Guy Griffiths - A great team of fellows

Transcript

The specialist officers on board were also very good. Of course, then you come to your senior sailors, the Chief Petty Officers, Petty Officers. A great, great team of fellows.

When you're building a ship in America in those days, and probably now if we were to, you go through their pre-commissioning training routine, and all my technical fellows, the propulsion system and all the electrical and the radar and the weapons systems, they all had to go through the American system. Invariably, they all passed out top of their courses at the examinations. So, they knew, the officers, they grasped.

It was a quantum jump in a way from where we had been in our weapons systems and our state of technology up to another level. They walked up that staircase very well, much to the way it was commented upon by the United States Navy fellas here and there.

When we came to doing things off the coast, lots of replenishments from the replenishment ships because we were using a fair amount of ammunition in these firings. I don't know that there was any particular event. The shore batteries fired at us. They didn't like what we were doing. So, we responded. I remember it was great to have a spotting aircraft from one of the carriers in the gulf. Some of them were absolutely expert spotters. One stage, there were five, I think five shore batteries along the coast.

Normally, the edict was that you don't go back and have a battle with shore batteries. But, with the spotting aircraft, I thought "We need to do something about this". So, we went back and we destroyed all five. That's a good effort. But, that means that your team, the whole weapons system group are really 100 per cent.