大象传媒

I joined the Navy in August 1940 after the fall of France. The first ship that I served in was HMS Bulldog, the leading ship of the Third Escort Group, based in Iceland. We escorted convoys to and from America and saw a number of ships being torpedoed by U-Boats operating from French ports. In May 1941 we were escorting a convoy off Iceland and suffering a number of sinkings by a group of U-Boats. In conjunction with HMS Amethyst, a corvette, we depth charged using our Asdic to locate a U-Boat. After several charges a U-Boat was blown to the surface and the crew emerged from the conning tower and made for the gun on the foc'sle. Our Captain ordered us to open fire and the U-Boat crew jumped into the water. We launched our whaler and boarded the U-Boat. It was quite rough and the whaler had difficulty in tying up alongside the U-Boat. The whaler's crew all disappeared inside the U-Boat and the whaler dis-intergrated, leaving the crew stranded on the U-Boat. We then had another contact so we set off after another U-Boat, leaving the whaler's crew on the U-110. About an hour later we returned to U-110 which was still afloat. The Bulldog then borrowed the whaler from HMS Amethyst and with our own motorboat took off our boarding crew from U110 with all the documents and equipment that we could find. We made several trips and completely cleared all useful equipment from the U-Boat. It was then taken in tow and we hoped to make our base in Iceland. Alas it was so badly damaged that after about 36 hours in tow we had to abandon the U-Boat which sank in the rough Atlantic seas. We had taken the U-Boat crew on board and treated them kindly. I spoke to one German who happened to be a war correspondent on his first voyage. He could not speak English and I had no German, but we were able to talk in French. I told him that the German's were about to attack Russia but he told me that it was pure British propaganda! A signal was then recieved from the Admiralty telling us to procede to Scapa Flow at full speed as it was realised that we had captured an Enigma Machine with the German code books. At Scapa Flow we off loaded our prisoners and all the equipment we had seized from the U-110. I kept a signal lamp with U-110 painted on in white, and a U-Boat jacket made out of some plastic material. It was only after the war was over that I realised that we had captured the Enigma Machine which was sent to Bletchley Park for the code breakers to examine. The German code was cracked and several U-Boats were located and sunk together with their supply ships. It was turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic.

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