by Edward Kay
The lights went down and a newsreel came on. I was expecting the usual mixture of news and puff pieces about things like rodeos and baby pageants. But tonight it was mostly war news, and all of it was grim. “A new phase of the war has begun,” said the clipped voice of the newsreel announcer, “one that they are calling the Blitz. Luftwaffe planes are bombing London and the other large British cities almost every night, indiscriminately killing men, women and children.”
The announcer went on to say that in one of the worst raids, more than four hundred Londoners were killed, most of them civilians. The newsreel showed London ablaze, firefighters silhouetted against a raging inferno. Then it showed the aftermath, the smoking rubble the morning following that raid. One image really stuck with me. In it, smashed buildings filled the streets and a family, including small children, climbed over the remains of what might have been their house the day before. One was a little girl about the same age as my own sister, Marian. They were all just ordinary people, like my parents and siblings. Just people trying to get by.
Later in the newsreel came a story about a convoy that sailed from Sydney, Nova Scotia, with food and raw materials for Britain. The ships were ambushed by a group of U-boats — the announcer said the Germans called it a “wolf pack” — which sank twenty of the thirty-five merchantmen. Wood, iron ore, mine equipment, oil and grain — quite likely grain that the Huronia had carried to the docks — had ended up at the bottom of the ocean. The sailors lucky enough to be rescued were covered in oil, shivering from the icy water, their eyes wide in terror and shock. A hot sensation rose inside me and my muscles seemed to tense up all on their own.
Then came almost the worst part — images of Hitler gloating over his latest conquest. What really got me was his smug expression as he posed for the camera, strutting around like a banty rooster while his aircraft bombed women and children into oblivion. It made me so angry I wanted to drive my fist into his face. I was so mad after that, I could barely sit through the movie. Those images of the bombed families, the terrified sailors, the haunted eyes of the survivors … I had to do something about it.
When we arrived at Toronto four days later to offload our grain, I finished my shift, then walked straight to the recruiting office at HMCS York. I lied about my age and told the recruitment officer I was seventeen, which I knew could get me into the Navy. I either looked old enough, or they were desperate enough, because the recruiter didn’t demand any proof. He told me that because of my shipboard experience, they would put me to the front of the line and to expect to report in about two weeks. In the meantime, he said that I should go home, take care of any business I needed to attend to, and wait for the telegram.
I went back to the ship and told Captain Jameson that I had enlisted and that I would probably be called up soon. I thought he might be angry, but instead he just nodded slowly and said, “You’re what the Navy needs, all right.”
I offered to stay on until I was called up, but he just shook his head. “I can find another fellow to fill in for you, somebody like me who’s too old for combat duty. Now you’d better get home and say goodbye to your family. I hate to say it, but I think we’re in for a long war. Give my regards to your father.”
Captain Jameson told me that if we’d been heading for Montreal, he’d have taken me right to the lock in Iroquois. But he had orders that as soon as the Huronia offloaded, it was to immediately sail back up to the Lakehead for another load of grain.
“Now that France is out of the game, we can’t keep up with the orders for wheat,” he said. “If you can keep those Jerry submarines from feeding it to the the fish, I’ll be grateful. And if you can sink a few of the bastards while you’re at it, so much the better.”
“I’ll do my best, sir,” I replied.
“I know you will, O’Connell. I know you will. Good luck.”
Chapter Two
October 1940
I took the train back to Iroquois to tell my parents. Being the lockmaster, my father knew that my ship wasn’t due to come through, and he and my mother wouldn’t be expecting me. So I knocked on the door before opening it. “Mom? Dad? It’s me, Billy,” I called as I entered the house.
My mother appeared in the hallway a moment later.
“Billy, how come you’re home? Is something wrong?” she asked.
“Not exactly. But you’d better sit down,” I replied.
In the parlour, with the door closed, I told my parents the news. “I’ve joined the Navy. They’re going to be calling me up in a couple of weeks.”
My parents both looked shocked. Nobody in my family had ever been in the military before. My father had a heart murmur, so he hadn’t served in the First World War. My older brother Don had inherited the same heart defect, so he hadn’t even thought about enlisting. And because he’d been stricken with polio, George wasn’t able to serve in the military either.
As soon as it sank in, my mom started to cry. No matter how much the government tried to paint a rosy picture, everyone had heard the stories about how unprepared the Royal Canadian Navy was.
She wiped away her tears, and soon her sadness turned to anger. “This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done!” she said. “You’re sixteen! You’re not even old enough to join. I’m going to call that recruiting centre and tell them.”
“If you do that,” I said, trying to sound calm and in control, “I’ll just run away and join the Army with a false ID.”
Mentioning the Army made her even more upset. More than three hundred thousand Allied troops had been killed or wounded during Hitler’s invasion of France and the Low Countries. Given the choice, I guess my mother decided that my skills as a seaman would at least give me a fighting chance, so at last she relented.
Ten days later I received a letter to report to HMCS York. There was a morning train from Montreal to Toronto that stopped in Iroquois. My family walked with me the few blocks from our house to the train station. At 12:14 the train arrived, right on time. There was an awkward moment where nobody knew what to say. I guess everyone wanted to be brave, but I knew that I might never see any of them again. My parents and George and Don were aware of that too, though Marian, and especially Burt, being the youngest, seemed to think it was just a big adventure. I was glad they didn’t know any better. The train slowed to a stop, and the conductor opened the doors and shouted, “All aboard!”
“Well, I guess this is it,” was the only thing I could think of to say to my parents. “I’ll write to you as soon as I can.” Everyone was so emotional that we didn’t speak very much.
My mother kissed me and squeezed my hand. She was trying to smile, but her eyes kept filling with tears. “Be careful, Billy,” was all she could say. Then her voice cracked and she let go and turned away so I wouldn’t see her cry. She hated anyone ever seeing her cry.
My dad shook my hand firmly and quietly said, “Take care of yourself, son. Write us when you’re settled in.”
“I will, Dad,” I promised.
George balanced himself on his crutches and leaned in close so nobody else could hear. “Whatever you do, don’t end up as a stoker. I heard that if your ship gets torpedoed, those guys down in the engine room don’t have a chance.”
“Don’t worry,” I answered. “I won’t.”
Then I climbed aboard. I took a seat and opened the window so I could wave goodbye.
As the train began to move, Burt started galloping along the platform, yelling, “Send me a flag from one of those German submarines after you capture it!”
“You bet,” I called back to him, “if there’s enough left of it to send to you by the time we’re through with it.”
He smiled and saluted me proudly. He was so excited, so confident that we would win.
I saluted back, putting on my bravest smile. But inside, I wondered what sort of a world Burt would inherit, wondered what sort of a world any of us would be living in a few years from now. Then in less than a minute we had pulled out of the station,
around a bend in the river and past a thick stand of maple trees. Iroquois disappeared from view as neatly as if it had never existed.
The train got into Toronto a few hours later, and I reported directly to HMCS York. First I was given a physical examination. Doctors checked us recruits over for any conditions that would make us unsuitable for military service. I passed my physical, then over the next few days, spent a lot of time writing aptitude tests. I surprised myself by doing well on the math exams. I had never been a particularly good student, but it turned out that I had an aptitude for geometry and spatial relations — a fancy way of saying the relative position of three-dimensional objects. I think it was because I had spent so much time hunting ducks and geese, where I had to aim not at where the flying bird was, but where it would be when the bullet caught up to it.
Then, along with a trainload of other recruits, I was sent out to Halifax.
The two-day trip felt even longer thanks to the hard, overcrowded benches of our old coach. The ride was rough, and between being squeezed in among all these other guys, and the vibration, we couldn’t really sleep. So I felt a huge sense of relief when the conductor came through the car and announced that we’d be arriving in ten minutes.
As we neared the station on Hollis Street, I got my first glimpse of Halifax Harbour. It was crammed with merchant ships waiting to join convoys. I counted at least thirty of them at anchor, and more by the docks, plus a sleek destroyer bristling with guns.
At the station a few junior officers were on hand to meet us, and after we piled off with our luggage, we marched the 2 miles to the Navy dockyard. It was only when we passed through the gateway and onto the grounds that I understood exactly how unprepared Canada was for war.
The base had the look of a construction site, with crews pouring concrete and sawing lumber and nailing together wooden frames for buildings, while hundreds of recruits getting their physical training ran past them and around them. A petty officer led us into a hall where we were given our kit, but it was incomplete. We were issued boots, socks and underwear, and were measured for our uniforms. But they didn’t have any actual uniforms on hand.
That meant that for the first few days we would have to exercise and parade in our “civvies” — literally the clothes we had worn on our backs to get here. Then three hundred of us new guys were led into a hockey rink.
“All right!” whispered a sandy-haired recruit standing behind me. “What a way to spend the war, playing hockey!”
Suddenly a loud voice boomed out of the darkness, and a figure in a neatly pressed naval uniform marched to the front of the crowd.
“My name is Chief Petty Officer Lancaster,” the man called out. “Welcome to your new home away from home. There are lockers in the middle of the hall. Stow your gear there, then form a line to my right for hammocks and bedding.”
As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I noticed that the rink had a dirt floor.
The same recruit standing beside me whistled with disbelief. “Get a load of this!” he said. “No barracks. We’ve got to sleep in a hockey rink.”
“Yeah,” I whispered back to him. “The least they could have done is laid down some ice and given us skates so we could pass the time.”
That got a few quiet laughs from the guys standing around us.
The petty officer didn’t seem to overhear any of it, but then looked right at me and said, “And for anyone concerned about the lack of skating opportunities, don’t worry. By the time we’re finished with you each night, you’ll be so tired you’ll be lucky to get your boots off before you fall asleep.”
I put my suitcase into a locker, then fell into line to get my hammock and bedding. I found a spot to hang my hammock where it wasn’t too drafty, and that was that. I noticed then that the guy in the next hammock was the one who’d made the crack about the hockey arena. We introduced ourselves. His name was Ken Luke, and he was from Montreal. “Home of the world’s greatest hockey team!” he boasted.
“Oh yeah?” I replied. “Did somebody move the Maple Leafs there and not tell me about it?”
He gave me a wry look. “The Leafs? You gotta be kidding me.”
“When was the last time the Habs made the finals?” I had him there, because even though neither of our teams had won the Stanley Cup in almost ten years, at least Toronto had made the finals the past three years in a row, unlike the Habs. But we couldn’t settle the argument, because the New York Rangers had beaten both our teams to win the Cup that year. So instead we talked about our hometowns. I told him about hunting and fishing in Iroquois.
“Wow, living off the land. You’re a regular Davy Crockett,” he said. “King of the Wild Frontier.”
I laughed. I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but I guess to a kid from the city, hunting and fishing for your dinner seemed pretty unusual.
“What’s it like in Montreal?” I asked.
“Well,” he replied, “since shooting the deer and geese on Mount Royal is frowned on, the closest I’ve got to hunting is being on the school archery team.”
Ken told me about growing up in downtown Montreal. With his stories of delicatessens, jazz music and all kinds of neighbourhoods — French, Italian, Jewish, Greek and Chinese — it seemed so colourful compared to Iroquois.
But there were no delis or jazz music in our hockey arena that first night, or any other kind of entertainment, for that matter. So some of the guys played cards, others read. Most just smoked and talked.
Then Petty Officer Lancaster returned and announced it would be lights out in ten minutes. Ken and I made our way to the bathroom. It was big, cold and drafty with a long line of toilets and sinks, and an open shower area. There was already a long lineup. “Hey, O’Connell, get a load of this. You ever had to wait in a line before just to brush your teeth?”
“Are you kidding?” I answered. “I’ve got three brothers and a sister. There isn’t anything I haven’t waited in line for!”
He laughed. Everybody was in pretty good spirits despite the less than comfortable surroundings.
As we climbed into our strange new beds, Ken and I figured that we would probably be here just for a couple of days, until they got us sorted out and assigned to our various barracks, wherever those were. The officers turned the lights out, and despite the cold and the scratchy wool blanket, and the difficulty of finding a comfortable position in my hammock, I fell asleep in seconds.
* * *
There were no windows in the rink, so we couldn’t tell day from night except by the routine. When six a.m. came around, the junior officers woke us by filing in and banging pots with spoons. They gave us half an hour to shower, shave and get dressed. It turned out there wasn’t enough hot water, so by the time I’d had my lukewarm shower and then stood in line waiting for the sink, I had to do my shaving with cold water. But I was so excited about starting my first real day of training, I didn’t care.
“All right, Ladies,” shouted Petty Officer Lancaster. “Time to work up an appetite for breakfast.” I was already hungry, but it was clear that would have to wait. They directed us out to the parade ground. It was still dark when we filed out into the chilly late-autumn air. Lancaster was the instructor for my group.
“Mark this day on your calendars,” he called out. “Because today is the day that we start turning you into sailors. And this day begins now.”
For the next hour we did calisthenics: stretching, jumping jacks, push-ups, squats, sit-ups and lunges. I was pretty fit from all the time I’d spent swimming and rowing and hunting in the woods, but by the end of the hour my eyes were stinging from the sweat running down my forehead and my thigh muscles and my shoulders were getting sore.
Between the workout and the damp, cool ocean air rolling in off the harbour, I was suddenly famished. My stomach growled like there was a wolverine down there.
In the mess hall, a row of cooks standing at a long cafeteria-style counter were serving up mountains of food.
I almost start
ed to drool. “Wow, that’s more food than I’ve seen in one place since last Christmas!”
“That’s more food than I’ve ever seen, period!” said a guy from Ottawa named Finn, who wore a threadbare wool jacket and patched-up trousers.
“Bacon, sausage, eggs, toast, oatmeal, beans, juice!” he continued. “This is one line I don’t mind being in.”
“Damn right,” said Ken. “Let’s dive in before it’s all gone.”
The food was good, and we were ready for it. We could have whatever we wanted, and as much as we wanted. The cooks would dish it out from behind the counter, whatever we asked for. There were rows and rows of tables and benches. We found a space, sat down and devoured our breakfasts like a pack of ravenous wolves. Nobody talked until we’d finished everything on our plates.
After breakfast the petty officers led us back out to the parade ground. This time it was for marching drill, learning how to move in formation. For the next few days our waking hours were a monotonous routine of marching, calisthenics, parade-ground drill and then more marching, more calisthenics and more parade-ground drill, broken up only by sleep and the welcome reprieve of breakfast, lunch and dinner. Many of us had grown up in a world where you couldn’t always count on getting “three squares,” so the certainty of regular meals was a comfort, even if we had to spend the rest of our time running and marching and sleeping in a hammock in an unheated hockey rink.
At the end of the week we finally got our uniforms, two per person. The uniform consisted of dark blue bell-bottomed trousers and a matching tunic with white trim that we wore over a white undershirt, topped off with a blue cap. We were all in a hurry to get into our new outfits and see what they looked like. Guys eagerly peeled off their civilian clothes — some of which were pretty beaten up — and put on the brand-new uniforms. The joke was that the Navy issued its uniforms in two sizes: too big and too small. But I didn’t hear any complaints. “We look like real sailors now, don’t we, O’Connell!” said Ken as he smoothed down the short tunic over his trousers.
