Posts Tagged ‘Convoy Escorts’

  The convoy battles of late 1941 were a defining moment for the Royal Canadian Navy, and the outcome was not good. The confusion over Allied priorities, the navy’s push to get the first corvette construction program into service, the urgent need to increase the size of the Newfoundland Escort Force (NEF) and its groups, the lingering presence of U-boats in the northwest Atlantic and the watchful—often sharply critical—gaze of its larger Allies all conspired to create the impression of a bungling, struggling young service. The situation prompted an exasperated Commodore L.W. Murray to lash out at the navy’s establishment in Halifax [...]

The division of Allied labour worked out in August 1941 for operations on the North Atlantic made perfect sense. Fifty destroyers of the United States Atlantic Fleet’s Support Force assumed responsibility for fast convoys between the Grand Banks and Iceland. This freed British forces to concentrate east of Iceland, especially along the embattled United Kingdom-South Atlantic route. In time, the burgeoning escort forces of the Royal Canadian Navy would be shifted eastward, but in the interim—while the United States Navy found its feet—the Newfoundland Escort Force’s largely corvette fleet took charge of the slow convoys between the Grand Banks and Iceland. [...]