On the Rocks with Jack Knox by Jack Knox

Author:Jack Knox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Heritage House
Published: 2018-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

CROFTON’S DENIS HIGGINS was but fourteen years old when he signed on as a cabin boy in Britain’s merchant marine in 1941. The death of his brother, a submariner killed off Italy in 1940, might have had something to do with his decision to enlist so young.

He was still fourteen when he was sunk for the first time. It was at night, in the South Atlantic en route to Sierra Leone, when the torpedoes struck. He was eleven days in a lifeboat before they washed up in the Canary Islands. While adrift, two of the men in the lifeboat drank seawater, went crazy, and leapt into the ocean, lost forever.

Later, Higgins was on a convoy to the Soviet Union—the dreaded Murmansk run—when his ship, laden with tanks, crated Spitfires, ammunition, and other war supplies, was discovered and attacked by two dive-bombers. One bomb slammed into the vessel amidships—and kept on going, right through the other side, exploding in the water. The damaged ship limped into Murmansk, where it was again attacked from the air and sank right beside the wharf. ‘‘I had my sixteenth birthday in Murmansk.’’

He was in the Bay of Biscay in 1943 when sunk for the third time, his ship struck by a flying bomb. He went over the side with his buddy Chris. Rescuers found Higgins, who regained his senses the next day. They never found Chris.

It always rankled that the merchant seamen were ignored by British officialdom after the war. ‘‘They didn’t regard us as members of the armed forces.’’

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