大象传媒

I joined the Navy in 1941 at the age of 18 in Liverpool as a visual signalman, otherwise known as a bunting tosser. My first posting was HMS Impregnable, a training establishment in Devonport. It was a three year course in peacetime but had been condensed to 9 months for hostilities only. Then I was posted to a port war signal station at Stoke Point where I spent five months. Then in January 1942 I was sent to America on the Queen Elizabeth to crew a tank landing ship built in Baltimore for the Royal Navy.
The Queen Elizabeth was built in Glasgow as a luxury liner but war broke out before it made a single maiden voyage and it was used as a troop ship. So I joined thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen being sent to the US for training and other reasons. I was with the men who were to be my new shipmates - a crew of around 100. The QE had no escort because of its speed which was about 34 knots which was too fast for Uboats - it reached New York in 4 days.
From NY we went to Baltimore and took over the ship from the dockyard. She was called LST410 - a new class of warship designed to land tanks and vehicles on beaches. So already in early 42 people were thinking of going on to the attack.
Our first mission was to take US troops across the Atlantic to the North African landings at Oran. This was my first landing and I went on to do 4 more landings in the next 3 years at Sicily, Salerno, Anzio and finally Normandy. I was on my way to the Far East to take part in the expected landings in Malaya when the war ended. At the very end of the war I crewed on the cruiser Glasgow and the
the flower class corvette Nigella. So I ended my war on a ship whose name means Love in the Mist.
I returned to civilian life in Liverpool where I still live today.