By D-Day Veteran Joe Billet
September 3rd is Merchant Navy Day – here is a little information that you may already know. I was 12 years old when World War 2 started and joined the Merchant Navy aged 15 in 1942 serving until 1946 when I joined the Army but that’s another story.
During WW2 Eighty thousand Allied seamen were lost and roughly 1,600 Royal Navy Gunners were attached to the Merchant Navy. I did a course on HM Ship in the Severn estuary where they taught me to dismantle, clean, reassemble and load the magazines of the Hodgekiss, Lewis, and Marlin guns.
I did 4 days and 3 nights aboard HM Ships, at least those weapons were only 303 ammunition but they stopped the German and Italian aircraft from coming in low to strafe us. Then from Sweden we received the Oerlikon which was a wonderful weapon, but I was number 2 on them and my job was to take the empty drum from the gun and put a new one on for the gunner.
I would then reload the old drum which held 60 rounds and make sure every 4th round was a tracer bullet. Later I did another gunnery course in the Gulf of Suez where I learnt to fire the guns. I am also a veteran of the Sicily landings and D-Day landings.
The Germans lost 28,000 u-boats from a total of 41,000. A lot of the old naval ships were pulled away from the convoys and were replaced by Corvettes. HMS Bulldog captured u-boat 110 which had sunk the SS Athenia which was the very first ship sunk on 3rd September 1939.
It is the same u-boat from which HMS Bulldog recovered the Enigma machine, was kept top secret and passed to expert cryptographers at Bletchley Park who broke the German code which helped to divert the convoys away from the u-boat wolf pack.
It is 83 years since the start of WW2 and in the 30 years I have lived in Spain we haven’t marked Merchant Navy day – any suggestions?
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