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Location
At Sea - Halifax to Liverpool
Age
18 Years

25th July 1941

THRILLS WITH THE FOG AND ICE!

When I got up this morning, there was a really thick fog laying over us, and all the ships were sounding their convoy nos. When I went to relieve Paddy at breakfast time I found that he had made the most lovely mess of several important messages, and the log book was in a most awful state! Mr Bonner was furious and once more proclaimed that Paddy would have to go. So in the end we had to double-bank, when ever Paddy was on. Besides being on at 12-4 this morning, I was also on from 8-12am and 12-4 pain! Paddy nearly drove me mad in the 8-12! His receiving was hopeless, just because everything was a little different and I think his intelligence must have been a minus quantity! However, things did get straightened out eventually.

What caused the excitement was the knowledge of ice bergs in our path, and also another convoy and that in the Straits of Belle Isle, is something. It was the other convoy that started the ball rolling, by one of their ships reporting they had struck an iceberg and was making water. After that, there seemed to be an ever lasting stream of messages either from ships having struck icebergs, or ships reporting them, or instructions from the Commodore and Vice Commodore. In all, 7 ships were damaged, three or four of them being from our convoy. This is the second time this has happened in the B.L.S’s! Towards evening, after being stopped for a while, we again proceeded and all of a sudden the weather cleared, just in time to let us see a large iceberg ahead and one on the starboard flank of the convoy. It’s pretty long odds one of us would have hit it – most probably us (!) as we were heading for it. We passed Belle Island  and several more icebergs, in the  evening, and more or less reformed the remainder of the convoy before nightfall. Now all is clear.