大象传媒

(This story was submitted to the Peoples War website by a volunteer from Three Counties Action at the Bletchley Park VE Day street party on behalf of Ralph Bilbey and has been added to the site with his permission. Mr Bilbey fully understands the site's terms and conditions).

I was a Radio officer on the 鈥淢attawin鈥�. We crossed the Atlantic to USA and we were sent to New York for alterations ready for the Middle East. Each radio officer should have had new codes for each trip but we had not received them. We left New York on our own with no codes and we were torpedoed at midnight. The ship went down quickly. I was in a lifeboat with 10 other people we had an engine and we pointed the boat towards America. We must have been the only lifeboat to invade America! We came to the sand dunes at Cape Cod. We found a look out post with a phone and rang it. We said who we were and they came and found us. We were taken to the British console in Boston still in our wet clothes but one of the console鈥檚 staff whispered to us to go to the American Charity association down the road. They kitted us out with very good clothes. We were taken to New York and brought back to Liverpool with other survivors on the Egyptian ship the 鈥淓lnil鈥�. We had to go very far north to dodge the U Boast 鈥� right up to Greenland. There were children on the boat from the Far East who were threatened by the Japanese. We landed in Liverpool and we stayed at the very big hotel the Adelphi.

I was on the Ravenspoint next. The captain would never sail without a cat called 鈥淏lackballs鈥�. We were anchored at Gibraltar but the enemy managed to attach 鈥渟ticky bombs鈥� to us and the ship blew up. We put the cat in the lifeboat first and it sat there while the ship slowly went down. When we got back to Bristol the cat was first off the boat and disappeared and was never seen again.

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