“He didn’t have a great lot to say,” said the ordinary seaman Allan Shaw, who was then nineteen and is now eighty-three, living in Blyth on the North Sea and nearly as nimble as he was back then.Before the Italian submarine’s strike at sunset, Captain Mason hadn’t appeared to be very excited by the day’s activity. In fact, he didn’t have much to say about it. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 12TH.The day passed fairly uneventfully. One or two isolated planes got through the outer screen and kept the gunners in action, and some bombs were dropped. Continuous salvoes of depth charges and emergency turns to port and starboard every few minutes. Several vessels reported submarines, and I believe two were accounted for this afternoon. The signal had been given that a concentration of submarines were expected inside a given area (approximately our position for dusk). We were then 75 miles north of Cape Bon, on the edge of the 100-fathom line. But when Nigeria and Cairo were torpedoed, Captain Mason’s “uneventful”
