Baptism by Depth Charges

The day I joined the Thunder was the 14th of July, 1942. And we were going out of Halifax. I think we were going out to do some minesweeping, but there was a convoy going out at the same time, and all of a sudden there was a submarine scare, so the captain ordered the minesweepers, "Cut, cut the cables." He picked up a, the Asdic operator, who was on, I don't know who it was, picked up a signal and we did an attack. The trouble is we weren't going very fast and our depth charges went off. But before I get to that, this happened within hours after I joined the ship. I didn't even know where my action station was. The alarm bells went off. I said, "Where the hell am I supposed to go? " "Down there." this chap said to me. My action station was in the 3 inch magazine which is full of explosives, of course, and right down at the bottom of the ship. So, I got down there and all of a sudden "boom!". All hell broke loose. The ship bounced. The depth charges went off too soon. Well, we weren't going fast enough. Blew the ass end of the ship up. All the lights went out. This is my first day at sea. I didn't know what was happening, but I was sitting back in a corner. I jumped out of there and ended up right below the hatch. Well, the leading seaman in charge, he had been standing there. He wasn't there when I got there. He had jumped right up through the hatch. However, we survived. That was a scary, scary day.