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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Katherine Wood of the ‘Action Desk — Sheffield’ Team on behalf of Mr. Burditt, and has been added to the site with the author’s permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

One of the tragedies of World War Two, The sinking of H.M.T. Rhona.

I embarked on H.M.T. ‘Duchess of Bedford’ on the morning of November 14th 1943 from Liverpool, bound to destinations unbeknown to me and my fellow passengers. Within a few hours of boarding, they asked for a few volunteers to man the guns on the voyage under the orders of Royal Naval Ratings. Being an R/A gunner I volunteered. This action was to prove that I witnessed the ensuing tragedy. We were at sea, part of a large convoy, when on the eleventh night at sea, we passed through the Straits of Gibraltar. This brought us to the morning of November 26th, when two more ships joined the convoy off Algiers. The convoy proceeded on its journey, when we were attacked on the afternoon of Friday 26th November by German bombers. Half an hour into the attack, the ship on our immediate left was hit by a missile (bomb, torpedo, anybody's guess) from one of the bombers. There was just a massive flash and after a few seconds, the sound that she had been hit. Straight away, our ship was engulfed in a smoke screen laid by escorting war ships. The attack must have lasted another one and a half hours, and then it was finished. The next morning (Saturday 27th), we disembarked at the port of Philipville, North Africa, and after a few weeks, the incident was just an incident that I had witnessed. Luckily I survived the war, and resumed civilian life. Thirty years later, sometime in the early seventies, I saw an article in the National Newspaper from an American gentleman, asking if any reader witnessed the sinking of H.M.T. Rhona of Friday 26th 1943. I took up correspondence with this gentleman, who had been a survivor of the Rhona. I learned that the said ship was one of the ships that had only joined our convoy on the Friday 26th November, sailing out of Oran bound for India. It transpired, that I had recently thought ‘an attack’, and I thought of it as an incident which resulted in the loss of 1192 men. By any description a terrible tragedy which had taken over thirty years to be brought into the open! From information given to me by other survivors from America, I learned they had also landed at Philipville on Saturday, November 27th 1943. This is just one of the many tragedies of World War Two that needs remembering, if only in memory of 1192 men who gave their lives.

Pr-BR

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