We were ready for sea and the orders came for HMS Dorsetshire and HMS Cornwall to leave harbour and to join the fleet in the Maldives. We left Colombo on Saturday night at 10pm on the 4 April 1942 and were about five hundred miles out. Cornwall was about five miles away going at the same speed. We were told about an attack by the Japanese carrier aircraft at Colombo resulting in the sinking of several of our ships plus some other local boats.
When we left we didn’t know what the purpose of the exercise was. We
thought we were going to beef up the rest of the fleet because the size and
weight of our cruisers Cornwall and Dorsetshire were about ten thousand tons
each, with eight to nine hundred people serving on them. We also had powerful
armament that would be useful to the Fleet. We were progressing with Cornwall
at a good speed when we noticed that there were enemy aircraft shadowing us
and we knew then that there was going to be an attack and everyone was sent
to action stations.
I was hoping that when we went into action I would be off watch because my action
station, off watch, was a fire party outside the sick bay which, by the way,
was caught by a direct hit and killed everyone in the sick bay bar two of the
doctors. I thought that should we go into action, I wouldn’t be in the
bottom of the ship in the boiler room but on the main deck by the sickbay and
at least have had a good chance of survival.
When the attack took place I was in the worse possible place in the boiler room
yet I survived. Only two out of seven of us in the boiler room survived. Yet
if I had been off watch at action stations I would have been outside the sick
bay and would have been killed. That was one of my nine lives!
I went down on the afternoon watch at noon with the other six people noon ‘til four. We had been forewarned that an attack was imminent, so we were obviously concerned because we were 3 decks down, well below the water line. The stoker on the starboard boiler behind me was called Wills; I remember that, he perished because he hadn’t been given the order to abandon ship.
It was Tom Shirley, my stoker PO, who said to me later, “The ship suddenly
shuddered and the water level gauges fractured hissing out water and steam,
we were going at top speed, twenty-eight knots”. After the shudder, Tom
said, “They’ve started” (attacking us) and, “That’s
our eight inch forward guns firing a broadside”. I had experienced target
practice on the Dorsetshire and when you fire eight-inch twin guns close up
that really shakes you, crockery would tumble off and break.
Tom, a very nice man, said, “Yes, that’s what it is” but immediately
a terrific shudder came and all the lights went out. Steam was hissing everywhere.
There was no order to abandon ship, not even from the chief stoker George Whooley.
It was Tom who said, “We’ve been hit – we’ve lost all
our steam pressure, put all fires out” because all sprayers were on into
the main furnace. We turned off all the sprayers and the oil supply and there
was only the glow of the red-hot cones that the fires were fed with.
We were in virtual darkness except for the glow from the fires through the ducting. Tom said; “Lets go” and he and I went up the starboard ladder, a long ladder with probably twenty-five rungs. He went first and I followed tight on his heels, shaking like a leaf and I expect he was too. He said, “Come on”. I followed him and got into an air lock that was used to restrict the air to the boiler rooms below. The air lock door was open and we went up another deck to where the force fans were. They were stopped and it was mighty hot. We came up level with the main deck that would have been our normal exit, the deck below the upper deck. We looked for our lifebelts that we hung up just inside the normal exit to the main deck. The lifebelts were gone and the exit was a ball of fire blowing in gas and smoke, no way could anyone get through there. I looked around and thought we were going to burn to death right here.
But Tom said, “Come on!” and he knew, because he had been on the ship longer than me, that there was a service ladder or escape ladder several rungs high, which took us up to a very small exit on the main deck. We came out on the deck amid-ships, roughly between the for’d funnel and breathed fresh air. Tom went first and I had to scramble out behind him. Tom was soon out of sight. The sight that greeted me was horrific, bodies, body parts, blood, screaming, men in agonies of pain, a terrible sight, and this unnerved me rather. The ship was listing to starboard and going down by the stern.
The ship was covered (with water) up to amidships, the bows rose fifty feet into the air from the guardrail too the water surface with the flooded stern section filling rapidly with water. I looked across to the port side of the ship that was very quiet because everyone was jumping off the starboard side, the lowest part of the boat. I went over to the port side to clear my eyes from the sights I had seen. I couldn’t walk over that lot and see what I saw. I went there for a few seconds when I suddenly heard the clatter of the fighter planes machine-gunning the port and starboard in groups of three.
I looked up and saw a Japanese fighter quite close by. I could see the cockpit,
the pilot’s face, his goggles, his equipment, and the bullets coming from
the machine gun. I straightened myself up against the steel bulkhead only about
six feet away from the guardrail. About seven or eight machine gun bullets hit
the deck within six inches of my feet. I waited for this plane to clear, everything
was happening in seconds.
I ran forward towards the bows and another plane came in doing the same thing.
I sheltered under the 8 inch “A” gun turret on the foc’sle
main deck until that and another plane had cleared. I ran to the guardrail,
stripped off my boiler suit and shirt, kicking off my boots that we wore as
a protection from the heat of the steel plates. I got on the outside of the
guardrail and steadied myself with my hands behind me. I jumped into the water
and finished up in a pile of wreckage and thick black oil the state of treacle,
which had congealed in the cold sea.