Now I was a torpedoman at that time and a torpedoman is also an
electrician. Well, you got the daily work and when it comes to
action stations well then you got the torpedoes and the depth
charges and other stuff. Looks after all the lights and
different things, whatever you need. And loading torpedoes
aboard aircraft, it was just an aircraft carrier I’m talking
about now and that was mostly what the job was. So you almost do
what you’re told. We knew there was going to be a raid sometime
but we weren’t sure. We were in the Greenock and they took on a
load of guns and tanks because the aircraft carrier could carry
a lot of that stuff, you could just roll right into it and the
airplane was on the top deck. There was an elevator on the top
deck you go out from the hangar up to the deck. That was it, the
tanks had soldiers that were driving the tanks and they come
with us. Some of the gunners, well most of them, the gun layer
and the trainers. The rest I suppose were fixed up with the
army, whoever they can get a hold of was put on the beach
so, that was all. So when we landed and the radio came on and
everything went out. We get this big speech. You probably heard
it on the radio about the biggest landing that has ever taken
place in the world and that’s the first we heard about it.
So the next morning, daylight, yeah there was daylight I suppose
when the plane started revving up and they took off. I was on
watch, I had to go up and tie down a couple torpedoes and
a couple other stuff. Anyway, they went off. They never came back
no more, the planes didn’t. Now whether they got shot down or
what happened to them I don’t know. Or they might have went
ashore in the landing, help with the landing over in England
somehow because there’s no distance over to England from France,
very little. And then about 11 o’clock, 11 or 12, I was asleep
and someone said they heard the news that the landing was pretty
good. There was progression over the beach. They were off the
beach then, they were gone up shore. Then the tanks went ashore,
the barges come about and took the beach. So, I wasn’t involved
in that. Then we were fooling around. We never stopped going
because we had to keep going because there were shells coming
from the beach outside. And we were a long ways out now, we were
a couple of miles but them shells could go that far.
That’s all, a few near misses. It never hit us.