大象传媒

I served on a destroyer 鈥� H.M.S. Cleveland鈥�. We were taking a convoy to land in Sicily we had left Gibraltar. Later that day a Canadian transport was torpedoed about 2wo-hundred yards away from us. We chased the U boat and tried to depth charge but it got away. We then started picking up the survivors two Canadian soldiers on a small float could not catch the rope because of injuries. I asked the Captain for permission to dive in and bring them alongside; the Captain鈥檚 reply was 鈥榮tand by your gun鈥�. Luckily one of them managed to catch the rope with his teeth, we saved one 鈥� hundred to two hundred men and sailed to Oran Port under strict security, those who could walk lined up and gave us three cheers, very moving we had been on our gun for over thirty 鈥� six hours; we set sail for Tripoli to top up with depth charges. My eldest brother Jack was on the North African coast and somehow got a rapio message to my ship to wish me well, he must have been in the know to do it. We left Tripoli to Sicily and sailed through a great armada of ships and anchored quarter of a mile offshore and bombarded an Italian barracks. When it got lighter I saw dozens of British gliders in the water, I felt a knot in my stomach and I knew then that my brother jack was in one of them.

After several trips to and fro between Malta and Sicily action stations sounded. I dashed up aloft in the passage; I turned to climb up to my gun when the twin four inch fired. I caught the full blast; it blew me twenty feet down the canteen passage. After the action my crew-members told me my both ears bleeding. I spent two weeks in my hammock in temperatures of 100 degrees F. I then went to hospital in Alexandria for three weeks

My next ship w2as an ocean going tugboat 鈥楬.M.S. Henrietta Moller鈥� no more was for me. Working on a tugboat is more dangerous than a destroyer. In 1944 I got news that my other brother Arthur had been killed in Burma

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