John Shannon's veteran story

Pre-D Day convoy

When embarkation came round we were taken to the wharf after midnight to embark at two o'clock and we were given a boarding card with a big red A superimposed on it. I thought A deck, that's the shot because we'd only been on C deck on the other ship and it was not A deck at all, it was A hold.

When we boarded the ship we went fo'r'ard where they'd lifted off the railway sleepers, you know, that cover the hole. They lifted off enough of these for us to go down this steel vertical ladder.

We were so tight in the ship we could only have two meals a day. At lunchtime they used to lower down a case of oranges and a case of apples. W

hen we, in the morning when we work up we were out of sight of land and there were sips in every direction as far as you could see, they disappeared across the horizon in every direction.

We learned subsequently it was the biggest convoy to ever cross the Atlantic, 187 ships. We didn't lose any.

What we didn't know was, D Day, at that point projected only, in fact it changed because of weather, D Day was projected three weeks after this convoy sailed.

The ships were chock a block full of American troops and all their gear. Tanks and mobile searchlights, trucks and jeeps and things.

You name it, the equipment was there. It was being held back as long as possible before D Day but to be there in time for D Day. So that was what caused it to be such a huge convoy.

The poignancy of personal remembrance

But as far as this trip is concerned, I see us, collectively, representing Australia, representing Australian veterans at large but in particular, representing air force veterans who served in Britain over Europe.

I also see us remembering and honouring those blokes who did not come home.

Now every small town in Australia has an obelisk with two or three names on it and use get to towns bigger the obelisk gets bigger and more names until you get to the extreme of the War Memorial in Canberra with those 110,000 names or something of that order.

In remembering and honouring those who did not come home there are two elements to that. There's the element of all those names on obelisks in little country towns, the names at the War Memorial but there's the other element and that is, we were there with the blokes who didn't come home. They had dinner with us in the mess that evening and they went off on their last trip.

They are real faces. Even if some of the names have been forgotten, the faces are still there. You know who you are talking about and a lot of them, as I mentioned earlier, were blokes who were in my class at school from age 10 to the end of high school which makes that sort of remembering and honouring so very personal as opposed to the earlier category.