大象传媒

I had been a member of the local Grammar school army cadet corps before the war started so to some extent I was used to a life that involved discipline and order but when I was called up for military service in 1943 I decided to join the Royal Navy.

I was sent to a shore base called HMS Excalibur, which was near Crewe in Cheshire, as an ordinary seaman to do my basic training, with seamanship training taking place HMS Dauntless in Rothsay in Scotland.

Once here I was tested as to my suitability to be an officer and it would seem that I passed the criteria and was then drafted to the shore base HMS King Alfred in Hove on the south coast for my officer cadet training.

I was commissioned as an officer in May 1944 and shortly after D-Day I was sent to join the crew of a flat bottomed ship that was to be used for carrying troops onto the beaches during the D-Day landings this was based at Southend. These ships were known as LSTs and not to be confused with another craft that carried tanks and called LCTs. At this time the craft didn鈥檛 have a name it was simply known as ship No 11 of the 4th Flotilla.

After a little bit of training we were sent to the D-Day beaches to take off any injured men and ferrying them back for further treatment in England. Attached to almost every ship was a huge barrage balloon. This was supposed to deter enemy planes from attacking you; sometimes it did and sometimes it didn鈥檛. Anyway, as the captain brought the ship alongside the Mulberry Harbour where the injured men would be brought onboard, the wire attaching the balloon to the ship got snagged up on the steel works of the harbour. Before anyone could make a move to free the wire it broke and the last anyone saw of the balloon was as it drifted over the beaches and further into France. Everything in the navy has to be signed for and as I was the person who had signed for the balloon I was more than a little worried as to how much per week I would have to pay the navy to recompense them for their loss. Later on the captain told me not to worry about it because he had already written it off as lost in action.

After a few days of ferrying injured British and American troops we were given orders to take on some German prisoners of war so some of the crew were issued with small arms and detailed to watch over them during their transportation. As we prepared to leave harbour the weather in the English channel blew up very rough indeed and a journey that normally took about three hours took over eight. When we eventually got to Portsmouth and opened up the troop deck we saw that nearly all the Germans had been violently sick and I was given the job of making sure that they cleaned out the area very thoroughly using hosepipes and brushes. They didn鈥檛 look much like conquering heroes to me at that particular time.

In December 1944 I was transferred to a larger ship at anchor off Greenock in Scotland. There we were detailed to take onboard an LST which was to be delivered to Port Said near to the Suez Canal for use by the British Army. The said vessel was lashed to the upper deck and we set sail as ordered but as we progressed down through the Irish Sea the weather got really nasty and the LST started to slip off its blocks. On being informed of this, the captain took the ship into the shelter of the bay at Milford Haven and the next day had the LST welded to the upper deck of the ship where it firmly remained until we arrived at Port Said. A few days later we set sail for somewhere in India and on arriving safely at our destination we were told to anchor in a nearby river. To our horror we found out that this river had a 7 knot tide running out to sea! To be really secure we thought that we would use an anchor that had some very special and expensive steel wire attached to it so you can imagine my horror when I let the anchor go and although an 18 stone stoker applied his full strength to the winch brake, the wire still paid out and the wire and the anchor were lost in the deep fast water. This too was later written off as lost in action.

We were kept busy in the Indian Ocean area ferrying troops and stores until one day the captain cleared the lower deck and told the crew that Japan had surrendered. After that it was just a matter of waiting until you were either flown home or took your ship back to the UK where you were demobbed.

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