大象传媒

I was sailing in convoy down off the coast of Spain... and on the Tuesday morning at half past one the convoy was attacked. We were all called up and told to stand by, and the escort started firing star shells and looking for the submarine. So we stood by until quarter past three until the star shells stopped... Then I went into the saloon to get a smoke, but almost a soon as I sat down we got torpedoed.
Everything was collapsing all around, so I dashed out and found the deck under water.The lifeboat had been blown away by the blast... I heard someone shouting 'raft by number three hatch', so I went back to the raft.
There were several of us there, and we managed to push it over the side.., there was a kite lashed onto the raft,and I was trying to cut it free when the ship heeled over, and the main mast came down across the raft and sent us into the water.
We got to the surface again, and got free of the ship just as she was sinking.., the skipper told me afterwards that she went down in 45 seconds after she was torpedoed--she had two torpedoes in her, several of the menon the raft saw the periscope of the submarine only a few feet away, but she didn't surface, she dived again.
We were three hours on that raft before the rescue ship found us, they took us aboard and gave us warm blankets and hot coffee.
We stayed around until daylight and picked up two more rafts, they were both empty.
By that time we were ten hours behind the convoy.
We had a corvette as escort and caught up the convoyat 2o clock the next afternoon. Then on Friday the covoy was attacked again, but we got safely through to Lisbon on Saturday evening.
They gave each of us a suit and sent us to hotels, we were ashore for ten days, then I joined another ship and sailed to Gibralter to join the convoy.
We were there for ten days, then on the first day out in convoy we were sighted by German aircraft, but the flak from the ack-ack ship kept them away, but the next night the two ships ahead of us were torpedoed,we were the rescue ship, so we stopped to pick up survivors, all the women and children were screaming in the water, it was a passenger ship with lots of women aboard being repatraited from Spain.
All hands were on deck with lines,and we pulled one woman aboard with a rope around her neck, she was a French woman, she had lost her fourteen month old baby.
We had to leave our lifeboat behind because the seas were too rough to bring it aboard.
Next day we caught the convoy, there were aircraft out that day, but they didnt do any damage, but that night I had just gone off look out at 1 oclock, and stepped into the engineers mess room for a smoke when our ship got torpedoed.
The Derricks and everything were crashing on deck where I was, I ran out to the raft a t number 3 hatch and took out the ships side rail and threw it over the side, then we got the raft over and jumped over the side after it.
In the scramble for the raft it got overturned, but we all got on again, there were eleven of us on it, and after about twenty minutes the rescue ship came across and took us onboard, and we got hot tea and blankets.
We were fifty miles behind the convoy by then but we caught it up at 4oclock that afternoon, and that night we saw another ship torpedoed, after that the escort ships kept off the jerry aircraft until we met an escort of 16 beau fighters and they saw us safely in.

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