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Until the spring of 1941, the Royal Canadian Navy had no clear indication that it would find its calling in the broad reaches of the North Atlantic. The process of defining that role culminated in May, when the British Admiralty called upon the RCN to form the Newfoundland Escort Force (NEF), and concentrate its resources there in the defence of transatlantic convoys.

The establishment of the NEF not only brought together the main elements of the fleet that would fight—and win—the battle against the U-boats, it also brought together several key players who would lead the RCN’s escort and anti-submarine […]

On June 26, 1940, just two days after France formally surrendered to Germany, the first Canadian-built Flower-class corvette, His Majesty’s Ship Trillium, slipped into the St. Lawrence River from the Vickers shipyard in Montreal. Nine more corvettes for the Royal Navy followed from Quebec yards over the next eight weeks. By the end of August 1940, these ships had been joined by seven Royal Canadian Navy corvettes, including the first produced by Ontario and British Columbia builders. But getting hulls in the water proved much easier than getting ships into action. In fact, it was another […]

Few warships epitomize the Atlantic war more than the lowly Flower-class corvette. An auxiliary vessel hastily built to mercantile standards and pushed into service by the score, with poor equipment and green crews, the corvette was hardly a match for Germany’s U-boat fleet. Nor did it inspire the imagination—except perhaps in perverse ways—of those who served in them.

But the humble corvette made Allied victory in the Atlantic possible: they allowed the convoy system to be extended throughout the North Atlantic, and they provided the ‘forces of position’ which freed better equipped anti-submarine vessels to do their job. Perhaps most […]

Contrary to what some historians suggest, the Royal Canadian Navy’s ambitious plans in late 1940 for a navy built around fleet-class destroyers and cruisers were not out of sync with developments in the war. In fact, even as the Canadian naval staff planned to acquire cruisers and modern fleet-class destroyers, the German pocket battleship Scheer attacked Allied convoys just east of the Grand Banks.

In November, in one of the dramatic moments of the war at sea, Scheer sank the armed merchant cruiser Jervis Bay while attacking convoy HX 84. By December, the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper was trolling the […]

By the summer of 1940 the Atlantic littoral of Europe was in the hands of the dominant land power of the age, and its army was poised to invade the British Isles. With access to the range and bases on the North Atlantic, Germany had […]

One of the great shortcomings of the German navy in World War I was that it lacked operating bases on the open Atlantic. The German army fixed that problem in 1940 in a matter of weeks. Bases in Norway became available in the spring, and by […]

The fall of western Europe to the Nazis by the end of June 1940 changed the nature of the war profoundly. Britain now stood alone in Europe against not only Germany and Italy, but also Germany’s notional ally, the Soviet Union.

It was a formidable array.

Europe, from […]

The German landings in Norway in April 1940 were a portend. The Phoney War had ended and with the spring came the long expected German assault on the Low Countries and France. That attack started in earnest on May 10 with German forces pouring […]

The outbreak of a general European war in September 1939 surprised no one, certainly not Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. The previous years had witnessed a series of mounting crises, and King’s acquiescence in the mobilization […]

As in 1914, the main threat to Canada at the start of WW II came from surface raiders, and the best protection against these ships was still the cruisers of the Royal Navy. In the western Atlantic in 1939, however, British forces could now […]