大象传媒

In 1944 I was a crew member on HMS Matchless, a destroyer usually occupied with merchant ship convoys in northern waters. Some time in 1944, possibly in the August, we were detailed to escort the Queen Mary across the Atlantic. Winston Churchill was on board the Queen Mary and was on his way for talks with the US President. The escort was organised like a relay race with six destroyers positioned in pairs across the Atlantic. The Queen Mary was a very fast ship and could carry enough fuel to see her all the way across the Atlantic to New York. Although we were faster ships we couldn鈥檛 carry enough fuel for the distance involved so each pair of destroyers escorted the Queen Mary several hundred miles to the next pair of waiting ships. The original pair of ships would then fall back and the two new ships would continue the journey. In this way the Queen Mary could maintain her speed without having to wait for her escort to re-fuel. On HMS Matchless we were one of the last pair of ships in the chain waiting at the US side of the Atlantic. As we took up the escort and started the last leg of the journey we ran into hurricane weather and the Queen Mary was forced to reduce her speed to avoid structural damage. Engine room staff were on duty to shut down the ships engines as the screws came up out of the waves, as to let them run free could have caused major damage through vibration. With the Queen Mary now travelling at a slow rate of knots Churchill must have felt becalmed and at one point we circled her towing a drogue behind us so that Winnie could shoot at it with an anti-aircraft gun. As we were registering forty foot waves at the time I don鈥檛 think he had many hits. The Queen Mary eventually completed her passage to New York and we continued on to St Johns in Newfoundland.

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