My first recollection of the Second World War was that I was in the Home Guard in Pontardawe and we had the bombing of Swansea. They dropped bombs in Pontardawe and I always remember there were six of us in (Hillside) Terrace and somebody shouted they were dropping incendiary bombs on the mountain and one of them shouted, 'I can hear the bomber,' he said, 'I can hear the bomb coming,' and he said, 'Dive.' And we all dived in front of us, we were 16 year olds then and one of them said, there were six of us in the Home Guard at the time and said, 'We're going to fight to the death'. That was his comment at that particular time.

I served two years in the Home Guard and I was called up. I could have joined the Royal Navy or Royal Air Force. At the time the air gunners were getting shot down pretty frequently so I decided to go in as a stoker in the Royal Navy. I did my training at HMS (Duke) and then I joined the battleship HMS Resolution and we sailed from Southampton to Scotland and done some training there and then we went to the Plymouth.

I was drafted to Scotland again to pick up a ship called HMS Newfoundland. She'd had a refit, she'd recently come back from Boston after being torpedoed off the coast of Italy. She'd had a refit in Boston, when she returned to the UK where we picked her up there in Greenock on the Clyde.

We left the Clyde for the Far East and we were all under a misapprehension because we were issued with Russian convoy clothes for the Arctic, so when we got to the Med, the captain made an announcement to say that there had been a change of plan, that we were going to the Far East, to the Japanese War. So we had a tropical kit and we had to hand the issue of the Russian clothes into the quartermaster on board ship.

Well, we sailed through the Middle East to Alex, then onto Hong Kong, Sydney and then we had to have a refitting of guns in New Zealand. After the guns were fitted, we sailed from Auckland to the Pacific Ocean where we landed Australian troops on New Guinea Island and we went from there then and joined the Task Force of the 4th Squadron and we were linked up with the American 7th Fleet and we spent 56 days, I know that, was the longest period the ship had been at sea, 56 days we spent in the Pacific Ocean. We were refuelled periodically with oil tankers.

We then attacked the Japanese mainland. We bombarded the coastline there and the ship was awarded battle honours and the atomic bomb had been dropped so we steamed in, into Tokyo Bay and Yokohama. We landed at Yokohama.

We took over the dockyard there and USS Missouri, she was in Tokyo Bay, she passed alongside us going into Tokyo Bay where the Japanese surrender forms were signed by the respective leaders. I was on the ship for two years and we went back to Sydney where the ship was decommissioned.

Some of my shipmates came back on other aircraft carriers etc., but I stayed on board ship. The way I looked at it, I went out to do a commission, I went out on the Newfoundland and I wanted to come back on the Newfoundland. My recollection of the Navy was, there were hard days, but there was the comradeship of the ship and my shipmates.