A BRIDGEND-BORN 100-year-old Marine who is one of only two remaining survivors of the sinking of HMS Charybdis has shared his tales from his remarkable time with the Royal Marines during World War Two.
John Eskdale, who grew up in Laleston, shared the memories as the Royal British Legion was preparing to mark the 80th anniversary of VJ Day.
The former Corporal spoke of the moment the ship he was on aged 18, HMS Charybdis, was torpedoed and the chaos that ensued. “We looked up to the bridge to get some orders, but the bridge wasn’t there” he said. “It had gone. We’d been split in two and down we went. Us on the stern went down in seven minutes.
“I was in the water for five hours before I got hold of a Carley float (life raft). There were three people in there with me, and we saw one of the destroyers starting to look for us. We were waving and shouting, but then it turned away from us. It was heartbreaking!”
John remembers the feeling when the destroyer did another sweep, and this time they were able to grab on to the netting to try to pull themselves aboard. He said: “They couldn’t stop in case there were submarines around. You had to grab the netting and climb up, but I was absolutely exhausted. Two sailors came down to pull me up. I was covered in oil and it took months to get it all out of my system.”
John was one of the just over 100 people who survived the sinking of HMS Charybdis, and every year he’s travelled to Guernsey to attend the memorial service to the 400-plus men who lost their lives at sea that day, and is planning to attend the next service there in September, shortly after he’s turned 101.
Following John’s recovery from the sinking, he was assigned to 30 Assault Unit Commando, headed up by future James Bond author Ian Fleming. Warned that it was likely to be “hazardous service”, John replied “well it can’t get any worse can it?” and undertook his driving and parachute training.
30 Assault Unit (30AU) was a Naval intelligence unit, and the entire unit was in a sealed-off military area around the points off the South Coast earmarked for the D-Day embarkation points. John was sent off to get parts for an unserviceable vehicle, and after driving all night he fell asleep at the wheel and hit a telegraph pole.
John remembers: “This pole went across the telephone wires and rang all the telephones in the village! By the time I got back to the depot everyone had gone, and that’s how I missed D-Day.”
John was shortly sent out to the war in the Far East and was in Australia when the atomic bombs were dropped. John said: “We were just glad the war was over. We were preparing to move up into Japan. Those bombs saved our lives. Without them, it would’ve been a bloodbath.”
Just a few months after the bombs were dropped, John was in Japan escorting Naval photographers who were capturing the aftermath in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
“There was absolutely nothing there” John said. “It was all virtually flat, burnt out, and everybody was wearing face masks. Nagasaki was gone, razed to the ground.”
John didn’t make it back home to the UK until he was invalided out of the Marines in 1947 but has stayed connected to military life working with the HMS Charybdis Association and becoming a long-time member of his local Royal British Legion branch.
Now, as the country remembers those who fought on after VJ Day, John plans to attend a special service at the National Memorial Arboretum on 15th August, hosted by the Royal British Legion to mark the 80th anniversary of VJ Day.
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