大象传媒

Training

I joined the Royal Navy on the 22nd of January 1940. And after 5 months training down in Davenport Barracks, I left on the 26th of September 1940. I went by train from Cherbourg to Marseilles then on to the destroyer, Dainty to carry me to Alexandria to join my first ship, HMS Resource. This was a large work ship, a depot repair ship for keeping the ships in the Eastern Fleet in good condition.

First action

After about 5 months on there, I was then drafted on to my first real man of war, the HMS Liverpool. This was a town class cruiser. Our job was to escort convoys to Malta.

On one occasion after safely delivering our convoy to Malta, we were on our way back to Alexandria in Egypt, when we came across an Italian destroyer towing another one. On seeing us, he cut the towline and scarpered off pretty fast leaving his disabled mate behind him. As we drew closer to him, we could see men on the deck waving various white sheets, pillowcases, tablecloths, in surrender. The captain then ordered them to abandon ship and take to the boats. After this had been done, he sunk the destroyer with gunfire and we carried on our way back to the home base. The captain told us over the ship's speaker that of course we couldn't stop to pick the crew up due to the danger of possible enemy subs in the vicinity. He then informed us, to our horror that he had given our position to the Italian authorities so that they could come and pick up their own men. This of course gave away our position and we didn't have long to wait. Shortly afterwards, I had just left my action station on the forward flooding over the petrol store; we carried two aircraft and that was what the fuel was for, and I'd just gone down below to start my shift. I relieved a chap called Johnny Locherty who in turn took over my position forward, and had hardly had time to settle myself alongside the throttle when the action stations alarm rang and almost immediately after this the telegraph rang "full speed ahead". The cruiser had four propellers and I was on the port outer screw. As I was opening up the throttle as fast as possible, the ship keeled over hard to starboard as it was steered hard to port. Seconds afterwards came a dull, muffled sort of thud and the ship leapt up and down like a seesaw, and the dreaded ring of the telegraph came again, "STOP". We never liked stopping in wartime but we had no option here. The smoke and fumes came down the ventilator into the engine room. We, of course, could only visualise what had happened. Eventually, we were informed that two enemy aircraft had attacked us and dropped two torpedoes. The ship had gone full ahead to escape the one heading for the engine room or the after part of the ship, though we didn't know that at the time. Then we had steered hard to port to try and escape the second one heading for the bow. Unfortunately, it had caught us and exploded. All the watertight doors were shut so flooding restricted but first the paint shop caught fire, and then the petrol tank. About 700 gallons of fuel exploded and poor Johnny Locherty who had relieved me in that position was killed. After about 6 hours, I suppose, I was relieved and came up on deck to see us being towed astern by the cruiser Orion and for the first time I was able to see the extent of the damage. The explosion had parted the fore deck away from the ship's side and the forward gun turret had been more or less blown to pieces. About thirty, I believe had been killed.

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