Aircraft Carriers

The aircraft carrier along side us was hit with one of these planes and it crashed right at the base of the tower on the aircraft carrier. And right inside the tower was an emergency room, medical emergency room and it killed about 18 men there. One of them was a Canadian doctor serving with the British Navy. It put quite a dent in the ship’s deck, but they put the fire out and pushed the trash over the side and they were able to retrieve their aircraft that were away on bombing. When they came back they were able to land on the ship, the damage not being that great. There were a number of British carriers that were hit, same thing. One of them the plane crashed on the deck and slid and all the debris just went over the side, the ship continued on. The ship next to us, they said that they had the damage repaired in a matter of a half an hour they - the dent in the deck they filled up with fast drying cement of some sort and the planes could land. Which resulted in the Americans bringing their, several of their admirals, coming over to the British carriers to see how come that they could continue to operate and the Americans ones couldn’t. And the difference was that the American aircraft carriers all had wooden decks and the British carriers had armour plated decks and so when they crashed into the Americans they blew right through to the wooden decks into the hangers below and of course you had all the fuel lines ruptured and so on. You had big fires and those carriers were generally put out of commission but the British ones weren’t. Well, our ship was never hit! We didn’t have that problem but the British ships along side us, the aircraft carriers, they were the ones that got it. We were never hit. We were very fortunate. Because we weren’t actually fighting, we weren’t using our guns and so on. Our 4 inch guns were used for anti aircraft. My action station was in the shell room, handling, loading the big shells for the big guns into the hoist that go up to the turret. So when our big guns were operating I didn’t’ see anything outside the ship. But I remember seeing aircraft coming back from raids and they’d have - I remember seeing one with the tail almost shot off but they were making it back.. I remember one crashing into the sea and it went straight down and for a moment it was silhouetted like a cross in the tail you know. Some of the fellows that we had onboard it was their first time at sea. Some of them had not had any training with the British Navy and they were having a lot more nerves than we were. We’d been in action before but some of those fellows were pretty worried.