The Athabascan (Part 4 of 5)
Heroes Remember
The Athabascan (Part 4 of 5)
My mother had sent me a parcel that day and she had sent a
yellow skull cap, if you can imagine, brilliant yellow skull cap
and everybody was laughing, "In the navy you're gonna were that
thing?" So I was wearing it for awhile and somebody else was
wearing it and anyway I, so that night I wore it for luck. So
he said that he looked up and he saw this figure with a yellow
hat and he'd been in the mess deck when I was wearing it and he
said that actually jarred him and brought him out of his torpor,
you know it, you know really, he was out of it completely.
He had only a thin shirt so he was,
he was suffering from the cold you see.
Anyway, we got him on board and we went a little further. The
engine broke down again. We tore the spray screen from the
forward canopy and I got some of the floor boards and put them
together and had a couple of pieces of line that I tied around
and made a sail and the wind was blowing from the south so,
there was nowhere to tie this thing, so I sat up on the aft of
canopy holding this thing until the wind got too strong and I
nearly went over the side with it so I threw that off. We went
on a little further and nothing happened, nothing happened, we
worked on it and worked on it and in the morning, let's see I
better go back, after 4 o'clock. Four o'clock gave me a
realization that 12 hours before I was sitting in, I was sitting
in the park with my girlfriend, Audrey, at the time, 12 hours
before this and here I'm out in the middle of the English
Channel. So we, we went along and I guess nothing happened,
nothing happened, we tried the engine again. It went for awhile
and it ran for about an hour I guess and about 10 o'clock in the
morning all of a sudden we saw two aircraft coming towards us so
everybody said, "Oh my gosh they're coming for us." We all dove
under the canopy and it went roaring by
and it was two P-47 Thunderbolts.
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