had just left moments before. The ship was now burning fiercely out of control and lighting up the surrounding sea. We could see the carnage and the deck strewn with wounded and dying shipmates. Powerful searchlights shone from nowhere and swept over the ship. I got caught in their glare and stood momentarily paralysed. They struck more fear into me than anything else knowing that these eyes of the enemy exposed us to yet more destruction. They were suddenly switched to the life boats which some crew were working frantically to launch. Another salvo burst demolishing the stokehold ventilators and part of the funnel, but the most sickening sight was to see the blasting away of the life boats and the brave men who in the face of such withering fire, had been trying to launch. Such merciless and systematic shelling could only mean one thing I thought, that the enemy intended to wipe out the crew completely as well as the ship. It was a if all hell itself had been loosed on us. The whole mid-ships was now ablaze and the shattered steam pipes let out a deafening hiss of escaping steam. The “Gallant “ Nazi commander who was we found later to be Korvette-kapitan Gumprich had executed his attack with such cold bloodedness on a helpless tramp steamer that he could now surely lay claim to the much coveted Iron Cross for such a glorious victory for the Third Reich. This was my first close glimpse of the real spirit of the enemy, and from what I saw all around me it seemed to be the very embodiment of evil. During a lull in the action seventeen survivors some seriously wounded took shelter on the forehead well-deck. The chief engineer took command as our Captain was missing, presumed dead. What a sorry sight we were, with one engineer wounded in his right kidney his insides exposed, and his right arm shattered at the elbow. The Bosun with head wounds was now just regaining consciousness. An Indian clutched a broken arm and nearby two young ratings lay dead. A radio officer had shrapnel in his lung and the galley boy was shell shocked and out of his mind; (we had been at school together). I passed a first aid box to Sid Powell the steward who quietly set to work bandaging his mates. To cap it all, over a dozen crew were missing either killed or drowned. Several Indian firemen were standing in a group and wailing and calling Allah! Allah! They were giving themselves up to their fate and mourning their own funeral. The scene imprinted itself on my mind and I began to prepare myself, and repeated the only Prayer that I knew: "The ”Lords Prayer”. The ship meanwhile was only just managing to keep her nose above the waves, but an occasional roller would come over, and so we all began as one to grab at anything that would float, hatch boards, a long ladder, anything. These we now lashed together with an ample supply of rope from number two derrick. What a splendid team we made as we grasped at this last chance of survival offered us by God to whom we had prayed only moments before. Meanwhile our attacker was getting impatient at the time the ship took to sink, because they started to open fire once again which was a signal for us to take to our crude rafts, and so along with our wounded mates we jumped into the sea and committed ourselves to God and the Deep. The prevailing cold current carried us away from glow of the burning wreck, and I felt safer as the night came to swallow us up, but then the fear of sharks took over. A couple of hatch-boards supported three of us. One was a wireless operator called Paddy …also known as the Mad Irishman, why I don’t know, as he was the most placid man imaginable and in spite of shrapnel in his chest he never complained but clung grimly to the boards. The other companion was the Indian fireman with a broken arm and he too bore up well under the trying ordeal. The larger raft supported the other survivors and whilst they were close by we felt some comfort but slowly we drifted apart. On abandoning ship our galley boy had drowned, the wounded engineer

Page 9/10 Next Page