When The Sea Shall Give Up Her Dead
WE therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body, (when the Sea shall give up her dead,) and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who at his coming shall change our vile body, that it may be like his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.
The Book of Common Prayer, Church of England
The Royal Navy floated a wreath over the wreck of HMS Hunter today. The destroyer was sunk with 110 members of its crew in 1940 off the Norwegian port of Narvik. The wreck was discovered by a Norwegian minesweeper a few days ago. The BBC talked with one of the 35 men who survived the sinking.
On the morning of 10 April 1940, 110 people on board HMS Hunter died when the Royal Navy ship was sunk by German forces during World War II's first Battle of Narvik, in Norway.
John Hague, now 87, but then a 19-year-old able seaman, was one of just 35 survivors.
"It was early morning, around four-thirty or five o'clock and I was down, below deck, in the ammunition room feeding munitions from the shell room to the gun room," he said.
He and the other men on duty felt "a jolt" and realised HMS Hunter had been hit, but they did not know the extent of that damage.
He recalled there was no evacuation siren, no orders to abandon ship.
Climbing the steps to the outside world, the men were struck by the chilling winds of the blizzard and an eerie absence of people.
I tried not to think about the cold and I tried to keep moving to keep warm"The first we knew it was bad was when we started to tilt, we went up to the deck and saw that there was no-one around - those that could leave had gone," said Mr Hague.
The Norwegians have named HMS Hunter as a war memorial. Rest in peace.
By Lars Walker, Saturday, 8 March , 2008 @ 9:46 pm
Amen.