before it was captured. We then moved to Scotland, to sweep to Norway, but on our journey we were recalled as the Germans had surrendered. I stayed on for nearly a year after the war to sweep mostly our own mine fields although at times we interviewed U-Boat captains to try to find out where they had laid mines, but that was not very successful.
I have just remembered a little interest, when in West Africa we escorted a Cable Layer out into the Atlantic to find a telephone cable between Berlin and South America. When we found it we cut about half a mile of cable from it. The Germans would find it very difficult to find the missing length in about six thousand miles of sea.
Mr Churchill with the King commissioned a silver badge for members of the Patrol Service who had served time, both Anti-submarine work and Minesweeping and last year some figures were released.

鈥淢inesweeping鈥 war without glory, where death lurked beneath the sea or floated from the air. A war without mercy or discrimination. The mine was impartial and gave no warning. The men who fought this lonely battle did so knowing it was an essential one. Every day each channel had to be swept, otherwise the country鈥檚 lifelines were clogged and the vital cargoes could not move. They were a mixture of men and old sailors; many of the latter had spent much of their lives trawling for fish, most of the others had been schoolboys before the war. To keep the sea lanes open, six hundred minesweepers, 鈥榯he little ships鈥�, paid the price, and around thirteen thousand officers and men died doing it, of which 2,385 have no grave but the sea.鈥�

This account was written by Debby Skerrett, librarian at Redditch Library, Worcestershire, on behalf of Ray Goodger, Leicester.

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