大象传媒

I wrote this story on the Internet for my grandad as he does not know how to use a computer. The story i wrote is from his perspective.

In June 1940 at the age of 21, I was at Chatham Gunnery school, when we were asked to make crews to rescue soldiers at Dunkirk.
I was appraoched and asked how long i had been in the Navy. "Since i was fifteen, Sir" I replied. "well, you obviously know the ropes - I'm promoting you to leading seaman", the Officer told me.
So I found myself with two others from the gunnery school heading for Ramsgate to become coxman of a Dutch diesel barge - four of us (we now had a Dutch engineer) - no food, just a barrel of drinking water.
All around us the sea was awash with little boats bobbing about - we spent the next three days ferrying soldiers from the beach (20 odd at a time) to the two waiting distroyers - GRAFTON and the GRENADE - anchored 1/2 a mile off the coast. Meals were haphazard - whatever the crews from the destroyers could throw to us.
Just after we had unloaded a boat load of the soldiers on the third day, the destroyer was torpedoed, and the back lash turned us over in the water. I bobbed to the surface with the other two crew members, but we never saw the dutchman again.
We were rescued by a whaler after about 1/2 an hour and got back to Dover, andhence to Chatham again.
P.S. Incidently - just a week before Dunkirk i was amoung a party of sailers from the gunnery school sent to Bologne to blow up some bridges (which the Army had failed to do) to stop German tanks crossing them. Only 7 of us survived - the rest of over one hundred men were all machine gunned down.

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