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This story has been written onto the ´óÏó´«Ã½ People’s War site by Storygatherer Lucy Thomas of Callington U3A on behalf of Douglas Mahoney. They fully understand the terms and conditions of the site.

Extracts from DOUGLAS MAHONEY’S W.W.2 MEMORIES part 3

The convoys

There they were, two convoys, each with about 1100 miles of dangerous waters to cover. The Gib convoy had the hazard of negotiating the narrow 50 mile gap between Sicily and North Africa. We had a wider gap of 200 miles between Crete and Africa, roughly half way to Malta.

That Saturday nothing much happened. To our initial alarm, some mines were exploded, our tanks amplifying the sound so that it seemed as if our engines had dropped to the bottom of the hull. With all the signallers on board, my section had little to do but to maintain a listening watch. In order to catch the action I fixed a long lead to the phones to let me get to the alleyway door. Watching, I started an unofficial log of the action which the NLO used later for his report.

On a quiet Sunday morning, at nine, our convoy, consisting of destroyers, cruisers, submarines, a ship disguised as a battleship and eight cargo ships was over half the way towards Cretan waters. Later in the afternoon, a lone, high, reccy plane was spotted. Soon after, high level bombs fell harmlessly in the centre and to the starboard of the convoy. This lasted for half an hour, the planes never coming lower than two to three thousand feet. We put up a highly concentrated barrage operating in an organised, short zigzag pattern.

After thirty minutes the next attack came from astern, concentrating on a cruiser to port, then working up to the cargo ship astern of us. She was hit on the foredeck and slowly settled in the water. She remained level whilst sinking slowly that the crew were able to step aboard the rescuing destroyers.

It was our turn next because two bombs fell just behind us, near enough to drench the occupants of the poop deck. They were said to be as near as 10 yards. The entire ship, all 15,000 tons of her, was jolted out of the water and slammed back on to it, throwing out all our controlling switchgear. The engines stopped and we rapidly slowed down. I dashed back to the cabin to start up my emergency generators just in case transmissions were needed. Our engineers did a rapid restart job and we were soon under way again. We could breathe again.

The raids — sometimes by small groups of planes, sometimes singles, sometimes raiding the escorts, other times the cargo ships - continued until dark. No-one else got hit. We were now in easy reach of their planes, both Crete and Cyprus nearby to the north. We learned later that the attacks were so sporadic because their groups were being broken up by our Air Force, before they got to us. We had escaped damage due to improved organisation, the only minor mishap being the loss of the main aerial. The previous convoy had lost 50% of its cargo vessels by this stage of the journey.

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