“Whilst on board the Lady Madeleine the second engineer and I had our wounds dressed. I learned later that the second engineer had 48 shrapnel wounds, also a piece of steel wire 2½ inches long embedded in his body.”
And there is a sentence on which I don’t rely, and the last sentence:
“I had 14 shrapnel wounds.”
My Lord, and then the last two paragraphs of the affidavit:
“This is my fourth wartime experience, having served in the whalers Sylvester (mined) and New Seville (torpedoed), and the trawler Ocean Tide, which ran ashore.
“As a result of this attack by U-boat, the casualties were six killed . . . two missing . . . two injured. . . .”
My Lord, the next document, D-647, I put in as Exhibit GB-204. My Lord, this is an extract from a statement given by the second officer of the ship Antonico, torpedoed, set afire, and sunk, on the 28th of September 1942, on the coast of French Guiana. The Tribunal will observe that the date of the incident is some 11 days after the issue of the order. My Lord, I would read from the words “that the witness saw the dead,” slightly more than halfway down on the first page. An account has been given of the attack on the ship, which by then was on fire:
“. . . that the witness saw the dead on the deck of the Antonico as he and his crew tried to swing out their lifeboat; that the attack was fulminant, lasting almost 20 minutes; and that the witness already in the lifeboat tried to get away from the side of the Antonico in order to avoid being dragged down by the same Antonico and also because she was the aggressor’s target; that the night was dark, and it was thus difficult to see the submarine, but that the fire aboard the Antonico lit up the locality in which she was submerging, facilitating the enemy to see the two lifeboats trying to get away; that the enemy ruthlessly machine-gunned the defenseless sailors in Number 2 lifeboat, in which the witness found himself, and killed the Second Pilot Arnaldo de Andrade de Lima, and wounded three of the crew; that the witness gave orders to his company to throw themselves overboard to save themselves from the bullets: in so doing, they were protected and out of sight behind the lifeboat, which was already filled with water; even so the lifeboat continued to be attacked. At that time the witness and his companions were about 20 meters in distance from the submarine. . . .”
My Lord, I haven’t got the U-boat’s log in that case, but you may think that, in view of the order with regard to entries in logs, namely that anything compromising should not be put in, it would be no more helpful than in the case of the previous incident.