大象传媒

~This story was submitted by Laura Eastlake of ERSKINE on behalf of Pat Campbell.~

I was born on the 14th of September 1918, eighty-six years ago and I was born in Greenock. They were old, old houses in those days: no electricity, paraffin lamps. I remember my mother used to send me out with a bottle and a penny ha鈥檖enny for oil for the lamps. And we just had a big black sink and a very, very small fire and there were seven of us lived there in that room. It was really bad days in those days and I was the oldest of eight.

When I was maybe 17 or 18, the thing about Hitler became very well-known but at that age, we weren鈥檛 very interested in all that. I mean, we heard it on the radio but we were out for fun and dancing and girls. But I had joined the HMS Carrick in 1937 so we had an inkling of what was going on. We were given training in gunnery, seamanship, rules of the road, signalling: 鈥淕reen to green, red to red, perfect safety, go ahead.鈥� You see, if two ships are coming you have to line up the green and red lights with those on the other ship so that you weren鈥檛 heading straight at each other. In the first crisis of 1938 we were all mobilized and sent to Portsmouth. Then it fell through and we all came back. That was the crisis with Czechoslovakia. And then when Poland came about we were put aboard the destroyer Boreas and the captain cleared the lower deck and stood up on the torpedo tubes and said 鈥淎lthough war hasn鈥檛 been declared yet, I can assure you that we are now at war with Germany.鈥� I remember Chamberlain coming on the radio after that and saying 鈥淲e are now at war with the Germans.鈥� I was quite shocked because we thought we were going to get sent home again, back to the Carrick, learning about sailing and boxing and having a wonderful time but now the wonderful times were over: we were now at war.

Within a week or so, we sank one of the first submarines of the war. We would pick up an echo bearing and the day this happened 鈥� it was a sunny Friday afternoon 鈥攁 lot of wreckage came up and that was how we sank the U-40. We picked up nine survivors out of it and I helped to pull them in. They had blue jerseys and blue trousers but their faces were blue too with white rings. They had escaped from the submarine but the depth was too great. They were half suffocated and half-drowned and eight of them died out of the nine. I remember sitting with the young boy who survived and giving him a cigarette.

It wasn鈥檛 until we got bombed that any of us felt any great fear. In those days they didn鈥檛 pipe 鈥淎ction Stations,鈥� but they piped to tell us that there were bombers coming in and I remember I had a mate on one of the guns and I looked up and saw the bombs coming down. We were travelling at high speeds鈥ig-zagging鈥o the Captain managed to dodge the bombs that time. So we knew then that this was serious.

When war was declared we were already on the Dover patrol. We were fighting the Germans all the time and then I was sent onboard the HMS Wolf as part of the Northern Arctic patrol. When I was at sea, I had been picked with several other guys and we were the boarding party armed guard. Our job was to stop and search ships in case they were sneaking things into Germany. They would pipe 鈥淎way sea boats crew and first armed guard鈥� 鈥� and I was in the armed guard. We jumped on the deck of one boat and I saw a tent rigged and there were loads of Jews on this boat and there were six or seven elderly ladies. They were like a nursing unit, and they were trying to get back to Britain. It turns out they had been in Finland helping to fight the Russians before the war started so it was lucky we found them to get them home. The boat was trying to get to America. I wonder if it ever made it.

And we made some really good friendships onboard but a lot of them never came back. On the Russian convoy run, one convoy lost 80% of its ships in the freezing waters. I remember being up in the crows nest and it looked like a Christmas tree. There was ice had formed all over the ships and it was freezing up there in the crows nest. We used to get parcels with woollen gloves and balaclavas and I wrote to one lady to thank her 鈥� I must have been about 19 then 鈥� and I asked if she would send her photo. I got a letter back from her saying 鈥淚 don鈥檛 think you would be interested in my photo as I鈥檓 84 years old.鈥� *laughs* But it was awful nice of them to do that. You see, you didn鈥檛 get mail when you were out on the boats. Greenock was the nerve centre of the operation and all the ships congregated there. I was sent to work there for a few days, sorting the mail bags and one day I was carrying these bags a chap said to me. 鈥淵ou can forget about those: they鈥檝e just been sunk.鈥� So this was a hellish time. We lost a lot of ships. It was mainly the subs that did the damage. We knew the boats were waiting for us coming out past Ireland鈥t was a high price to pay. There was a boom net across from Dunoon and they had to open this net to let ships in they鈥檇 close it to keep U-boats out. At Scapa Flow the Germans were convinced that they could squeeze a submarine in past the net and they managed it. That was how they sunk the Royal Oak. I still remember the name of the German who did that. His name was Gunther Prien.

Onboard the ship, conditions were quite different. I came to love my hammock! Life aboard the destroyers was very hard: the food was poor and we got corned beef mostly. But when I got transferred aboard HMS Wolf, it was an ex-liner, so we had all the facilities the passengers had. The navy had cooks though. At least we got hot food. We could have a bath or a shower and a clean hammock to sleep in. I often think we were far better off than some of the infantrymen.

But it was a dirty war. You never saw the enemy. A ship would get bumped and sink and by that time the enemy would be away. The only way to stop that was with depth charges. I remember one day we dropped some charges and a buoy floated up and it had, written on it in German: NOTIFY THE GERMAN AUTHORITIES THAT THE U-40 HAS BEEN SUNK.

I think my attitude towards war changed a lot in this time. At first I was very anti-war but soon we realised that Hitler had to be gotten rid of. It didn鈥檛 matter what race of nationality you were. We soon realised what kind of life it was going to be if he got world domination. It felt like a really personal thing 鈥� we came to detest him. I suppose most men are the same. War can change you. As the war progressed we began to realise what Hitler鈥檚 thinking was and that was more and more chilling as the officers used to give us lectures and tell us what was going on.
I remember one time, we picked up some German survivors and one of them saluted Hitler and a friend of mine picked him up and threw him back in the sea! *Laughs* I can understand that. That was the main reason why we fought: to stop Hitler鈥nd for Scotland!

There were a few times when we really feared for our lives; there was a lot of bombing. I was in Portsmouth when they flattened it, I was in a naval hospital when they flattened that, I was in Devenport when they flattened that. I was what you call bombhappy. I jumped out of my skin when the bombs went off. I remember we were in the shelter one night and I was twitching away, jumping out of my skin and the nurse next to me was sitting, knitting away. I think you can only take so much of that, no matter how brave you are.

Mines were another thing. When we sank the U-40, we were chasing her at high speed and when I was over we realised that we had stopped in the middle of a great big mine field. We had to be so careful there and at times we were even pushing these mines away. There was one mine that looked out of place. Our mines have short stubby horns on them but this mine had lots of tentacles coming out of it. To make things worse the captain shouted 鈥淎way sea boats crew and identify that mine.鈥� So we had to go and see what this mine was and it was a great big French mine. I remember some bright spark had the idea of tying a crew member to the front of the boat to try and spot the mines. Another bright ideas someone had was to use the mines as target practice. I was firing away at this mine one day and I heard someone scream and I had been following this mine as the ship was drifting round and my bullet had passed right below another chap鈥檚 ear. *Laughs* I had been concentrating so hard on this mine.

I was lucky at this time because I lived at Greenock which became the only port we ever called at. So I got to see my family and we started to notice things changing at home during the war. People had better houses and better furniture and everything was better. I had been born into mass unemployment and extreme poverty. My father was one of the few that had some work going, being a shipping area. After the terrible First World War, of all those men who survived it, many of them spent 20 years on the dole. My grandfather was torpedoes 7 times in the Great War. He was a big, big man and a great swimmer. One time he swam over 20 miles and he was the only one of them who survived the swim. I think the First World War was worst than our war. I thought with our modern weapons there must have been more fatalities in our war, but there was more men killed in one day in the First World War than the whole of the Second World War.

I remember, in those days, people didn鈥檛 integrate at first. You had Geordies and Cockneys and Highlanders and they all spoke Gaelic. We always used to think the Highlanders were talking about us and it took a while for us all to integrate but we did eventually. We all became friends. This was the lesson of the war that most of the world learned: we all had to work together.

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