Oswald Johnson

A Merchant Navy second engineer from Toxteth in Liverpool, who sailed in the convoys of the Battle of the Atlantic. Born in 1917 in Toxteth, the son of a Jamaican father and an English mother. He went to sea at sixteen. Liverpool was the principal port of the Atlantic convoys, and its crews included seamen from the West Indies, West Africa, China and India — in the same ships and the same engine rooms, on markedly worse terms of employment. A second engineer's work was below the waterline, among the boilers and machinery, several decks and ladders from the open air. When a torpedo struck, the engine room flooded first and few got out of it. It was among the most dangerous trades of the war — and not a combatant one in status: merchant seamen were not servicemen, and until 1941 their pay stopped the moment their ship went down. He died in 1942. He was awarded Lloyd's War Medal for Bravery at Sea. THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF HIS DEATH ARE UNVERIFIED. This page previously stated that his ship, SS Empire Dorado, was torpedoed by U-443 on 22 October 1942. Open sources do not support it: Empire Dorado was lost on 22 November 1941 in Convoy SC 53 after a collision with the Greek ship Theomitor, and her whole crew was taken off before she sank; the two ships U-443 sank on 22 October 1942, in Convoy ON 139, were Winnipeg II and Donax. The claim is withdrawn as unproven. The ship in which he died, and how, remain unestablished.