The words of the title are the opening words of Reginald Cogswell's book that describes 43 months of his life aboard HMS EXETER. A period that included peacetime visits to the ports of South America, assisting earthquake victims in Chile, suppressing riots in Trinidad; then came the transition to war and his part in the Battle of the River Plate.
Below are extracts from Ch 15 - when the action against the German Panzershiffe Graf Spee starts:
The alarm for Action Stations tore me out of that little sleep. The harsh sound of it drove me up and out to run for’ard and on my way to meet a bugler sounding off as he ran the other way. The rasp of Action Stations on a bugle would hasten anything that could hear and move. It hastened me against a stream of men who were mostly running the other way. There was a clumping-to of armoured doors and the clank of dogs being set to hold them tight. Men were going down through hatch manholes only big enough f
75 years ago today - HMS EXETER was lost in the Battle of the Sunda Strait fighting against an overwhelming Japanese force.
HMS EXETER, and her ship’s company, were battle scarred veterans when she deployed to the Far East in 1941. She had limped back to Devonport in January 1940 after carrying out temporary repairs in the Falkland Islands following the Battle of the River Plate and the sinking of the Graf Spee.
The work to refit her ready for sea took just over 12 months and included the replacement of her single 4 inch AA guns with twin mountings: a new catapult and tripod masts. Her new captain, Captain W N T Beckett (known as ‘Joe’ Beckett after a famous boxer of the time) was an experienced officer with a distinguished career but sadly died, of complications arising from wounds sustained when commanding Coastal Motor Boats on the Dwina River in Russia in 1919. His death occurred on the day that EXETER was to re-commission. He was replaced by Ca
