大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People鈥檚 War site by Bruce Logan of the CSV Media NI Team on behalf of Thomas Houston and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
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[The convoys] still had the armed merchant ships that would join up with the convoy to try to defend the convoy, and to take most of the attention away from the merchant ships.

The convoy would normally be, as you would be going across, it would be in the mid-Atlantic. Usually most convoys passed around Iceland, because there was Reykjavik, which had a lot of the defence. They would be either Corvettes or destroyers, or even their converted trawlers, and they would all be more or less in Reykjavik. That's where they would come from.

[Our ship] had what we call a WW1 12-pdr. It was the only defence then. After, we more or less were notified we were going to be armed. We got different armament, which was more or less the ASDIC [SONAR], and we had a few more that were even better and were put onto different ships. They then started to build special places for them so that they could have different points for different places where we were going to have guns.

They got us [anyway]. It was very seldom you were able to shoot with the merchant ship and get it down. Some of them did get them by ramming them, you know, which was a rather dangerous expedition, ramming a submarine. It did take place, but not on any convoy I was in.

There was plenty of escorts with us. There must have been about 8 at least, that were with us and around us. Most of them were named after flowers. They had one that was a very big destroyer and it was known as the Bulldog. That was one of the leaders of the corvettes and that. He was in charge of the tracing, the ASDIC business.

[re: Bulldog's capture the first Enigma machine]

[Bulldog's crew] went down into the submarine before it sank itself, and they got most of the stuff that they would need, the books and stuff, the charts to show how they had taken the Atlantic and cut it into squares. They numbered the squares, and if a sub made contact they knew that we had a convoy in that square, and they then had an easier way of attacking.

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