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This story has been taken from an interview with the author and has been used with his permission. Elizabeth Rice conducted the interview and Mark Jeffers transcribed the story.

Unfortunately there was very little work about Killyleagh during the war. Whenever I turned eighteen I went to Belfast and joined the Royal Navy, in April 1942. I did a lot of training in Devonport, I went through various training exercises regarding depth charges, torpedoes, electrical work and I passed all the exams. I was then sent to a Corvette, HMS Pink and we escorted convoys from Londonderry to America and St John’s New Finland.

We became caught up in the Battle of the Atlantic. Prior to the Battle we were having a lot of conflicts and battles of our own with submarines. They tried to attack the convoys and we were there to protect the convoys regardless of anything.

The battles were fought with depth charges. We got a pink, as the saying goes, and we proceeded in the direction of the submarines. We engaged in battle and tried to sink them. People don’t really understand the amount of lives that were lost in the Battle of the Atlantic. At one point there were at least fifty submarines which came up in the middle of one of the convoys. We got word to assist them and when we arrived at the scene there were bodies floating everywhere; women and children as well. It would have sickened anybody. We rescued 126 survivors.

We could do absolutely nothing about the bodies in the water, which was really vicious. When we were lifting the survivors out of the water, a huge wave came and carried me off my feet. I hit a depth charge and was washed overboard but luckily one of the crew members caught me in time and pulled me aboard. I was carried below deck and put in a bunk where I had to stay because I couldn’t move. A doctor and a specialist came to see me when we arrived at St. John’s Point and they took me ashore and examined me. My back was really badly damaged and for the rest of my life it would be painful. We took the survivors and went to St. John’s Point, New Finland.

During the Battle of the Atlantic the Germans came up between the allied ships so it meant that we couldn’t shoot them in case we hit our own ships. This went on from 11o’clock at night until 4o’clock in the morning and we were on the upper deck. After 4o’clock the German planes went away and the British planes arrived; unfortunately with the men being tired and frustrated there were shooting their own British planes down by mistake. We couldn’t tell the difference between the planes but they were being shot at until we got word that they were British planes.

One morning I had just come off duty and I went down and I hopped into my hammock. I had just got into it and was lying in just my underpants and a vest and I was lifted clean out of the hammock. I hit the bulkhead and came back down on the bottom again. I dashed out through the door and jumped out and there was no ship there. The back end of the boat was missing. We had been torpedoed. I swam about in the water for a long while and I was panicking because you always heard about sharks and things. You didn’t know what was going to get you. Luckily enough there was a motor torpedo boat, a Yankee one, which came along and lifted all the survivors that were there and they rushed us back to England to the hospital. We arrived in the hospital and I think the biggest majority of the crew were discharged from the forces because they really were a bunch of nerves. It’s hard to describe it.

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