Posts Tagged ‘War at Sea’

Naval historians tend to focus on action at sea, and in the early period of the Second World War they typically find much that is wrong with Canada’s burgeoning wartime navy. There is ample evidence—as we have seen in this series—that the fleet was unprepared for war, and that the operations of Newfoundland Escort Force left a legacy of bungling ineptitude that haunted the Canadian navy for generations.

The fall of 1941 was perhaps the toughest period of the war for the Royal Canadian Navy. It is hard to think of a time when the gap between the capability of the fleet and the demands placed on it was so large. Indeed, the RCN would have been stretched to the limit to meet its new obligation to escort slow convoys between Newfoundland and Iceland even if the weather and the enemy had co-operated. Winter weather closed in on the northern convoy routes in the fall. With it came short days of thin, watery sunlight followed by long, bitterly [...]

The Royal Canadian Navy escorts that arrived in Newfoundland in May and June 1941 had more exposure to training programs than perhaps any other escorts in the early years of the war. For a period of nine weeks during that spring, Lieutenant-Commander “Chummy” Prentice drove the officers and men of the corvettes Agassiz, Alberni, Chambly, Cobalt, Collingwood, Orillia and Westaskiwin relent­-lessly—belying the deliberate irony of Prentice’s nickname. At the same time, the first ‘Canadian’ corvettes to arrive in the United Kingdom and most of the RCN’s new Town-class destroyers went through the Royal Navy’s workup system at Tobermory, Ont., under Commodore [...]

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 campaign [...]

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 the [...]

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 important [...]