Raleigh honours victims of the Blitz

TODAY’S trainee sailors paid tribute to their forebears as the 70th anniversary of HMS Raleigh’s darkest hour was commemorated.

Forty-four sailors and 21 Royal Engineers were killed when a German bomb destroyed their air raid shelter at the Torpoint base on April 28 1941 – during the height of the Blitz on Plymouth.

All 65 fallen are buried at Horson Cemetery in Torpoint, where their graves are maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and are honoured by Raleigh personnel each Remembrance Sunday with a service at the graveyard.

But their sacrifice is also commemorated in the establishment itself with a memorial plaque.

And so on the April 28 2011, trainees and Raleigh staff, led by CO Capt Steve Murdoch, joined chaplain the Rev David Wylie around the monument for a commemorative service.

The fatal raid came at the end of more than a month’s pounding of the Plymouth area by the Luftwaffe. That night 123 aircraft attacked the city, raining 123 tonnes of explosive on the unfortunate people below.

Some 160 homes in Torpoint were damaged, and gas and water mains wrecked, and several residents were injured.

The only fatalities that night, however, were the personnel at Raleigh – at the time a training establishment for Ordinary Seamen. The youngest victim of the raid was a 16-year-old trainee, the oldest a 54-year-old chief petty officer.