大象传媒

This story has been submitted to the People's War website by Liz Andrew of the Lancshomeguard on behalf of Leonard Ball and added to the site with his permission.

I was twenty one when the war started and, because my surname is close to the beginning of the alphabet, I was called up as soon as it began. I volunteered for the Navy. I did my training in Devonport. It was interesting - General de Gaulle was there at the same time - he seemed very miserable. He kept his nose in the air and didn't say much to me!

I had only been in the Navy five months and I had to go onto the French battleship, the Paris, and request their maps from them and then do the same on the largest French submarine. We were prepared to get them at any cost - our excuse was that we needed them to clear mines but our Navy really wanted them so that the French wouldn't be able to sail away.

I qualified as a naval gunner and was sent onto merchant ships. One of my first trips was in a convoy to New York. We were clobbered by the U boats on the way over and clobbered on the way back. At the beginning of the trip we were 5th in the line, by the end of it we were the first. I can still remember a tanker going up in a ball of flames. And of course we couldn't stop to help. Atlantic convoys were an absolute nightmare and this convoy was the worst of the lot.

Later I joined the Bradford City which was full of a cargo of military supplies destined for the 8th Army in North Africa. We had to sail all the way round the Cape and up the Suez Canal and we were just coming into the harbour at Alexandria when the ship in front of us hit a mine and exploded. Italian divers had been down and laid mines close to the entrance of the harbour.

We were in Alexandria for 42 days - and we suffered 42 Air Raids. The only target in town was the harbour and of course we were on board ship at the time. We were continuously covered in mud and slime and sewage which the bombs threw up when they hit the water. I could smell it for months afterwards. For me this was the worst moment of the War.

Our next voyage was to Karachi and back with some railway lines and then we set off for Mauritius where we loaded 14,000 tons of sugar. We rounded the Cape and two or three days later at 3.30 in the morning we were torpedoed. The sugar acted like sandbags and delayed us going down instantly and we succeeded in getting two lifeboats away with everybody on board.
Then the submarine surfaced - the German captain wanted to know the name of our ship. After that we were left to get on with it. I had got married at the end of my training and it was our first wedding anniversary!

We sailed in the direction of the African coast. The trade winds were taking us in the right direction but in a waterlogged lifeboat with 22 people on board, it was very slow going. We lost sight of the other lifeboat on the first night. Then we were on our own. We had no idea of our position -only that we were heading for the Kalahari Desert.

We were a week on the lifeboat. It was leaking significantly and water was flooding in. We had to keep baling non stop - day and night. Our drinking water supplies were meagre and we were rationed to one biscuit a day.

After a week we caught sight of land. We waited till daylight and then went for the shore. There was no way back.We surfed in on a big wave and landed on a neat little beach. I was in the bows and had to jump into the water and run up the beach with a rope. Then we pulled the boat up the beach and stripped it of everything we could. We needed to find out where we were and the Chief Officer had just told us to go and climb a nearby hill to get the lie of the land, when an aeroplane came over. It seemed like we hadn't been there more than five seconds! It was an Avro Hansen from the South African Air Force and he spotted us straight away.

The pilot dropped a flimsy piece of paper weighted with a coin. "How many are on the boat", he asked and "How many are injured." We replied by writing words with stones on the beach. His last message was " Help coming by land and sea." The Air Force had been looking for us since we sent out an SOS as the ship went down and if he hadn't spotted us we'd have been done for because the wind and current had taken us much further north then we had anticipated.

We were several days on the beach. The plane came back and dropped food and an inner tube full of water. A Navy patrol came and tried to float a raft ashore but the surf was too rough and they had to give up - " Wait for the Army to come overland for you, " they said, " and in the meanwhile we will carry on looking for the other lifeboat."

At the spot where we had landed, it hadn't rained for 100 years. We managed to build a little filtration plant, lighting a fire under a vessel full of sea water and condensing pure water out of it.

Eventually the Army came with ambulances and desert trucks and the drove us to a place called Swakopmund. The hotel there provided us with our first wash for weeks ..and a pint of beer. I remember we had a meal with asparagus...it was like a dream.Then we boarded the train for Cape Town - it was a journey of about 4 days and at every station people welcomed us and gave us things like toothpaste and toothbrushes. And the day before we arrived in Cape Town we received a message to say that the other lifeboat had reached Portuguese West Africa..many years later I met up with two of the crew from that boat.

I reached home in 1942. My first voyage after that was to Nova Scotia to bring back a cargo of wheat and the next to New York to collect military supplies and ship them to Bombay. I changed ships there and joined a salvage vessel which was clearing a ship from Trincomalle Harbour which had been sunk by the Japanese. Then I was posted to Calcutta to join a vessel which was taking supplies down the Burma coast to a place called Cox's Bazaar. Than I joined the Debrett and sailed to Cape Town, Tristan de Cunha and Montevideo, catching sight of the Graf Spee in the mud in the harbour.

We had been in Buenos Aires for only a couple of days when the telephone rang with an invitation for all the sailors to go to the Enlgish Club....and to bring our swimming trunks! We were met at the station with cars and taken to swimming and tennis. I decided to watch a polo match and the gentleman who came to sit down next to me turned out to be the President of the Club.

Two days later he telephoned me to invite me to his home. "We get so much propaganda from both sides that the only way I can find out what's going on is when I talk to you."

I told him about the War in the East and had a meal with him and his wife and two lads - on the Dining Room wall was a picture of Prince Edward, the Prince of Wales, who had stayed with them when he was in Argentina.

My last trip was in 1945 to Australia - and I finally came home later that year on the Queen of Bermuda - it was the best momnent of the War.

I am now 87 years old and I was awarded six medals, the 1939 - 1945 Medal, the Africa Star, the Burma Star, the Atlantic Star, the Pacific Star and the Victory Medal.

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