大象传媒

Our story starts in Bombay in 1944. We then joined the American ship Mariposa, we expected to return to the United Kingdom having spent some 5 years in India and Burma, we were then informed by the ships officer that we were carrying on board 2000 Italian prisoners of war. In wartime they did not tell our destination however, ultimately we arrived at Melbourne in Australia, after a very uneventful journey.
We were at first stood looking over the rail and strangely enough a country like Australia had stevedores on the dock and also dock police. It seemed very strange that they were shouting up at us in Australia if we had any cigarettes to spare, we had plenty of camel cigarettes from the American鈥檚 almost unlimited amounts so we threw packets of them over the side onto the docks for these chaps. One of the funniest incidents was between a chap working on the dock and a policeman who started to fight over a packet of the cigarette's eventually we were allowed to leave the ship and to take a break down in Melbourne. This was the first time for many years that we had seen chip shops and pubs; we were made very welcome by everyone in Australia and enjoyed our stay. We then after they had taken off the P.O.W, we bought on some German prisoner officers who were being exchanged under the red cross and some English officer's being exchanged, this proved another escort job looking after these officer's we left Melbourne within a few days sailing through the tasmin sea we still were not aware of any destination and then everywhere was beautiful calm sea's and a gentle breeze when all of a sudden we came under fire. We donned our life jackets and made for boat stations, by the time I had reached my boat station with one or two others we were just in time to see a Japanese submarine starting to sink and Australian escort attacked immediately. For some reason he thought a troop ship was an easy target on the surface rather than using torpedoes. They must not have observed our Australian warship at the rear. After this episode, we had a peaceful journey through the Panama Canal to Boston; Massachusetts once we had arrived the German P.O.W were then handed over to the Red Cross. We then moved by train from Boston to Fort Hamilton outside New York, the American C.O at Fort Hamilton made us very welcome. The food we were served was out of this world. Afterwards we made our way around New York in the evenings, we stayed for about 7 days and where ever you entered our money was no good, we couldn鈥檛 spend a penny, everything was given to us no matter where we went. Hence, the generous nature of the American people.
Our next trip was to then board Queen Elizabeth the 1st our ship; we also had a lot of Americans on board on their way to Europe. We were constantly in danger from U-boats all the way across the Atlantic to Europe. We then eventually, went up the River Clyde as the news came over the tannoy "landings were being made on the coast of France this was the start of D-Day. We could not dock at Gourock, we were taken of the ship by tender and I think the funniest part of it was that there must have been war time customs people they came along asked if we had any gear, whisky, cigarettes etc. Of course we had ample amounts of cigarette's form the U.S he joked that he liked a cigarette. We gave them some cigarettes and eventually landed in Scotland and were sent down by train to just outside Chester. Thus, ended our journey in wartime.

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