THE Review's stories earlier this year about the sinking of British battleships Glorious, Acasta and Ardent in June, 1940, were sent to a Lydney survivor now living in Australia.
Ronald Dowle, whose parents lived at Lower Forge Road, was a seaman on the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious when the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisnau attacked.
He well remembers CPO Reginald Morgan, mentioned in one of the Review stories, who was one of the 1,515 who lost their lives in the action.
He said although it was reported only five men survived, in fact 36 were plucked from rafts after spending three days in icy seas and were finally landed in the Faroes.
"It is extremely doubtful whether 25 per cent of the crew were able to take to the water," he writes.
"The carnage was horrific, too terrible to describe. Also, anyone with a minor wound would not have withstood more than a few minutes in the bitterly cold water.
"After the longest and hardest swim of my life I was half dragged aboard a very overladen raft. Our number then was 47. Men had already died and were still dying the moment I joined them on the raft, and it was to continue this way until there were only seven of us left."
He suffered permanent disablement and the "miserly" nine shillings a week allowance he received for this finally drove him and his wife to emigrate to Australia in 1955, "something we have never regretted".
"I knew CPO Morgan quite well by sight," he recalls. "We could hardly miss meeting each other confined as we were in a ship for two and a half years."
He said June 8 was "stamped indelibly on my heart" when he thought of his mates, some of whom had been together since January 1936 on the training ship.
"To think it was something that should never have happened – a total waste of life!"