Dad In The Navy - The Memoirs Of John Francis Connor

At this point I was called into the ships office and told my time was up as I had spent nearly two years abroad and was now entitled to go back to England, the officer told me there was no pressure on me to go home and I could sign on for another trip if I wanted to,  anyway I could think about it for a couple of days. I did think seriously about going back home as I had lost all homesickness ages ago. I knew the Belfast was to stay out east at least another year and there were plenty of places I would still love to see. However news from home wasn't so good, my mother had written to me to say brother Tom had contracted TB and was very ill (in 1946 TB was still the biggest scourge of the country). I felt I had a duty to go home and do anything I could for my family. Also my brother Joe had married a nice girl and I had missed their wedding. I wanted to meet Joe and Daisy as Joe and I hadn't seen much of each other since he joined up in 1942. Anyway, after thinking it over I wen

We boarded the landing craft at about 11pm to sail up the coast to Seramban, there were about two dozen of us, we were given a food parcel each containing sandwiches and a couple of sachets of instant tea. All the landing craft provided was hot water for the tea which turned out to be undrinkable, but the sandwiches were OK. After a sleepless humid night we arrived in Seremban where we were met by a bus to take us to Port Dickson. Port Dickson itself seemed to have been a quiet resort before the war with a small village and a country hotel, a nice beach and small islands offshore which were reachable by canoe. It had been converted to a rest centre for British troops and most of the lads with me had like myself been away from home for two years and therefore qualified for this leave. It was really a very relaxing time, most of our time we spent canoeing and rowing round the small uninhabited islands and at night we went into the hotel which was renamed the White Horse Cabaret, they pos

As we entered Singapore harbour the first thing I noticed was a couple of Japanese cruisers at anchor. These had been captured at the end of the war and we anchored quite nearby as we couldn't go alongside till we had de-ammunitioned the ship. A boat party went across to one of the cruisers and I was among them. We had a good look around and saw how the Jap sailors had lived.  Although the ship was modern in armament and design - they were as good as ours but the accommodation was really primitive. The crew slept on the deck in large mess-decks and they had communal baths in canvass troughs. There seemed to be very little comforts for the ships crew and perhaps the biggest shock were the toilets which consisted of canvassed off areas of the after deck where sailors squatted on planks overhanging the stern, not very comfortable I imagine at sea. After we had disposed of our ammunition and taken on lighter peace-time ammunition we went alongside the quay and waited our turn to go ins

I wasn't really sorry to leave Japan, it was a sad place to be at that time, you couldn't enjoy yourself when you knew people had suffered so much. We sailed out of Kobe after a couple of days and headed south for Hong Kong. I was looking forward to visiting Hong Kong and when we arrived the sheer bustle of the place excited you. The Chinese had adapted quickly after the war and even as the Belfast pulled into the harbour, our burn-boats tagged on alongside flying their homemade flags with HMS Belfast painted on them, about half a dozen of these boats had assigned themselves to the Belfast and all the time we were in Hong Kong they stayed tied up alongside us selling the crew everything under the sun, painting the ship and even setting up a laundry on the deck. I went ashore the following day at noon on a 24 hour pass. We had rick-shaw rides round the town and visited the monument on the top of a hill which the Japs had forced the British POWs to build in honour of the Jap conq

It was now April 1946 and Springtime in Japan is similar to England's spring with flowering cherries and other trees visible on the islands as we sailed through to the inland sea. We were however heading for a much grimmer sight - Nagasaki. We tied up the Belfast alongside the jetty at Kobe, the inland sea port and when we went ashore that same evening, buses were laid on to take us to Nagasaki which was nearby. The devastation was terrible, although not much worse than Yokohama, at first sight there was something more deep and total about this devastation that was hard to describe. For instance, the thing that struck me was that only a very few things were still standing and these were usually brick walls, most things seemed to have been flattened by huge winds. A pile of bottles and glass which must have once been a tip was pointed out to us. The bottles had melted and were twisted round each other in grotesque shapes , the heat must have been terrific to fuse glass together that