LEST WE FORGET 173 Being a wireless operator, we’d be copying the messages and a lot of these messages came from headquarters informing us of the submarine activity and wolf packs [groups of German submarines that operated together] that might be in our way. So efforts would be made to alter course of the convoy, which is pretty difficult, alter course, so we would miss them. But invariably, we’d never miss them and practically every crossing we had, we met some action from submarines. Most of the crossings, we lost one ship anyway. Later on during the war, it wasn’t so hectic but to begin with, with the wolf packs and in 1942, it was the peak of the U-boat [German submarine] warfare, we lost a lot of ships. On one crossing, we lost I think it was 18 ships. But of the 18, there is 13 submarines in this wolf pack. And so they were situated in together under and they waited for the convoy to pass over and then they would come up and start popping them off. And with six escorts, it was impossible to keep them out. So they took their toll. But the majority of our ships, we had convoys 80 ships and so we lost 18. Of course, that was bad because there would always be survivors and of course, we were always detailed, our ships were always detailed to pick up survivors if there were any. And we, first time we picked up in bitterly cold weather and stuffed with ice and we spotted one boat with one person in it and that turned out to be a 15 year old Scottish lad. And we picked him up and he was pretty happy to be picked up but he was almost frozen. And he had a whistle in his mouth and he couldn’t even blow it.
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