It was February 1, 1944, and he was on board the Norwegian tanker MT Seirstad and while he didn't speak a word of Norwegian at the start, he quickly learnt what "open fire" meant.

During World War II, those in the merchant navy often served alongside forces on troop, cargo, evacuation and hospital ships, but this teenager was helping to transport oil and fuel across the world to fill warbirds and other military vehicles, as well as domestic vehicles back home.

Unlike the Navy, the merchant navy consisted of commercial shipping vessels, but their crews were at just as much risk as the Royal Australian Navy. Merchant navy ships were attacked and sunk not just in distant lands, but also within sight of the Australian coastline as they traversed trade routes.

Mr Kennedy, who is now 94 years old, remembers that first day on the tanker vividly.

"I was a kid, very shy, very nervous," he said. "I was terrified, I went up to the bow and looked down and I thought 'I wonder how deep it is down there?'"

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The only time he'd been "out at sea" before was on the Manly Ferry, and that day he left for the Panama Canal.

"On the ship for the first month or so I was just painting and doing odd jobs, I was a deck boy, you can't get any lower than a deck boy, it's like being a private in the Army," he said.

During his 15 months on board the tanker, he traversed the globe collecting and delivering oil and fuel in: Peru, Chile, Auckland, Aruba, Persian Gulf (now Arabian Gulf), Persia (now Iraq), South Africa, Bahrain, USA, New Guinea, Manila, The Philippines and China.

At 3am one day in Aruba he was woken to the tanker's alarm bells and the sky being "bright as the day".

"There was a parachute coming down with a big light on it," he said. "I was asleep on the deck, sleeping on some old life jackets, and I had to jump up and run like hell, it was a long way to get to my gun, it was a 20mm Oerlikan, they called them anti-aircraft cannons.

"I only fired because the naval officer was calling out in Norwegian to open fire. I pushed 50 rounds up into him and he flew away, I was always proud of the fact that I didn't kill anyone."

Mr Kennedy said these parachute flares were used at night to check out vessels passing by to determine if they were friend of foe.

On another night, as the ship made its way from north of New Zealand to Brisbane, it suddenly began to zig zag.

A fellow crewman later told him a torpedo had missed the ship by about 20 feet (six metres). Following a call for help from the captain, the Royal New Zealand Air Force sent in a Hudson bomber to patrol overhead.

"That as a very, very tense night, it was obvious that the submarine had stayed down below because of the aircraft and he couldn't find us in the dark so we got to Brisbane," he said.

"The hull was about half an inch thick and if a torpedo hit it would make a hole about 10-12 feet high. When I hear about people having post traumatic stress disorder I think, 'you should have been on a tanker in the Atlantic, that was stress'."

Mr Kennedy served on board the MT Seirstad for 15 months, and later on the American Army cargo ship USAT Point San Pedro before returning home in July 1946. He now lives in Forestville, in Sydney's north.