Torpedoed (part 1 of 2)

We had gone through passed Gibraltar and this is November 5, 1943 and I remember it was such a lovely afternoon and people sitting out on the deck. The first tip-off I got was that one of the sailors, one of the crew was muttering, "I'll sure as hell be glad when we get another day beyond this. This is a poor spot." And all of a sudden our ships sirens started hooting steadily and you could hear guns going off. And over top of all that there was a crash and a boom and the lights went mostly out, not completely, they went dim. And the ship tilted so we knew that we had been hit. And there was no panic whatsoever really. We had been drilled on what to do. The nursing sisters were put into the lifeboats right away. Dropped over and they took off. Very fortunately there was a large passenger ship, the Monterrey, who had been part of the convoy, they stopped and they were picking up survivors. They were about a mile away and so the Nursing Sisters were taken across in the lifeboats. Now the drill was that everybody else, there were rafts. Throw the raft in then jump in and climb onboard the raft. And when I was up on deck I ran into a character who was the OC of troops and he had been a teacher at North Toronto Collegiate and he was heading to check on some chaps that had been in the ships hospital. And so I went with him and got these guys out and they were alright. But the rafts had all gone over by this time and we decided that we better get away. But we were darn lucky because by that time the life boats had made their run over to the Monterrey and were starting to come back. So we slipped into the water.