Transcript
Roy Cornford:
We hadn't been on board very, very long and the ship picked up anchor and it set sail. And two naval vessels joined us and this was two days before the Fall of Singapore. And we didn't know where we were going or what was going on and the next thing, the Japanese come over and they started bombing.
Dropping bombs around the ships. And we got into one of the holes and one of the bombs hit the hull of the ship next to us, and of course that stirred up that much dust we couldn't see where we were or what we were doing.
And we had to crawl out the hole that we got in. And then we were up on deck and one of the sailors, an officer, asked myself and a mate to come with him and we were picking up the bits and pieces of bodies that had got killed by the bomb. And he says, "Toss them overboard." He says, "There's no good us keeping them for a funeral or anything later."
So we were tossing them all over. And then later the bombers came back again and then all they done this time was machine gun the ship, but we got all in underneath the deck and nobody got killed then. That night, one of the wounded ones had died and they buried him.
