Wally Powell

I was sent overseas on the troop ship, Isle de France, and in England I joined as a commissioning crew, I joined the castle class corvette, HMCS St. Thomas, as a telegraphist. We were wireless operators, I mean, we were receiving messages from shore and also sending messages, telling them what we were doing. We had what we called HFDF, which was High Frequency Direction Finding. If anybody got a radio message, we knew the type of messages the Germans used to send. And if anybody received one, any ship or shore, they would come on with something like 444 right over our, break right in on us and that meant to swing our, what do you call it, bearing so we could take a bearing in that direction and we, if three or four ships took the bearing, then they could pinpoint where the bearing was. And that’s what we had that happen several times. One very exciting part of it was when we sunk our own ship, sunk a submarine and I remember that very clearly. And normally, my watch was as a wireless operator in the cabin but my action station was on the bridge, handling voice communications. I would take the communication from the captain to the wireless cabin or to the engine room, like through a voice pipe on the bridge. So I had a great view of all the action. We were off Newfoundland while we were on our way over to England, we had just left Halifax [Nova Scotia] and we were passing Newfoundland on the way across with a big convoy. We had what they called squid [a British ship-mounted anti-submarine weapon] which was, we had regular depth charges but the squid was about, the bombs were about twice the size of an ordinary depth charge. And we were one of the earlier ships to be equipped with what they called the squid and it fired three of these that straddled the submarine automatically because of sound and, and etc., to find it. And when they exploded, they would explode, they could be 80 meters down and you’d see boiling water come up from the explosion. But that was about all. Once it surfaced, we attacked [the German submarine U-877 on December 27, 1944] with our guns but then we saw they were abandoning ship and we stopped and went over to pick them up. And this was December and it was awfully cold in the water and some of them were in pretty bad shape. And one of my memories was of one of my pals, Roy Potter, stripped right down into his underwear, he was a very good swimmer, jumped into the water and helped these [56] survivors, helped them get onto the landing nets. And as I said, some of them were in pretty bad shape. Several are probably alive today due to his assistance that day. We picked up half of them and another ship, I think it was HMCS Sea Cliff, which picked up the remainder. They were one healthy, very very strong group of people. We were amazed at the submariners, the physical demeanor of them and everything else, they were extremely healthy fellows. I mean, apart from being bashed around and that, you know what I mean, with their countenance, muscular. We used to do a little bit of kidding with them, some of our people could speak German and some of theirs could speak English and they had a little bit of bantering back and forth when we had them onboard until we dropped them off in England. As I said, there was a little bit of bantering both ways and I think they were relieved that they survived and we didn’t have any trouble with them. Mind you, they were always under armed guard, and we gave up one of the messes. The cooks and that got out of their mess and we put these fellows down in that area. Well, sometimes at night when you’re sleeping in your hammock, you’re looking at the porthole just above you, not the porthole, I forgot what they called it, the hatch, hoping it doesn’t open and a bunch of Germans come pouring through.