大象传媒

鈥淭his story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by a volunteer from CSV Newcastle on behalf of Valentine Burn and has been added to the site with his permission. Valentine Burn fully understands the site's terms and conditions鈥�.

Chapter 2

The German battleship Tirpitz was anchored in a fjord in northern Norway for a few months and aircraft from the Furious carried out some raids on it; to do this we sailed across the North Sea, then the aircraft flew over the ship and bombed it. They had a very difficult job 鈥� not only did they have to contend with anti aircraft fire, but they also had to cope with the high steep slopes of the fjord. They did some damage to the Tirpitz but unfortunately we lost some aircrews and aircraft.

After operating for a long stint in the Med, we returned to Britain. One night while coming through the Bay of Biscay, we changed from cruising stations to action stations. Shortly after we had closed up the Commander broadcast quietly, they had received a message from the Admiralty that there were 9 U-boats operating in our area. We resumed cruising stations after daylight. When we got back to Britain we joined the home fleet at Scapa Floe, spending the next few weeks on operations in the North Atlantic and the North Sea. We then moved to Liverpool, to the Gladstone Docks near Bootle. There we prepared for some maintenance work to be done. At that time Bootle suffered a week of intense air raids with heavy bombing and incendiary bombs. After a week of this we moved to Belfast. I think the intention was that we should have the work done there. The Germans thought differently. Belfast had a few nights of very heavy air raids, again with heavy bombing and incendiary bombs. One night, having been ashore with Billy Burke (a fellow Marine whose home was in Belfast) an air raid started up just after we鈥檇 gone to bed. We stayed in bed for a while but when the bombing got too close for comfort, we got up. That night we extinguished 12 or 13 fires. They were mostly in attics where we had to crawl as flat as possible to keep below the dense smoke.

One morning when I walked back to the ship, I had to walk on splintered glass. The shops at that time had very big plate glass windows and the suction caused by the explosions had pulled the windows out and shattered them on the pavements and roads. When I got back to the Dock Yard, I had to make a detour because the dock where the ship was berthed was closed off, a land mine had floated down during the air raid and the cords that held the parachute and land mine together had wrapped around the steam pipe that protruded from the brow of the ship. The bomb disposal people dealt with the land mine.

We soon left Belfast and had the work done in Gibraltar and then another spell of Mediterranean cruises.

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