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This story was submitted to the People’s War website by Justine Warwick and has been added to the site with the full permission of the author. The author fully understands the terms and conditions of the site.

When the war started I was 19. I went into the recruitment office in Leeds and volunteered for the navy. They didn’t need me though. So I got married and a fortnight later my paper arrived calling me up!

I joined a tribal class destroyer called the Maori — part of the 4th destroyer artilla. It was captained by Captain Vaim and he was one of the most daring commanders of the whole war. The four ships were Maroi, zulu, kosak, sikh. The Captain of the Maori was Commodore Armstrong — he drowned later in the war.
We took part in a lot of the major campaigns of the war - the North Atlantic convoys, the Battle of the Bismarck and the Battle of Cape Bon, and the Malta convoys. We were very badly bombed on one or two occasions and were eventually sunk in 1942. I then joined HMS Penelope, a cruiser, that’s been well written up. Even CS Forrester wrote a book dedicated to her. She too was eventually sunk but I wasn’t aboard at the time. I ended up in hospital in Malta for two months and then I joined a small land based unit and I served the whole of the way through the siege of Malta until it was relieved. I did eventually come home via Libya and Gibraltar.

Maoria and the Kosak delived a bombardment in Sardinia and we sailed under the Italian flag and went right up the Italian coast.

The sinking of the Bismarck has been written about and covered on television so much, but mainly written by men who didn’t arrive until late in the date. The fourth destroyer flotilla, of which my ship was part, received orders to sail north and join the battleships heading for the Bismarck. Captained Viam disobeyed and headed straight for the Bismarck! We arrived a day before the other ships and were involved in torpedo runs all through the night and the next morning. In between we were firing shells to light up Bismarck — which of course also lit us up. We were under heavy fire all the time from big guns and the Maori did the last attack in the early hours of morning. After that the big ships arrived. We said that the Bismarck’s crew were so tired they were finished. The Maori was the only destroyer to stay behind and pick up survivors - we picked up 25 Germans. We grabbed as many as we could in 50 ft high waves. I remember men scrambling down to try and save as many as possible.

We got back to the UK and the Senior Officer came on board and said he was sorry we couldn’t have much publicity — because the Hood had been sunk he thought the battleships should have the publicity. We didn’t agree.

The worst bombing I saw was on a convoy from Malta to Alexandria. Stuka dive bombers came down on us and one dropped a string of four bombs all around us. The shrapnel came up through the sides and through the deck and killed the A-Guns crew and injured a number, among them was my closest friend, a young newly qualified school teacher Whittaker from Bradford. The last I saw of him, was when he was being carried passed my gun on a stretcher and we buried him at sea the next morning.

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