- Contributed by听
- Thanet_Libraries
- People in story:听
- Mr Clifford Woods
- Location of story:听
- Indian Ocean and beyond!
- Background to story:听
- Royal Navy
- Article ID:听
- A6263075
- Contributed on:听
- 21 October 2005
At the age of 17 and a half I joined the Royal Navy just a few months before the outbreak of World War II. The first ship I was drafted to from Chatham was HMS Corwall and we esccorted convoys from Liverpool right up to the Suez Canal. They were all troop ships and were known as the 8th Army or Desert Rats. On one occasion we spotted a merchant ship and challenged her but she fired off a salvo of shells. We were hit but were lucky as it hit the flour stores and left only a hole in our side. We returned fire with our 8 guns and sank her but unfortunately there had been British merchant men on the ship and while we picked up as many as we could I do not know hw many died. We also rescued a number of Germans who gave the Nazi salute as they came up the ladder, they were put ashore at the Mauritus Islands.
At 2pm on Easter Sunday in 1942 HMS Corwall was attacked and sunk by 80 Japanese Kamikaze dive bombers. As I was the torpedo operator I was below decks and so was trapped when the ship began listing badly. It was actually a Japanese bomb that saved my and my companions lives as it blew out the hatches and enabled us our only hope of escape. 300 men died in that sinking and those of us who survived spent a long night floating in shark infested waters before being picked up by a destroyer on strict instuctions not to waste time searching for survivors. It was the oil floating on the sea from our ship that saved us from the sharks. I consider my survival that night as miraculous.
I also served on HMS Uganda and we were posted to Salerno Italy where we were firing at the tanks along the coast. It was not long before we were hit by a radio controlled bomb which went down one of the funnels and killed 16 below decks. Eventually we were towed to Canada where I was posted to a barracks in Toronto. As the destroyer I was to be allocated to was still being built I joined the other British seamen and found a job as a fork lift driver. I was earning more in a week there than the Navy paid me in a month!
This generation of Japanese are polite and I hold no grudge against them.
I'm 83 years old and do believe I have a halo over me to have survived when so many did not.
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