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This story is taken from an interview with Albert Acton at the Dublin WW2 Commemoration, and has been added to the site with their permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The interviewer was Claire Small, and the transcription was by Bruce Logan.
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I’m from Dublin, born and bred in Dublin.

I served 3 years up in the north Atlantic convoys. That medal there was presented to me by a Russian ambassador here. And then I was at d-day. I went down to D-Day.

[could you describe D-Day for us?]
Very difficult to describe it. So much mayhem going on around, so much noise. So much activity. It was, I can’t describe it. One witness can’t recall every moment, because if you were working down below ship you couldn’t see what was going on up on deck. Then, my ship the HMS Dryden was on the gold and sword beaches. We were supporting the British infantry coming in, and also the Canadian infantry. So I was there for maybe about 6 weeks or so. And then I was shipped out East after that. We went to Bombay, and [as it was then] Columbo. Then on to Singapore, from Singapore on to Indonesia, and we were working up and down that coast.
We were just down for the Jap fleet of war, but halfway through the Mediterranean it came thought that Japan had surrendered. And nobody on-board complained about that!

[when did you get back home?]
Oct 1946. Again, mixed feeling. Probably I was just glad to be out of it. The change, the wind shift in the type of the people who were coming into the services. They now were not volunteers as such, like the people they were replacing. They were called up for National Service, and they resented the service. No matter what it was — Army Navy, Air Force — they resented the fact that they had been enlisted.

[so why did someone like yourself volunteer?]
I’d love to give you an honest answer for that. We’re going back 64-5 years. To me, it just seemed to be the thing to do. It wasn’t a very popular thing to do here, in this country. It seemed to be the thing to do. Plus the fact I always had a yearning for the sea. I was in the navy, the RN.

[where are these medals from?]
The Atlantic Star, the France and Germany Clasp. That’s the pacific one there. The General Service medal. This was issued by the French government.

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