大象传媒

Tony Whittle navy , called up June 1942 no PGX 380273
I went to HMS Collingwood in Fairham in Hampshire for three months training, and where did I go
after that? Iwent to Scapa Flow on a submarine supply ship and I did about six months on that
and I was glad to get out of it. In fact one 18yr old wanted to get out of it so badly that he stopped going to the toilet and bunged himself up, and ended up on HMS Isle of Jersey Hospital ship.
At Scapa Flow we went to Long Hope Island and exchanged tickets for beer, when we were'nt doing
minesweeping or fishing for alternate weeks on a Drifter called HMS Hope. The skipper of that vessel used to be a fisherman and when the net flooded the deck with fish we had to scale and gut them.
He told us to throw the purple ones back because they were poisionous.
The ship at Scapa Flow was HMS Ambitious and what a miserable time we had up there.
Later we went to Southhampton and me and a mate from Liverpool jumped ship in order to get a drink, the streets of Southhampton were full of tanks. We did manouvres before that at Slapton Sands
Devon with American Rangers doiing landings , actually this was near Slapton Sands , a place called
Blackpool Sands and a German Torpedo boat came and sunk a couple of transports , and these American troops, they had their life belts around their waists, and when they hit the water they had that
much gear on their backs and the lifebelts around their waists that they upended and drowned.
They reckoned that a thousand of them were washed up dead at Slapton Sands and Blackpool Sands
all because they had their lifebelts strapped to their waists. I'll tell you what they were called, they were called J Force and they were American Rangers.

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