大象传媒

This story was added to the People's War Site by a volunteer from Radio Newcastle on behalf of Sid Bolam. Mr Bolam fully understands the site's terms and conditions and the story has been added to the site with his permission.

I was already a member of the Royal Navy in before the war; in August 1939 at the age of 19 I was sent on practice for a month on an old destroyer and ended up going to war for six years. In about 1940 we were unfortunately torpedoed, that was half past two in the morning. We only knew it was 2.30am because one of the crew came up to the deck for a cigarette and while he was there he looked at the clock. There was only one clock on board the ship that was where the mess was, where people lived and slept. So at 2.25am, while he was looking at the clock that鈥檚 when the torpedoes struck. The ship took about an hour and a half to sink, so that gave us time to get out and be rescued. We were then taken to Gibraltar by the ship that rescued us and on the way we unfortunately hit a mine. The bows of the ship (the front end) were damaged and the water came in. Fortunately they closed all the doors and the ship was still able to float although we then had to go in reverse all the way back to Gibraltar so as not to put pressure on the front of the ship. In Gibraltar we were put onto other ships and eventually I was sent back to Britain wearing only a pair of overalls and a pair of soft shoes. I was given a new uniform and assigned to a landing crew in Scotland which was used to take troops onto the beaches, and given training to do this landing at first on the beach and then moving further away to give the troops practice wading through the water with their arms above their heads. Eventually I became a Non Commissioned Officer, with more responsibility. We then started doing raids on North Norway with Commandos on board, where the Germans were refining oil. So we would go across and destroy the factories, take back any Norwegians who wanted to join the British forces and also bring back Germans as prisoners of war. We then moved down into the mainland of Norway causing as much trouble as we could, whether it was blockades of a bridge or whatever we could. Then we moved into the Mediterranean as this was the beginning of the second front, and we landed a lot of troops in a place called Oran which is in West Algeria. We kept going up, sometimes behind enemy lines and we would cause as much havoc as possible doing raids on the North African coast. After the troops had conquered in the desert we were sent to Sicily, putting spies and certain people onto the Southern coast of Sicily to prepare for the invasion of Sicily. As we advanced in Sicily we would send out commandoes to go ahead of the army, and then we built huge camps in Messina, just next to Italy to give the troops a rest. When we got across to Italy there were landings of thousands of troops. I had two friends that I kept in touch with after the war, but they both lived in the South, in Somerset and Southend and died from injuries not long after the war. Fortunately for myself, I was wounded in Sierra Leone but the injury was only slight although the head injury was uncomfortable for a few years after.

At home I had three sisters and a brother, my brother had been born with hearing difficulties so he obviously wasn鈥檛 called up. My eldest sister was married, her husband was in the army and she had a little boy, my middle sister worked in the munitions factories and my youngest sister was just starting school. The only contact I had was by letter, every three months we were allowed to send one little letter home and it had to be censored in case you were giving any information away. Life at sea could be tedious and lonely. So your comrades, the people that you worked and lived with became like brothers. In 1945 I went for further promotion and came back to Messina in the barracks doing 24 hours on duty and then 24 hours off, responsible for the prison there until VE day. I only saw my family twice in the six years, once when I was torpedoed on an automatic 14 days leave for survivors and once three months later on 2 days leave. You didn鈥檛 think about weekends, going out, you just lived for today because tomorrow anything could happen.

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