FRANK CASEY ('Jack Dusty')

Supplied by his son Tony Casey

My father was called up to join the Royal Navy in 1942 and his father went with him to London and saw him on the train north to HMS Royal Arthur at Skegness for his initial training. During wartime, train journeys were painfully slow and uncomfortable. There were no lights, they were packed with servicemen and many people were unable to get seats. The training at HMS Royal Arthur (which was a Butlin's Holiday Camp before the war) was mainly designed to get people fit - it consisted of PT, drill and learning to row. People who were unable to swim learnt to do so in the camp's swimming pools. My father then spent three months in the summer of 1942 at HMS President in Highgate, London, where he was trained to be a Stores Assistant. Here, he learnt about the ordering and issuing of clothes, naval stores and victualling stores (food) and also learnt to type. At the end of the training period there were exams in these subjects. While in Highgate he lived in digs and occasionally went to football matches although most competitive football had been abandoned for the duration of the war. He left London in the autumn of 1942 for his first draft which was at Milford Haven in South Wales where he was involved in the supplying of armed trawlers. These vessels were primarily involved in the task of minesweeping off the coast of South Wales. Promotion to Leading Stores Assistant followed in the Spring of 1943 and he was then posted to the corvette, HMS Meadowsweet at Londonderry. Corvettes were very uncomfortable and unstable vessels and it was not uncommon for them to roll at angles of up to 45 degrees. This was my father's first time at sea and, although slightly sick on his first trip, quickly adapted to life at sea. He was only seasick again on one occasion - on a trip from Scotland to Ireland when almost every member of the crew, including experienced seamen, suffered similarly. Because he was responsible for the ship's stores he had his own office where he laid throughout the day feeling extremely ill. During 1982 much attention was paid to the rough weather British ships and men were subjected to in the Falklands' War but my father believed their discomfort was nothing to that experienced in a fragile corvette of World War II.

WILLIAM THOMAS FRANCIS CASEY AT HMS ROYAL ARTHUR, SKEGNESS, 1942.

(BACKROW, 4^th FROM LEFT)

 At first, HMS Meadowsweet was involved in anti-submarine patrols in the Bay of Biscay, in a group of five ships consisting of four corvettes and an old 'Campbeltown-type' destroyer. They were at sea for long spells and went into Gibraltar occasionally.

During one of the Say of Biscay patrols the Meadowsweet was bombed by a German plane, the bombs failing very close to the side of the ship and there was a large explosion. The other ships in the group at first thought she had been hit but the Meadowsweet eventually shot the plane down and survivors from it were picked up by one of the other ships.

Members of the crew would go to different action stations in different situations. During air attacks my father was a member of a party which supplied shells to the guns. During anti-submarine actions he led a depth charge team and was responsible for checking that the depth setting was correct. The biggest job was reloading which was done by hand, a pulley being used to lift the depth charge into its final position. The idea behind the Biscay patrols was to go in and try to flush out enemy submarines but my father remembers that there was only a handful of contacts.

 HMS MEADOWSWEET

The biggest problem at this time was the supply of food. Although the ships were refuelled at sea, they only received new food supplies when they returned to port. Very of ten, fresh food would run out while they were still at sea and the crews would end up on a diet of corned beef and rice. The arrangements for cooking meals on board were such that each mess would tell the Stores Officer what they wanted, each would make up its own menu and then take the food to the galley to be cooked. One of the jobs of the Stores Officer was, therefore, to try to ensure that there was enough food on board to last the journey. My father recalls that, on one occasion, he made Cornish pasties for his mess and they were delighted.

HMS Meadowsweet eventually returned to Fort William for a ref it in mid 1943 which lasted about four weeks. This was followed by a further patrol in the Bay of Biscay, the ship eventually returning to Liverpool for alterations prior to going to the Far East. My father came home for Christmas leave in 1943 but had to leave home on the evening of Christmas Day to get back to his ship on time. Shortly after Christmas, HMS Meadowsweet escorted a large convoy to Italy. Submarines used to attack at night and my father saw several merchant ships blown up. During the daytime they were attacked from the air. The main danger occurred between Gibraltar and Malta; after reaching Malta they were comparatively safe.

Prior to leaving Britain the crew had been issued with tropical gear so they knew they would be going further than Italy - at first she carried out antisubmarine patrols in the eastern Mediterranean, calling at ports such as Alexandria, Haifa, Limasol and Famagusta. There was great deal of poverty in Alexandria, many local people begged in the streets and on one occasion, when my father went ashore for a drink, he had all his money stolen.

Again, there were occasional submarine contacts but my father did not remember any confirmed sinkings. HMS Meadowsweet then sailed through the Suez Canal, calling at Aden where my father went ashore to have a tooth out. He had been suffering from toothache and, as there was no dentist on board, he had to go to an RAF base in Aden. He remembers the country being very wild and stony and that he had to go up into the hills to reach the RAF base. They then sailed into the Persian Gulf to try to get fresh food and met native boats coming out from the shore trying to sell food. They also carried out exercises in the Gulf and, when they practised depth charging, they killed a large number of fish which helped with the supply of fresh food.

The Meadowsweet then proceeded to Colombo to take on stores and, from there, to the southern Indian Ocean where they picked up a convoy of troopships en route from South Africa to Chittagong, Burma, which was in the frontline of the battle against the Japanese. Crew members were prohibited from going ashore singly because of the presence of Japanese snipers in the jungle (At the time Chittagong was a small native village). While the Meadowsweet was in Chittagong it was attacked by Japanese planes but not hit. This was followed by a second run from South Africa to Burma escorting another convoy of troopships. During this period the Meadowsweet also stopped off at Calcutta and madras where my father recalls the extreme poverty.

All this occurred during mid-late 1944 and, at the beginning of 1945, he was posted to Naval Intelligence Headquarters, Colombo (known as HMS Anderson) in what was then Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

ON THE QUARTER-DECK OF HMS ANDERSON (COLOMBO)

There, he was again looking after the stores and, because this was an intelligence headquarters involving a great deal of clerical work, he was more involved with the ordering and supply of stationery. While there, he saw what were known as Hollerith machines which were used for receiving coded messages. The headquarters was situated on what used to be the Colombo Golf Course and was about 10 miles outside Colombo itself. The men lived in buildings of thatch-like material called bandas which had open spaces around the top of the wall because of the heat. Colombo was a much safer area to be in and did not experience any air raids. My father remembers playing football and cricket on the Colombo Cricket Ground (which is now a test ground) for the base team against visiting ships etc. They also had a visit from Lord Louis Mountbatten who had come to meet as many of the troops as possible in Colombo. However, the war did not last much longer and hostilities with the Japanese formally ceased in September of 1945.

My father remained in Colombo until 1946 and then joined the aircraft carrier HM5 Indomitable which was due to pick up troops from Singapore and take them home. Again, he worked in the stores department but, on this occasion, described himself as 'only a minor cog in a big wheel' compared to previous occasions where he had been his own boss. After taking the marines to Portsmouth, the Indomitable returned to Devonport in the spring of 1946. On his arrival, my father had a suitcase full of souvenirs, postcards and presents stolen. As he had been away for two years he then had several weeks leave which he spent in Penzance and then joined the 'L" class destroyer HMS Lookout (the only one of its class to survive the war). This was moored just off Saltash (only a mile or so from the spot where he was to be living thirty years later) and he was a member of a skeleton crew looking after the ship until his demob. He remembers going ashore at Camels Head to go into Plymouth in the evenings and saw a great deal of bomb damage. In parts of Devonport nothing at all had survived so that nothing but vast stretches of rubble could be seen.

My dad photographed with an American veteran of Omaha beach at 60th

Anniversary D-Day celebrations at Trebah, Falmouth, 2004.