With the Eastern Fleet in HMS Renown, 1944

With the Eastern Fleet in HMS Renown, 1944
Transcribed from a video recording
From there on it gets more exciting, or more interesting, because it’s in the Tropics now. Straight down the Suez Canal, and it’s the only place in the world where you can see the curvature of the earth. As you look down the canal it appears to curve. It doesn’t actually, it’s a mirage, but we used to fool the young lads — “just have a look at this” — “Oh yes, isn’t that funny?!” Anyway, down the Canal, and we finish up in Sri Lanka, well it’s Ceylon then, I remember it as Ceylon, and the main anchorage, beautiful anchorage, called Trincomalee, so we’re base in Trincomalee with the Eastern Fleet. This is tropical, sun every day, our men, swimming, nearest beach, but all the time the numbers of ships are accumulating, the Americans joined us, in a huge aircraft carrier the Saratoga, the French joined us in the battleship Richelieu, and the fleet is getting together for an attack against the Japs, and we did one bombardment of the Anderman islands — now they’ve been mentioned recently, because they were affected by the Tsunami thing, so was Ceylon — they were Japanese occupied.
So we bombarded the Anderman Islands, and the Nicobar islnds, almost in the same group, and we also did a bombardment of an oil installation and Japanese airfield in Surabaya in Java, and when I say we bombarded it, we never saw the land, because we had 15” guns on Renown, that’s not 15” long,, its 15” diameter, the shells weighed three quarters of a ton for a start, so we were bombarding from about twelve miles, we had spotter planes from the carrier Illustrious, we had several carriers with us, Illustrious was one of them, and when the photographs were taken, it was just like a zip fastener, bombarded right down the runways. The Japanese didn’t like it, but we were happy with that, and that was two of our main actions. Ceylon was a beautiful place, and I’m devastated with the news, because the area that I knew, in the South of the island, was wiped out by the Tsunami thing, Beautiful place. So that’s that part of it.

Gordon Richmond

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