Veterans remember the horrors of war
Then and now...hero Donald Hunter Ted Cordery and, inset, when in Navy cold was so intense that flesh and metal could freeze together in an instant and the mountainous seas could rip off a gun turret roof.
Ted fought in the Battle of North Cape off Norway in December 1943 and played his part in sinking the Scharnhorst.
He said: “I was on Arctic convoys for two years and it was hell on earth. I was on torpedoes where we attacked the Scharnhorst. She was ablaze and we got the signal to go in and finish her off. So I fired three torpedoes and it sank her.” HMS Belfast’s oldest surviving veteran yesterday told of his love for the grand old ship, despite twice having been nearly killed on board.
Sprightly John Harrison, who proudly gives his age as “103-and-three-quarters”, survived being blown up by a mine and thrown 16ft in the air in 1939.
John, who was a Chief Petty Officer in the ship’s first crew, ran a gun turret and was on board when Belfast was almost sunk in the Firth of Forth by the magnetic mine which killed one of his crewmates and injured 46.
The sailor, from Godalming, Surrey, suffered terrible headaches but was just given three aspirins and told to report for duty the next day. He later learned he had broken two vertebrae in his neck, an injury which was only finally treated in the 1990s. Before the mine, he only escaped being swept overboard while on patrol in the Arctic because he grabbed a metal door handle as a huge wave threatened to throw him into the icy seas.
He said: “If my hand had not frozen to the door handle I would have been over the side. That’s why Belfast is a very lucky ship for me. It’s a beautiful ship and it was a happy ship.”