大象传媒

This story was submitted to the Peoples War Site by volunteer John C Haywood 大象传媒 Radio Lincolnshire Action Desk on behalf of Mr Harry Winning, and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Winning fully understands the site terms and conditions.

I was determined I was going into the forces, and I thought I would enrol into the navy rather than any other, so on the thirteenth of September 1939 I went to the recruiting office in Newcastle and volunteered to join the Royal Navy. It was ten days after war was decalared, but I was not called up until December 1939 and sent to the barracks at Chatham in January. I was there until May 1940 and then told I would be joining a ship called H.M.S. Phoebe which was in the Clyde. The ship had not been completed and was not fitted with any guns or armaments, and a few other things. I was aboard Phoebe from the day she was commissioned in the Clyde, to the time she was torpedoed. We began patrols in January 1941 in the North Atlantic escorting convoy's from America, the weather was atrocious and it was nothing to see fifty or sixty foot waves, but after two or three days at sea you got used to it and you became a good hardened sailor after a week or two. We then changed to escorting convoy's down to Freetown in West Africa returning each time to escort another one, we did this three or four times then an order came to join the Mediterranean fleet, this time we went around the Cape with the largest convoy of the second world war. It was forty merchant ships full of troops for the western desert, we dropped them off at Port Said and Port Tufic. The escorts had to circle the convoy all of the time covering many more miles. When we arrived at one jetty and as I was on deck looking down I saw a young man that I had worked with for ten years, he was a marine attached to the merchant navy. The ship he was on was called the Costa Rica, and the story goes that there was three thousand men on board and the conditions were appalling, so they complained and nothing was done so they mutinied. When the ship left Durban in South Africa she did not stop at any of the usual places but carried on to the Mediterranean and straight to Greece, this was their punishment. The friend who I met on the jetty who was on the Costa Rica did survive the war because I met him after.

While we where evacuating troops out of Greece we saw the Costa Rica again, but this time she was bombed while still full of men and sinking, but two ships went along side and picked off every man,not a solitary man was lost. I watched the Costa Rica sinking, and at that time I thought my marine friend would be giving three cheers. After the war I went to see my old employer a lady in Newcastle, and my friend was there. He had told her that I had not survived the war, and that I had been killed when my ship was torpedoed. She told me that she knew I was ok because she had seen me in her dreams, but I was not in my usual navy white uniform, but in khaki. It was true I was in khaki because I had transferred to the Naval Air Squadron and everyone had kaki in the desert.
We had been asked to take food to Torbruk from Alexandria, this was about August 1941 and we had done about six runs, but on the seventh while waiting for the ships to unload fot the return, Phoebe was torpedoed and began to sink, but a four inch steel plate from the upper deck swung down accross the thirty foot gap and stopped most of the water coming in, it saved the ship. The time taken to get back to Alexandria was about ten to twelve hours but with the damage it took us three whole days. We did not realize it until we tied up that the amount the ship had sunk, so they opened up the floating dock and put the ship in, and that was the last time that I saw Phoebe. They patched her up and she sailed to America but returned later. In 1947 she carried the then king of England on a courtesy trip back to America. Twenty five years after the war I was told she was in the Humber. I went over to see her but the crew was on shore and only the guard was there, unfortunately she sailed the next day.

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