Posts Tagged ‘Battle of the Atlantic’

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 […]

This story doesn’t begin during the Second World War; it begins this year, on the first Sunday in May, with a bespectacled Arthur Taylor—now 85—standing on the portside of His Majesty’s Canadian Ship Sackville with one hand resting on the rail and the other clutching a red rose and part of a small bouquet.

The old sailor from Newfoundland did not come aboard the wartime corvette with the flowers. Instead, they were given to him by people he had just met—people who were pleased to meet him and show respect for what he and thousands of other sailors did during […]

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 […]