大象传媒

This story has been submitted to the People's War website by Pam Riding of Kirklees Libraries on behalf of Jan Derych and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

At the age of 16 I set out to join the Polish Army and travelled 2,000 miles in 26 days to a camp in Uzbekistan where the authorities had a simple method of ensuring only the healthiest were recruited. Tents held 12 men each and if none of them died in seven days they were taken to a new camp and accepted. It became my job first thing in the mornings to go from tent to tent, taking anyone who had dies in the night out to the morgue. They were then replaced by newcomers. They called me the Old Man, even though I was only 17.
I was taken to South Africa and then boarded the cruiser Laconia, which was to carry 2,000 Italian prisoners of war, 2000 troops. On the 12th of September 1942 there was to be a party and dance, There were a few hundred women-the families of British personnel who had been evacuated from Egypt. At 8.00pm I was off duty. We were near the equator and the heat was terrific, so I was wearing only shorts and carrying my life-jacket in my hand. I was on the portside deck watching the friendly dolphins. Ten minutes later all hell broke loose. A torpedo hit us below the water line, snapping the middle of the ship. Before I realised what was happening, another had hit us just below where I was standing, and then a third somewhere further on. It seemed that almost at once the Laconia was over on her portside, keeling over more and more. The lights were out. Without really thinking, I moved quickly. We could not walk up the waxed floor of the ballroom, as the angle was now too steep. We had to crawl-some got to the doors, some kept sliding back.
When I got on the starboard deck, some of the crew told those of us who had made it to lower the lifeboats but most of the chains were rusty. The navy had been so certain that the Laconia would be safe, they had not had a practice drill for evacuating the ship in case of danger-which meant the lifeboats had not been checked and tested. In the panic some of the boats hit the water with their bungs not in their holes, they sank immediately. Some of the other boats slid on the exposed side of the ship, turning over and spilling their occupants, many were being killed or wounded as they fell onto sharp metal before tumbling into the sea. The boat nearest me would not budge, someone was using a bayonet to hack at the hawser, but still it would not move.
Behind me I could hear screams-the Italian POWs were crawling along the 3ft-diameter air vent chutes which were now almost horizontal. Bayonets had to be used to rip the grills that blocked their way, Some got out but they were badly cut and their clothes ripped to pieces. A light directed onto us from one of the four submarines diverted my attention. I could hear the German national anthem.Deutchland Uber Alles being sung by the U-boat sailors standing to attention on the deck.
It soon became impossible to lower any more lifeboats, as the deck was almost vertical. The crew shouted at us to keep throwing anything that might float into the sea-rafts, wooden benches etc.They were using axes to release any boats left, in the hope that they would reach the water. Then they urged us to run and jump.
In my haste I failed to secure the ties down the sides of my life-jacket. I had not done it earlier because it was almost impossible to work on deck with them tied. So when I hit the water I realised I was in deep, deep trouble-the back cushion floated horizontally while the front one was pushing by chin up. Then I felt something come up underneath me, lifting me up long enough for me to grab the tapes and knot them as tight as I could under my arms. Suddenly I was back in the water, watching the creature swimming away and diving-it was a dolphin. I can remember feeling so relieved that it had not been a shark To this day, of course, I love dolphins and porpoises and my home is full of their images.
Some hours later I was pulled into a lifeboat by a friendly hand. When dawn came there was debris floating as far as the eye could see. Some of the rafts, and even some boats, were empty. Other boats were so overloaded: another inch and they would have been swamped. Three submarines emerged. One was Italian. I wonder what its crew thought when they realised that nearly all of the 2000 comrades had been drowned in the bowels of the Laconia.

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During the whole Normandy campaign, I hardly saw my unit because, being the radio man, I had to be up at the front in a good position to effectively relay messages between the infantry battalion in the front-line and our battery a few miles back. Myself, a driver, a spare-man and sometimes our CO were in a Bren-carrier directing our guns as the infantry unit required. it was not so bad if we were doing something but if we had to stay in a fixed position all day and wait for the bombs and howitzers, then that was when fear was fear. All we could do was hope that it would not be our vehicle next. After suffering 鈥渇riendly fire鈥� before, we had joked that when the German bombers came the Allies ducked, when British bombers came the Germans ducked and when American bombers came we all ducked. But at Falaise we had to join the Germans in ducking from our own gunfire.
The Polish Regiment鈥檚 task was to act like a cork-stopper as the Allied regiments surrounded the German forces and pushed them towards the town where the pincers would close in and we would be waiting for them. But the stopper turned out to be more like a sieve as hundreds of thousands of Germans broke through. Sometimes we were surrounded by German tanks, with just the Bren gun for protection. The only thing to do was to radio-in our own co-ordinates, directing our artillery fire down, with a good risk that it might fall on ourselves.
Fortunately, enough of the enemy were hit to make them eventually surrender, but I was still having to pass messages to our gunners to cover attacks on the German-occupied fields-often without knowing if they were still fighting or not. In the end it was difficult to tell who were the prisoners of whom, as our troops were often in a minority and penned into fields surrounded by hedges.
By August, Normandy and Brittany were in Allied hands and the race across France to Belgium had begun. In October, I was ordered to go to Tilburg to receive the Virtuti Militari-the Polish equivalent of the Victoria Cross-for my part in the operation at Falaise. It was presented to me by General Stanislaw Maczek

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