Editor’s Note: This series was originally published by Alex Funk on the TimeGhostArmy forums (original URL – https://community.timeghost.tv/t/canada-and-the-battle-of-the-atlantic-part-4/1447/3).

Sources:

• Far Distant Ships, Joseph Schull, ISBN 10 0773721606 (An official operational account published in 1950, somewhat sensationalist)
  [Schull’s book was published in part because the funding for the official history team had been cut and they did not feel that the RCN’s contribution to the Battle of the Atlantic should have no official recognition. It is very much an artifact of its era, and needs to be read that way. A more balanced (and weighty) history didn’t appear until the publication of No Higher Purpose and A Blue Water Navy in 2002, parts 1 and 2 of the Official Operational History of the RCN in WW2, covering 1939-1943 and 1943-1945, respectively.]
• North Atlantic Run: the Royal Canadian Navy and the battle for the convoys, Marc Milner, ISBN 10 0802025447 (Written in an attempt to give a more strategic view of Canada’s contribution than Schull’s work, published 1985)
• Reader’s Digest: The Canadians At War: Volumes 1 & 2 ISBN 10 0888501617 (A compilation of articles ranging from personal stories to overviews of Canadian involvement in a particular campaign. Contains excerpts from a number of more obscure Canadian books written after the war, published 1969)
• All photos used exist in the Public Domain and are from the National Archives of Canada, unless otherwise noted in the caption.

I have inserted occasional comments in [square brackets] and links to other sources that do not appear in the original posts. A few minor edits have also been made for clarity.

Earlier parts of this series:

Part 1 — Canada’s navy before WW2

Part 2 — The Admiralty takes control

Part 3 — The professionals and the amateurs

Part 4 — 1940: The fall of France, the battle begins, and the RCN dreams of expansion

Part 5 — The RCN’s desperate need for warships

Part 6 — New ships, new challenges

Part 7 — The end of 1940, rise of the U-boat threat, the corvette waddles into the war, and expansion headaches at every turn

Part 8 — Expansion problems: not enough men for not enough ships

Part 9 — Early-to-mid 1941, The Rocky Isle in the Ocean

Part 10 — The Newfoundland Escort Force and the Canadian corvettes

Returning to the corvettes themselves for a moment, while I have already spoken of the diversity of the modifications that they would receive [in Part 7], it is important to discuss the modifications that Canadians gave to their own corvettes in comparison to those made to Royal Navy ships. The RN used its corvettes for ocean escort and had begun to implement some of the modification to individual ships of the class to make the vessels more suitable for work on the open sea. The lengthened forecastle increased available crew space (required as ships’ crews were augmented with extra ratings for the newer equipment being fitted) and helped to make the ships’ interior spaces significantly drier. The bows were also strengthened to take the pounding of the heavy seas typically encountered in the North Atlantic. The first Canadian-built corvettes could have been delayed in order to incorporate these changes while still in the builders’ hands, but the shortage of ships meant that they went ahead largely as originally planned. The major Canadian alteration of the original design reflected the corvettes’ intended coastal operational role: minesweeping gear. The alterations to the original design, involving modification of the quarter-deck, cutting back the engine-room casing to accommodate a steam winch, broadening the stern to fit both the minesweeping wires and the depth charge rails, and the extra storage for the minesweeping gear when not in use, had already delayed the delivery of the ships to the navy.

[Editor’s Note: Minesweeping, while not the primary intended role for the Flower-class corvettes (especially without gyrocompasses!), was a viable alternate task. Here’s a post-war diagram of how WW2 minesweeping was done (from History on the Net‘s Minesweepers of WW2 page)]:

[Minesweeper-equipped ships would] “sweep” anchored mines by cutting their mooring ropes or chains, permitting the mines to float to the surface where they could be destroyed by gunfire.

Magnetically activated “influence” mines were defeated with a strong electrical current passed through a loop of cable, neutralizing the detonator. Acoustic mines, which responded to the noise of a ship’s engines and propellers, were prematurely detonated by underwater noisemakers operating on suitable harmonic frequencies.

RCN personnel preparing to launch a minesweeping float from HMCS Alberni off the coast of British Columbia, March 1941.
Canada. Dept. of National Defence / Library and Archives Canada / PA-179942

Marc Milner, North Atlantic Run:

All of this delayed completion and may have hardened the Staff to any further delays occasioned by major alterations. Moreover, that the Naval Staff was not unduly concerned about the A/S performance of the corvettes is evidenced by the fact that the addition of a full minesweeping kit “had an adverse effect on the operations of the A/S gear”. The latter, as the Staff went on to observe, was carried forward and was affected by the corvette’s tendency to trim by the stern when fitted for minesweeping. In practice, however, the original corvette design, when fully stored and armed, tended to trim by the bows, which also affected A/S efficiency. The addition of extra weight in the stern may unwittingly have compensated for the design fault.

More important in terms of sea-keeping and habitability in deep-sea operations was the extension of the foc’sle. News of this major alteration reached NSHQ while most of the vessels of the first program were still in the builders’ hands. Although the RCN would make allowances for more crewmen, better refrigeration, a more powerful wireless set, and more depth charges — all indications that corvettes were expected to go farther afield and stay longer — the navy did not act on this fundamental alteration in basic structure of its first sixty corvettes. However, the Staff did recognize the value of the design improvements. … In the meantime, the RCN plodded along with escorts which, as late as the end of 1940, the navy still considered inshore auxiliaries. In any event, corvettes were still tied closely to the defended-port system under the terms of Plan Black. It is also arguable that the Staff’s failure to extend the foc’sles of corvettes when it had the chance stemmed from the navy’s need of ships to permit expansion really to begin, or from the increasing gravity of the war at sea. Whatever the case, it was a lost opportunity that would come to haunt the navy.

The forecastle extension (or lack thereof) would come to be the norm for the RCN and NSHQ: certain trivial modifications seemingly at random, major ones delayed exponentially. The after gun platform (for the Pom-Pom) was moved further to the rear of the ship so that it was not in danger of blowing away the mainmast, and would remain further to the rear long after the secondary mast was discarded. Shortage of primary AA armament saw a number of .5-inch Colt and Browning machine guns acquired from the U.S. and fitted in twin mounts (two in the aft gun position and one twin-mount on either side of the bridge). Inability to acquire sufficient Colt or Browning machine guns meant the return of the Lewis guns.

Other differences between RN and RCN corvettes were much less noticeable, but had a more important effect on the performance of the ships as deep-sea escorts. There was, for example, no provision in Canadian plans for a breakwater on the foc’sle of original corvettes. Without it, water shipped forward was able to run aft and pour into the open welldeck — the crew’s main thoroughfare. The British soon corrected this, but the RCN moved with incredible slowness on this simple matter, and as a result Canadian corvettes were unnecessarily wet. Canadian corvettes were also completed without wooden planking or some form of synthetic deck covering to prevent slipping in the waist of the ship, where the depth-charge throwers were fitted. Since this area was also constantly wet, the difficulties of loading charges can be imagined.

The most telling shortcoming of Canadian corvettes, and the one that was to cause the most difficulty in the struggle for efficiency, was the lack of gyro-compasses. The latter were at a premium in Canada, so the Naval Staff decided to fit them to the Bangor minesweepers, whose need for accurate navigation was paramount. The first Canadian-built corvettes (including those built to Admiralty accounts) were equipped with a single magnetic compass and the most basic of ASDIC, the type 123A. Even by 1939 standards the 123A was obsolete and in the RN was considered only suited to trawlers and lesser vessels. The 123A’s standard compass, graduated in “points” and not in degrees, made it equally hard for captains to co-ordinate operations between two ships or to undertake accurate submarine hunts and depth-charge attacks. The single binnacle and its attendant trace recorder were mounted in a small hut, above the wheelhouse. During an action it was impossible for a captain to be both in the ASDIC hut and outside on the bridge wings, the only place from which he could obtain an overall perspective on the situation. Nor was the needle of the standard compass properly stabilized, a deficiency particularly noteworthy in such lively ships as corvettes. … As a final point, it should be noted that compasses were also susceptible to malfunction from the shock of firing the main armament, exploding depth charges, or simply from the pounding of the ship at sea. The tendency of Canadians to launch inaccurate depth charge attacks proved a source of continuous criticism from British officers.

Officers on the bridge of Canadian Flower class corvette HMCS Trillium, circa 1940-42.
Image from the Canadian Navy Heritage website, Image Negative Number JT-159, via Wikimedia Commons.

Partly because of a disparity of resources, partly because there was still a lot of ambiguity concerning the role that the corvettes (and the RCN) would play in the war in general, the RN corvettes outclassed RCN corvettes when it came to performance at sea. Misapplication of Staff energies also played a role.

Instead of laying down a basic policy for the engineer-in-chief to follow, the Staff haggled over every conceivable alteration to their corvettes. They insisted, for example, that inclining tests be done before .5-inch machine guns were authorized for the bridge wings, even though they knew full well that this practice had already been adopted for comparable British ships. In the final analysis it would have been much better had the RCN continued its initial practice of calling its own corvettes “Town class”, after its policy of naming them for small Canadian communities. Instead the practice was abandoned in deference to the Admiralty’s choice of “Town class” for the ex-American destroyers, and the RCN applied the British class name of “Flower” to its corvettes. Had the RCN stuck to its distinctive class name, the tremendous differences which were to prove so very important by 1942-43, might have been as apparent as they were real.

Deck awash on HMCS Trillium, circa 1943
National Archives of Canada PA-037474, via HMCS Trillium page of the For Posterity’s Sake website – http://www.forposterityssake.ca/Navy/HMCS_TRILLIUM_K172.htm

NSHQ’s notion that the RCN was to provide convoy escorts for the Newfoundland focal area suggests that the Naval Staff had not made the mental leap from the concept of locally based “strike forces” to the idea of a regional escort force. In this they were not alone. The distinction between two types of operation — one searching for submarines where shipping was plentiful, the other actually protecting the ships towards wich the submarines were drawn — was never very clear in the early days. NEF was, none the less, admirably suited to RCN capabilities. It also met two other vitally important criteria: it supported the government’s geopolitical aspirations and was at the same time fundamental to the war effort.

The war was entering what Churchill called “one of the great climacterics”. On June 22nd, Hitler would invade Russia and soon had her reeling. A Soviet collapse would give Hitler access to enormous resources. Even if Russia could fight them to a stalemate, there could be no Allied victory without an attack supplied by sea and mounted from the British Isles. Whether for the ultimate defence against a stronger Germany or for our own seaborne assault, Allied resources had to be turned into munitions of war and stockpiled in the UK. The resources were more than sufficient, but between the promise of the future and the need of the present lay a perilous gap of space and time that could only be bridged by ships, all the ships now available and hundreds more. Many convoys arrived at British ports each week and the tonnage unloaded was enormous. Yet a great percentage of it was what the island required simply to exist. Only the margin above that daily necessity represented the power to wage war. Munitions, aircraft, guns, tanks, and above all, aviation gasoline and fuel oil. If oil stocks fell below the point of safety, the operation of ships and planes would have to be curtailed. If U-boat attacks could not be met effectively, more ships would be lost, creating further shortages which would again reduce operations. The increasing demands of the war had to be met by a corresponding increase in the flow of cargo.

The U-boats imposed a steady drain: three merchant ships were going down for every one replaced. Eight submarines were coming into operation for every one sunk. U-boats swarmed in the Mediterranean. They were off Gibraltar, off the Cape Verde Islands at the bulge of Africa, off Cape Town far to the south. By the virtue of St John’s position alone, it bridged nearly a quarter of the gap between the Canadian seaboard and Iceland. June 1941 would also see Canada’s Commodore Murray return from Britain to become Commodore Commanding Newfoundland Escort Force. From Liverpool, the RN’s Commander-in-Chief Western Approaches, Admiral Sir Percy Noble, directed the whole Atlantic battle, but Commodore Murray exercised autonomy within his own war zone. The Newfoundland Escort Force was made up of six Canadian destroyers and seventeen corvettes, plus seven destroyers, three sloops and five corvettes of the RN. Soon more ships, French, Norwegian, Polish, Belgian and Dutch, were allotted to Commodore Murray. His authority extended to all local escorts operating from St. John’s and to convoys and their escorts while in Newfoundland waters.

SS Rose Castle sinking and decks awash, 2 November, 1942. The original description for this item gives the date October 1942 as the date of the sinking, but according to eyewitness and survivor Gordon Hardy, the Rose Castle sank at 3:30 AM, November 2, 1942. On Oct 20, 1942, the Rose Castle was hit by a dud torpedo but was not damaged.
Library and Archives Canada/PA-192788

Editor’s Note: This series was originally published by Alex Funk on the TimeGhostArmy forums (original URL – https://community.timeghost.tv/t/canada-and-the-battle-of-the-atlantic-part-4/1447/3).

Sources:

• Far Distant Ships, Joseph Schull, ISBN 10 0773721606 (An official operational account published in 1950, somewhat sensationalist)
  [Schull’s book was published in part because the funding for the official history team had been cut and they did not feel that the RCN’s contribution to the Battle of the Atlantic should have no official recognition. It is very much an artifact of its era, and needs to be read that way. A more balanced (and weighty) history didn’t appear until the publication of No Higher Purpose and A Blue Water Navy in 2002, parts 1 and 2 of the Official Operational History of the RCN in WW2, covering 1939-1943 and 1943-1945, respectively.]
• North Atlantic Run: the Royal Canadian Navy and the battle for the convoys, Marc Milner, ISBN 10 0802025447 (Written in an attempt to give a more strategic view of Canada’s contribution than Schull’s work, published 1985)
• Reader’s Digest: The Canadians At War: Volumes 1 & 2 ISBN 10 0888501617 (A compilation of articles ranging from personal stories to overviews of Canadian involvement in a particular campaign. Contains excerpts from a number of more obscure Canadian books written after the war, published 1969)
• All photos used exist in the Public Domain and are from the National Archives of Canada, unless otherwise noted in the caption.

I have inserted occasional comments in [square brackets] and links to other sources that do not appear in the original posts. A few minor edits have also been made for clarity.

Earlier parts of this series:

Part 1 — Canada’s navy before WW2

Part 2 — The Admiralty takes control

Part 3 — The professionals and the amateurs

Part 4 — 1940: The fall of France, the battle begins, and the RCN dreams of expansion

Part 5 — The RCN’s desperate need for warships

Part 6 — New ships, new challenges

Part 7 — The end of 1940, rise of the U-boat threat, the corvette waddles into the war, and expansion headaches at every turn

Part 8 — Expansion problems: not enough men for not enough ships

Part 9 — Early-to-mid 1941, the Rocky Isle in the Ocean

Marc Milner continues the story in North Atlantic Run:

The problem of providing end-to-end A/S escort in the North Atlantic was discussed by British and Canadian authorities during the winter. These talks were the first sure indication that RCN corvettes were likely to be used as ocean escorts (what the navy thought corvettes earmarked for the Eastern Atlantic were initially expected to do remains uncertain). In any event, the Anglo-Canadian discussions identified three factors crucial to the establishment of end-to-end A/S escort: the escorts must be available; they must have reached a reasonable state of individual and escort-group training, and the necessary bases must be available. In May 1941 none of these factors obtained in the Western Atlantic. An insufficient number of new corvettes were in commission, and most of these only recently. The development of facilities was now a top priority, but support facilities outside of Halifax were virtually non-existent, and the standard of training was to prove inadequate, to say the least.

The natural place from which to stage escort operations in the Northwest Atlantic was Newfoundland.

To briefly discuss Newfoundland’s role so far, when Canada declared war on September 10th, Newfoundland had already been at war for seven days. As a British dominion [under direct rule from London since 1934] ten years before joining Confederation, the mainland declaration of war received modest space on page four of the St. John’s Evening Telegram. They had participated in the first “hostile” act in North America: a German merchant vessel had been seized and thirty prisoners taken. The local YMCA was converted into a prison. Rationing and dim-outs took effect instantly. Private radio stations were silenced, mail and cables censored, aliens registered and controlled. Insurance premiums on waterfront property had gone up in less than a week from $1.00 to $5.00 for each $1000 of coverage.

View of the entrance to St.John’s harbour and port facilities, Newfoundland, taken from Signal Hill, 1942. A minesweeper is leaving port.
Canada. Department of National Defence / Library and Archives Canada / ecopy

Milner continues:

Although not yet part of the Dominion of Canada, the island was integral to Canadian defence, and its protection was assumed, in consultation with the British, as a Dominion responsibility in 1939. By early 1941, however, the Canadian armed forces had made only a modest contribution to Newfoundland’s security, though more was planned under the terms of Plan Black. During 1940 the RCN had surveyed the coast for possible base sites and fleet anchorages and ordered a further ten corvettes for local defence. The navy had also seconded personnel to the Naval Officer in Charge, St John’s, Captain C.M.R. Schwerdt, RN, the only naval establishment on the island. Until the latter was turned over to the RCN in early May 1941, the Canadian navy had no permanent presence in Newfoundland. For a number of reasons, not all of them enemy inspired, this low level of activity was destined to change. The absorption of Schwerdt’s command into the RCN came as part of the integration of Newfoundland into the Canadian east-coast command system, and it mirrored similar army and air force arrangements. But Canada was also engaged in an embryonic war of influence with the U.S. over the old colony. The establishment of American bases on the island, as a result of the destroyers-for-bases deal with the British, was attended by an agreement granting the U.S. rights to defend its new bases by operations in adjacent territory. The agreement was concluded despite strong protests from Canada and in spite of the prior Canadian acceptance of responsibility for Newfoundland’s defence.

The anxiety Canada felt over her position in Newfoundland was exacerbated by joint Anglo-American planning of a combined strategy for the defeat of Germany should the U.S. enter the war. For several weeks in early 1941 senior American and British staffs met in Washington to discuss a co-ordinated Commonwealth and U.S. plan. Neither Canada nor any of the other Dominions was accorded official representation, although British delegates kept their Commonwealth allies informed of proceedings. The result of these meetings was an agreement, American-British Conference 1 (ABC 1), whereby the world was divided into two basic strategic zones. The Americans were to assume responsibility for most of the Pacific and for the Western Atlantic, with the exception of waters and territory assigned to Canada “as may be defined in United States-Canada joint agreements”.

The Canadians were not pleased with their treatment in the Anglo-American discussions, and the Chiefs of Staff feared that ABC 1 was intended to oust them from Newfoundland. The issue was somewhat problematical, since the implementation of ABC 1 was dependent upon U.S. entry into the war. However, the resolution of such issues, which had a direct bearing on Canada’s responsibilities as a sovereign state, did not accord with the national view of Canada as a full and independent partner in the war against Germany. Canada was already attempting to force recognition of that claim, at least with respect to North American defence, by the establishment of a Canadian Staff mission in Washington. While the battle to be heard and recognized went on, Canadian responsibilities under under the terms of ABC 1 were worked out by the Permanent Joint Board on Defence. These agreements, styled Joint Canadian-United States Basic Defense Plan No. 2 (Short Title ABC-22) and appended to ABC 1, acknowledged Canada responsibility for her own coastal waters (within the customary three mile limit) and for the commitment of five destroyers and fifteen corvettes to supplement USN forces in the Western Atlantic. Under the terms of ABC 22 the balance of Canadian naval forces was to be sent overseas.

[Editor’s Note: The actual wording of Annex 1 to ABC 22 isn’t quite as restrictive as far as available naval forces are concerned, and the inventory of USN and RCN forces is interesting in itself:]

ANNEX I-MILITARY FORCES

In view of the uncertainties which exist as to the stability of the strategic situations in various theatres, and as to the date on which the United States may enter the war, the strengths of forces listed below must be regarded as subject to change in the light of the strategic situation which may exist when the plan is placed in effect. The forces now estimated to be initially available for the operations required by this plan as of 15 July, 1941, are:

(A) ATLANTIC

    Ocean Escorts United States Atlantic Fleet
      6 Battleships
      5 8" Cruisers
     54 Destroyers
      4 Mine Sweepers (destroyer type)
     54 Patrol Planes

    North Atlantic Naval Coastal Force (U. S. N.)
      5 Eagle Boats
      3 Gunboats
      4 Patrol Yachts
     18 Patrol Planes

Page 1591

    Newfoundland Force (R. C. N.) (Allocated to operate with Ocean 
      Escorts, U. S. Atlantic Fleet)
      5 Destroyers
     15 Corvettes

    Atlantic Coast Command (R. C. N.)
      8 Destroyers
     28 Corvettes
      4 Mine Sweepers
      4 Magnetic Mine Sweepers
     11 Armed A/S Yachts

USS Eagle 2 (PE-2) on builder’s trials in 1918.
US Navy photo via Wikimedia Commons.

[Editor’s Note: I’d never heard of “Eagle Boats” before, so here’s what Wikipedia has to say about them: “The Eagle class patrol craft were a set of steel ships smaller than contemporary destroyers but having a greater operational radius than the wooden-hulled, 110-foot (34 m) submarine chasers developed in 1917. The submarine chasers’ range of about 900 miles (1,400 km) at a cruising speed of 10 knots (19 km/h) restricted their operations to off-shore anti-submarine work and denied them an open-ocean escort capability; their high consumption of gasoline and limited fuel storage were handicaps the Eagle class sought to remedy. […] The term “Eagle Boat” stemmed from a wartime Washington Post editorial which called for “…an eagle to scour the seas and pounce upon and destroy every German submarine.” However, the Eagle Boats never saw service in World War I. […] A number of the Eagle Boats were transferred to the United States Coast Guard in 1919, and the balance were sold in the 1930s and early 1940s. Eight Eagle boats saw service during World War II. One was stationed in Miami as a training vessel. After the war, seven were decommissioned, while one was sunk by a German submarine.”]

Members of the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, August 1940.
Library and Archives Canada / C-005767

Milner continues:

In the strictest sense, should the U.S. enter the war, Canada had lost the battle for Newfoundland. But though the Canadians had earlier been prepared to place their forces unreservedly under U.S. strategic direction in the worst-case scenario of Plan Black, they considered ABC 1 and ABC 22 offensive plans. The Canadians therefore clung firmly to their right to exercise command and control of Canadian forces in Canada and Newfoundland, even should ABC 1 come into force. Further, actual command of forces, despite a strong American sentiment to the contrary, was to remain with the respective nations. Co-ordination of the military effort in a given area was to be by “mutual co-operation”. Unified command of all forces under a single officer was allowed for upon agreement by the officers in the field or the Chiefs of Staff. The criteria for determining who was to command under such conditions were never clearly defined; however, the Canadians at least considered that the size of national contingent and the rank and seniority of its commanding officer were the governing elements. It was Canadian practice, therefore, throughout the joint American-Canadian occupation of Newfoundland to keep Canadian strength above that committed by the U.S. and to ensure that the senior Canadian present outranked his American counterpart. All of these considerations were foremost in the minds of the Canadian government and Staffs when Canada was asked by the British to base large escort forces at St John’s in the spring of 1941.

Thus, aside from the very real operational importance of the task, it was not surprising that the RCN responded enthusiastically to the Admiralty’s request of 20 May that the navy begin the escort of convoys from a base at St John’s. NSHQ responded by declaring that it was prepared to commit all of its new construction and its destroyer forces as well — virtually the entire navy. “We should be glad,” the Canadian reply read, “to undertake anti-submarine convoy escort in the Newfoundland focal area.” Naturally, command of the forces would rest with an RCN officer, and NSHQ suggested Commander E.R. Mainguy, RCN, an officer with experience in the Western Approaches who would be promoted to Captain for the task. However, the Canadians agreed that the Admiralty, through the Commander-in-Chief, Western Approaches (C-in-C, WA), would assume “direction of this force when necessary to coordinate its cooperation with those of the Iceland force.”

Commander E.R. Mainguy, Commanding Officer, HMCS Ottawa, off Botwood, Newfoundland in June, 1940. Botwood was being scouted as a potential seaplane base at the time, and would eventually become home to two RCAF Canso squadrons and a full Canadian Army detachment.
Canada. Dept. of National Defence / Library and Archives Canada / PA-104029

Whether Canadian enthusiasm for the Newfoundland Escort Force (NEF) stemmed from a belief that a permanent, military and politically acceptable role for the burgeoning corvette fleet had been found remains a mystery. What is patently clear, however, is that both the British and the Americans considered the NEF a stopgap measure. By the summer of 1941 it was becoming increasingly evident that the U.S. would get involved in the Atlantic battle under the guise of defending the neutrality of the Western Hemisphere. When that happened, the role of the RCN in the Western Atlantic would be governed by the accords of ABC 1.

Whatever the final outcome of NEF, the commitment of the corvette fleet to ocean escort work marked a radical departure from the intended use of such vessels.

Royal Canadian Navy Operations Room, St. John’s, Newfoundland, 24 September 1942.
Lt Gerald M. Moses / Canada. Dept. of National Defence / Library and Archives Canada / PA-180609

Editor’s Note: This series was originally published by Alex Funk on the TimeGhostArmy forums (original URL – https://community.timeghost.tv/t/canada-and-the-battle-of-the-atlantic-part-3/1442).

Sources:

• Far Distant Ships, Joseph Schull, ISBN 10 0773721606 (An official operational account published in 1950, somewhat sensationalist)
  [Schull’s book was published in part because the funding for the official history team had been cut and they did not feel that the RCN’s contribution to the Battle of the Atlantic should have no official recognition. It is very much an artifact of its era, and needs to be read that way. A more balanced (and weighty) history didn’t appear until the publication of No Higher Purpose and A Blue Water Navy in 2002, parts 1 and 2 of the Official Operational History of the RCN in WW2, covering 1939-1943 and 1943-1945, respectively.]
• North Atlantic Run: the Royal Canadian Navy and the battle for the convoys, Marc Milner, ISBN 10 0802025447 (Written in an attempt to give a more strategic view of Canada’s contribution than Schull’s work, published 1985)
• Reader’s Digest: The Canadians At War: Volumes 1 & 2 ISBN 10 0888501617 (A compilation of articles ranging from personal stories to overviews of Canadian involvement in a particular campaign. Contains excerpts from a number of more obscure Canadian books written after the war, published 1969)
• All photos used exist in the Public Domain and are from the National Archives of Canada, unless otherwise noted in the caption.

I have inserted occasional comments in [square brackets] and links to other sources that do not appear in the original posts. A few minor edits have also been made for clarity.

Earlier parts of this series:

Part 1 — Canada’s navy before WW2

Part 2 — The Admiralty takes control

Part 3 — The professionals and the amateurs

Part 4 — 1940: The fall of France, the battle begins, and the RCN dreams of expansion

Part 5 — The RCN’s desperate need for warships

Part 6 — New ships, new challenges

Part 7 — The end of 1940, rise of the U-boat threat, the corvette waddles into the war, and expansion headaches at every turn

Part 8 — Expansion problems: not enough men for not enough ships

Marc Milner discusses the RCN’s ongoing manning crisis afloat and ashore in North Atlantic Run:

… it was also necessary to find personnel to man new shore establishments. Indeed, by early 1941 the latter took precedence of the needs of the fleet. Although the navy remained committed to increasing the number of escort numbers assigned to its first operational priority, defence of the North Atlantic trade lanes, the gradual extension of the war underlined the paramount need for bases. “Our primary object from the Naval point of view,” a Canadian Chiefs of Staff “appreciation” of May 1941 observed, “must therefore be the extension of existing facilities and the provision of new ones to meet the ever-increasing demands of the British — and perhaps the United States — Naval forces.” The expansion fleet was then only one part of a much larger plan of support for North Atlantic naval operations. Moreover, actual planning for the commissioning and work-up of the new escorts took place as the fleet assumed new and more demanding tasks.

The concern of the Chiefs of Staff for facilities underlined the fact that even by the second winter of the war the navy’s growth was still held in check by enormous shortages. … The Director of Naval Personnel, Captain H.T.W. Grant, informed the council that the RCN needed three hundred RCNVR executive officers — none of whom had yet been enlisted — if the authorized commitments for the following May were to be met. This was no mean task in itself, but the Naval Council noted that the training establishments needed to prepare the men had to be built first. The final twist occurred when the minister advised that the navy must first make steps to acquire the necessary land!

As Nelles later explained in a personal letter to Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord, the RCN was indeed making bricks without straw. … The primary need was now quantity in all aspects of naval endeavour — manpower, ships, and bases.

With existing training establishments choked and new ones still in the planning stages, the provision of personnel for the expanding fleet posed a serious problem. Urgency was to Canadian planning in late 1940, when it became clear that Britain was involved in what Nelles described as “a Naval crisis equal [to] or greater than that which existed in 1917.”

Hon. Angus L. Macdonald, Minister of National Defence for Naval Services, with senior RCN officers, Commodore H.E. Reid and Rear-Admiral P.W. Nelles, September 1940.
Canada. Dept. of National Defence / Library and Archives Canada / PA-104112

To help address the RCNVR officer shortage, a deal was agreed between the RCN and the RN by which RCNVR officers-in-training would travel to England and receive training at HMS King Alfred, the reservist training centre at Hove:

The great irony of the scheme was that it proved virtually impossible to draw on this body of highly trained Canadian naval officers later on, when the RCN was badly in need of qualified personnel. Certainly the King Alfred plan did nothing to resolve the shortage of qualified officers that crippled the fleet in 1941.

Another aspect of proper planning was work-up and operational training facilities for the fleet, particularly with respect to ASW.

Especially considering numerous British complaints of the low quality of Canadian ASW efforts on destroyers operating from UK bases. Canada had possessed no submarines since 1922 and had long since lost the ability to operate them. There was one submarine operating with the RN’s Third Battle Squadron out of Halifax: the Dutch O-15:

At the end of November, the Naval Staff formally requested that O-15 be made available for A/S training. For the moment, the Admiralty refused, although some exercises were conducted with her later in the year.

[Editor’s Note: The Dutch Submarines page on O-15 says “… the RCN was so desperate for ASW training in 1940 that when a Dutch submarine, which had avoided capture when Holland was invaded, fetched up in Halifax en route to England, the navy used it without permission and would not let it go when the Admiralty asked them to relinquish her …”]

Unable to obtain satisfaction from British sources, the RCN turned to the US, where preliminary investigations into acquiring an older USN submarine were made in early 1941. Commodore H.E. Reid, the naval attaché in Washington, raised the matter with the new Permanent Joint US-Canadian Board of Defense and then set about beating the bushes in more obscure parts of the American capital. By the end of January it was clear there were no submarines of any description would be forthcoming from American sources. The only gesture of assistance that the USN made was an offer to send a squadron of submarines (four boats) on a courtesy visit sometime in the summer. The RCN was advised to prepare itself to make maximum use of two to three weeks of free ASDIC training time. It was a generous offer, but it did not provide the RCN with a long-term solution to the pressing problem of providing ASDIC trainees with proper targets. Probably for this reason and because of the fear that acceptance would prejudice negotiations still underway regarding the future of O-15, the RCN politely declined the American offer. A few days later the Admiralty signalled its consent to the use of O-15 for A/S training.

View from HMCS ST Laurent of the submarine O-15 of the Royal Netherlands Navy during an anti-submarine training exercise off Pictou, Nova Scotia, Canada, 20 August 1941.
Canada. Dept. of National Defence / Library and Archives Canada / PA-105491

While extremely useful, one submarine was not sufficient for all training needs and the shortage would continue until 1943 when Italian and Free French submarines became available in the Western Atlantic to help train US-built British destroyer escorts commissioning from US ports.

… having secured the services of O-15, there was no reason not to return to the American offer of training time on US submarines. That the RCN saw fit to reject direct USN assistance was the first sign of what became a curious, closely guarded attitude on the part of the RCN towards the USN. Nor were training submarines the only answer to preparing escorts for battle with the U-boats. Had the RCN — and the RN, for that matter — been more attuned to developments in the war at sea and seen the U-boat pack for what it really was, a flotilla of submersible torpedo boats, motor launches would have formed an essential part of A/S training as well. These small craft offered an excellent substitute for a training submarine in exercises designed to simulate night attacks on convoys, but it was not until 1942 that the RCN would begin to use launches for that purpose. The continuing fixation with submerged targets was understandable, since training on an actual submarine was the only means of attaining and maintaining efficiency among ASDIC operators. …

Aside from the escorts operating from the UK, RCN expansion hung fire during the winter of 1940-1. Obviously it would have been better to commission twenty corvettes into the RCN during 1940, as the Staff had originally planned. But when winter closed its icy grip on the St. Lawrence River, only four were operational.

A few more ships were patrolling and training in Pacific waters, and they would be joined by fresh ships commissioned on the west coast from British Columbian yards over the winter (six ships all told). The last week of April brought the thaw, and with spring came the expected deluge of new ships. Orillia, Pictou, and Rimouski were down the river before the month ended. In May, ten more were accepted into service, three for the west, six for the east. (Including HMCS Baddeck, the ship that Captain Alan Easton, whose firsthand account I find quite fascinating, first commanded.)

In a period of seven months thirty-three warships were added to the Navy List, slightly over half of the 1939-40 construction program.

Had it been possible to build the fleet entirely on the Atlantic or Pacific coasts, the seasonal character of expansion would have been averted. But because of the heavy demand for repair work on east coast yards after the fall of France only three orders for corvettes were ever placed east of the St. Lawrence River. [All at Saint John Shipbuilding.] All of these were much delayed, and the last to commission, Moncton not taken into service until April 1942 — two full years after the commencement of the program.

Lieutenant-Commander Easton described his first look at and first voyage of the Baddeck in 50 North: Canada’s Atlantic Battleground:

She was resting on the blocks of a dry-dock in a shipyard farther up the [St. Lawrence] river when I first saw her. I had stood on the wall and looked down at her sturdy features, the brand new vessel which was to take me many miles over the ocean. HMCS Baddeck was mine; we were to share at least a part of our lives together.

I was elated at being given command. I could not thank anybody because the news came in a naval signal, one of those pieces of paper rather like a telegram, but without the advertising at the top. I just had time to catch the night train from Halifax to Quebec.

When anyone is given an appointment which places him in charge of something which he thinks is pretty important, it generally makes him feel he has been singled out as being above the crowd. But this was not so in my case; the authorities who selected me probably had no alternative. There was no one else handy. In the Royal Canadian Navy during the first half of the war, there were not enough people to go round. Often you got the job whether you deserved it or not.

I could see now that the ship had been built mainly after the fashion of a big steam trawler, but with a longer and sharper bow. From drawings I had seen I knew she was 204 feet long and had a thirty-three-foot beam. Her appearance fitted these dimentions and in her nakedness her fat belly seemed to bulge over the floor of the dry dock, suggesting an ample capacity for, among other things, a large engine. Her rounded stern was inclined to turn up like a duck’s tail.

[…]

The first sight of a ship in which one is going to sail is always exciting, that first intensely interesting glimpse which creates an immediate impression — sometimes of disappointment. […] This time I was not disappointed. And as I stood on her deck, I felt alone with her in the silence of the deserted yard. It was Sunday and everything was quiet — no hammering or riveting, no trail of steam drifting up from the machine shop. Would she stay young like this or grow old quickly? I was glad it was quiet because this was my private introduction and she would try to show me herself — before our exploits began.

Exploits? That was the trouble. She might never be involved in a fight. A corvette, after all, was designed for coastal patrol work. And Canada had a long coastline. The war was on the other side of the Atlantic.

It was a month or more before I had an opportunity to try out her promises of performance on the broad reaches of the St. Lawrence below Quebec. She had been fitted out, her crew had come on board and she had been duly commissioned into the Royal Canadian Navy.

Many men felt strange. But this alien environment was what a good many expected, even sought, when they joined the navy. Stokers looked into the furnaces and felt the burners they would be tending. They looked for a quiet spot in the mess deck to sling their hammocks. They did not know then there would be no quiet spot. Most of them — for most were new to this — felt a twinge of concern and a little ache of homesickness. But these were hidden by an extra swing of the shoulder and more noise than necessary.

There had been no fanfare on leaving. No “off to war” business. Just a farewell hoot of the whistle as we pulled out into the river and headed down-stream for the coast. […] Of the three officers, only the navigator had been in a ship before. He had been twenty-five years at sea in all sorts of small vessels. He had started to sea in fishing vessels when he was twelve, and had gone on from schooners to small steamers to become master of a coastal tanker. He was a rough and readly little man and a rule-of-thumb navigator, I suspected; not that I was disinclined to be one myself. Of the 50 men, about five had been professional sailors or fishermen and, below, no more than six were experienced with engines and boilers. So with more than three-quarters of the complement as fresh to the sea as the ship herself, it was hard to perform our simple task; hard to keep steam up, avoid the shoals or even to steer a straight course. Had anything warlike occurred there would have been a shambles.

Thus, while we were on patrol, the few who knew their profession taught the others. The principles had been explained to them ashore and our specialists had been well instructed, but when they came to supply their knowledge in the ship, a place where discomfort alone had a dazing effect on the mind as well as the stomach, it did not always work out as expected.

We went at it systematically. I had been back at sea almost continuously since the beginning of the war. I was, therefore, in a fair position to know what was needed to develop the crew.

Boats were lowered many times and rowed and then hoisted; men swung the lead for soundings; they put out fires; they were taught lookout-keeping; they learned to read a swinging compass and compensate with the wheel; to stoke the furnaces without belching smoke; handle guns in a choppy sea and to throw a heaving line. But all of this was not learned easily.

Coming in from one of the patrols we were going alongside a jetty, which was overlooked by the admiral’s office; the admiral was known to be fond of observing his ships docking. A strong offshore wind was blowing. It was now or never with the heaving line as the bow of the ship drew parallel to the jetty at a nice throwing distance. An able seaman heaved but his line went up like the first act of the Indian rope trick instead of across the gap. It came down in the water on the lee side. The gap widened but another man standing by with a spare coiled line, in case the first man missed, heaved. It reached the jetty and was caught but the thrower was empty-handed. The end of the rope had gone too! The ship drifted away. And the admiral looked down from his window on the performance.

Lieutenant-Commander Alan H. Easton, DSC, Commanding Officer of the frigate HMCS Matane, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, January 1944.
Lt. Gilbert A. Milne / Canada. Dept. of National Defence / Library and Archives Canada / PA-206442

Marc Milner, North Atlantic Run:

Staff preoccupation with a myriad of apparently non-essential matters also stemmed from the lack of any sense of urgency over the commissioning of the corvette fleet, at least for operational purposes. Despite Nelles’ stated concern over a possible repeat of 1917, even the Admiralty advised in February 1941 that the RCN could accept a delay in the attainment of competence by its own corvettes. Further, although the navy ardently desired to play a full role overseas in what Nelles described as the “theatre of active operations”, the Naval Staff decided in October 1940 that the products of the first construction program would go to meet home requirement first. Once fifty per cent of the latter were met, escorts would be sent to the Eastern Atlantic — the war zone — on an equal priority basis.

Despite the policy of sending auxiliaries overseas and the sure knowledge that the RN was already using its own corvettes as ocean escorts, there is no indication that the RCN believed either that its corvettes would be called up for similar activities or that they required modification to make them more suited to an ocean escort role. In fact, Canadian escorts were primarily intended for inshore duty, as had been the original intentions of the British as well. But the inshore role of Canada’s corvettes was reinforced by defense arrangements made between the US and Canada after the fall of Western Europe. In August 1940 the new Canadian-American Permanent Joint Board of Defence produce its first basic defence plan (Number 1) for North America. It adopted a worst-case scenario, the defeat of Britain by Germany, followed by a contined state of war between Germany and the Commonwealth, from which it took its sobriquet, Plan “Black”.

Canadian corvettes under Plan Black were to be formed into five-ship ASW strike forces that would hunt down and destroy U-boats for the RCN’s system of defended ports. Primarily hunting in the approaches to harbours or at the focal points of trade. “It was expected that in some cases, notably off Halifax and Sydney, corvettes would conduct some local escort, though for Canadian purposes this was not their primary role.”

A line of corvettes departing Halifax, April 1941.
Source: Library and Archives Canada – PA105334

In addition to this offensive use of corvettes, the navy also looked forward to the commissioning of the first construction-program ships in order to proceed with many aspects of expansion, such as training. For the professional navy at least the corvette fleet was not the embodiment of naval expansion. Rather it was, as Nelles described it, a “stepping stone”. Events at sea would soon change this, but it would take some time before that change affected attitudes in Ottawa.

On the ocean, as the war at sea intensified it pushed further westward. Over the winter the dispersal points under British ASW escort had moved steadily into the mid-Atlantic. The bases in established in Iceland in April 1941 allowed escort to roughly 35 degrees west.

This move, in conjunction with a similar extension of air escort, proved initially successful. During April three convoys were attacked in the area that had previously uncovered by A/S escorts, and three U-boats were sunk in the ensuing actions. The Germans, once again finding the climate around defended trade too unhealthy, simply pushed farther west. In May they struck at Halifax-to-UK convoy HX-126 as it approached the limits of A/S cover. Before the escort could join, a U-boat pack of six attackers sank five ships. In the face of a continued threat, the convoy was dispersed, which led to further losses. To forestall further German success, the gap in continuous A/S escort of convoys between the limits of local Canadian escorts and those of the RN based in Iceland needed to be filled.