Receiving Distress Calls

Interviewer: During the time that you were with the Empress of Canada, the merchant vessels were taking a tremendous toll in the North Atlantic, you men would be aware of this?
I was aware of it. I'll tell you the truth, even Churchill disguised that he wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, he must help it, he says two and a half million tons of our ship, have been lost in the last ten... it wasn't two and a half, it was three and a half million. They all tried to pretend that no ships were going down, but I was a wireless operator, I knew they were going down and not only that they were being attacked, you know, with surface ships. And I know one case there was a ship said a big attack by the surface ship and then a little while later said, oh a mistake we're not being attacked. But it was a different hand writing that I could tell, so I wrote to the Bridge, you know, we had a fleet, a fleet of fleet ships with us. I said "He'll speak in tact, the other cancellation was put in by another person," yeah, I saw that.
Interviewer: So you suspect that was done by the Germans?
Oh yes. The Germans had taken over and said it was a mistake, there's no.... They had SSS for submarine, RRR for radar you see. And it came out RRR radar and then he said, "Oh, cancel the radar," but the German fellow did that.