Veteran’s salute to Navy comrades lost 75 years ago
“IT was our spirit that kept us alive,” recalled Geoff Stott.
The Royal Navy veteran needed a special kind of resilience on March 1, 1942.
Yesterday, 75 years to the day that his ship, HMS Exeter, was sunk by Japanese forces, he made a poignant tribute to lost comrades.
The 94-year-old laid a wreath at a cenotaph at Salford’s Broughton House care home for ex-servicemen, in memory of the 54 sailors who died when the Exeter was shelled and torpedoed in the Java Sea.
She went down at 11am and the survivors – including Geoff – faced another ordeal.
After three hours in the water, he was picked up by a Japanese destroyer, and then spent three years in a POW camp on an island off Nagasaki.
There he existed on a sardine-tin portion of rice a day and the occasional fresh vegetable and dried fish.
Geoff, who was born in Bolton and later lived in Salford, recalled the terror of the Exeter going down as he tried to load its guns.
“The ship is getting knocked about a lot with explosions. It’s hard to keep your footing but you can’t go dropping shells,” he said.
“The ship is turning or tipping... then there’s another explosion and the main electricity is off. A louder explosion makes the walls and the floor rattle. Up on the quarter deck we see some of the crew in the water swimming for it.
“We’re being shelled like mad and someone shouts ‘they’ll shoot if you’re in the water,’ but there isn’t much choice. I swim until I find a float. By the time I reach it our ship is under water.”
The POW camp he was held in was just two miles from Nagasaki.
One day in August 1945 he and the other prisoners were mesmerised by a incident in the distance. “A huge flash. It looks like an ammunition dump or electrical works being hit. We all stopped to look at it, even the guards too,” said Geoff. A US Flying Fortress had just dropped an atomic bomb. Geoff was rescued by American troops and reached England six weeks later. The Able Seaman resumed his career in the Navy, becoming a Petty Officer, before being discharged in 1954.
We’re being shelled like mad and someone shouts ‘they’ll shoot if you’re in the water Geoff Stott