Great Men: Boy Merchant Seamen

This week, I was fortunate enough to be present when a man related a story of Remembrance to a group of listeners.

He had attended a Remembrance day event and while there, he saw a man wearing an unusual navy medal called the Atlantic Star. He noticed it because his own father had the same medal and so he was prompted to ask the man about how he received it.

The Atlantic Star medal, awarded for service in the Atlantic and home waters
including the north Russian convoys

The man said that he and his brother had joined the merchant navy in 1939, serving aboard supply ships during the Second World War. The most striking element was his age at the time: his bother was 16 years old, and he himself was just 14 years of age when he signed on the dotted line.

What can you say to that? 14 years old and he volunteered for the merchant Navy. What is about about men, and even boys who are not yet men, that affords them the nobility to put themselves in harms way for the good of others?

Both brothers were posted to different ships as was policy at the time to help avert situations when the entire male side of families might be killed in one incident. The two ships steamed from Swansea through the Atlantic to the North West of Spain in order to pick up vital copper ore to bring back for processing.

This was in the early part of the war, before military escort for convoys was common or effective and so it was a case of each ship for themselves, weaving and meandering as best they could to avoid being sunk by German u-boats.

On the return journey, one of the ships was attacked and sunk with the loss of all men on board. It was the one carrying his 16 year old brother. It was only on arrival back at Swansea that he received the grim news of his brother’s death. Still a boy and dealing with his brothers death in war. A death that could easily have been his own.

What were you dealing with in your life when you were 14? As the man telling me the story said; “We haven’t been born.”

The boy mourned his brother and received the Atlantic Star in recognition of his risk in that journey and subsequent supply missions.

I asked the man who told me this story about how his own father earned the Atlantic Star medal. He said that, even though his father had lived quite far inland in England and it was therefore more usual for men to join the army or air force, his father chose to join the Navy. When he asked his dad why he had chosen to go to sea, the father didn’t really want to tell him. When pressed by his 10 year old son (the man telling me this), he took the boy aside and said “I went to sea, son, simply because it was the best death.”

He didn’t want to be killed by bayonet to the stomach, or crushed by a tank, or shot down over enemy territory. He considered death at sea to be the most palatable way to go, if it should happen.

The son told me how he would often end up sleeping the night in the sidecar of his motorbike when he came home late after a night out. If his father was asleep, he would not enter the house because he knew how lightly his dad slept and that if disturbed, he would be instantly awake, shouting and reaching for his rifle. He was as permanently wired at home in his bed, as he was on a battleship in the middle of an alert. And this was 10 years since the end of the war. So, for the sake of his dad, he kept a blanket and toothbrush in the motorcycle sidecar.

Post traumatic stress disorder wasn’t really appreciated in those days. Oh there was knowledge of shell-shock and many people could clearly see that the men who came home were not the same men who left for war. However, the damage to the psyche of these men typically went untreated except in the most severe cases when they would be kept in institutions under psychiatric care.

This is what men have been through and is part of the enormous tapestry that describes the greatness of men. In their achievements and talents and overwhelming sacrifices, it is a greatness that gets all too little recognition.

Well, it’s recognised here.

Notes

Great Men will be a series of posts highlighting some aspect of the greatness of men today and in history. Covering individual men of high achievement, or else groups or teams of men who have accomplished something and also, the unrecognised greatness within just the average man.

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