Imagine you are a seaman on a tanker full of high octane petrol in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
It is midnight and your convoy is being attacked by a wolf-pack of U-boats.
You listen to the explosions of torpedoed ships, knowing that your ship will erupt in a huge fireball with no chance of survival if it is hit.
But you reach Liverpool safely with your precious cargo.
One load is not enough.
You go back again and again until the war is over - or you have joined the 30,000 merchant seamen killed, and what is left of your ship rests on the seabed, one of the 5,000 merchant ships sunk in the Second World War.
J H CURBISHLEY
Ex-Royal Navy
Boothfields
Knutsford
Converted for the new archive on 13 March 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.
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