by Edward Kay
I looked down at myself in the new uniform and couldn’t help smiling. We all looked good.
A lot of the guys began experimenting with the caps, tilting them at different angles, trying to figure out which position made them look toughest or sharpest.
In the midst of this Petty Officer Lancaster entered. “All right, gentlemen, quit admiring yourselves and fall in.” He shouted it like a command, but I could see that he had a very faint grin. I think he was pleased to see us looking like real sailors at last.
We lined up for inspection. One by one, Lancaster checked us over, commenting wryly when somebody had worn their cap at too rakish an angle, saying, “Sailor, why is your cap on that angle? You make me dizzy just looking at you,” or “How come your cap is on the side of your head? You got a hole there you’re trying to cover up? Straighten that out!”
Once Lancaster had thoroughly educated us on the ins and outs of how not to wear our uniforms, we were back to our usual routine of workouts and drills. Each day our run got a little bit longer. At first, the Navy-issue boots tortured all of us. The hard leather chafed and gave us blisters that we would pop each night with a needle.
But after a couple of weeks, either the leather softened or my skin got tougher, because I stopped getting blisters. I was getting used to running long distances every day, and I enjoyed being out and seeing the activity in the harbour.
It was constantly busy, day and night, like an anthill. Ships were always being loaded, no matter what time it was. Every available space was put to use. Unlike the lake freighters I worked on, when the holds of these ships were filled, the crews would start lashing cargo down to the deck. You name it — lumber, drums of gasoline, trucks, Jeeps. As I ran along the street with the other guys in my group, I even saw a crane lifting the wingless fuselage of a large combat plane — everything from the nose and cockpit all the way back to the tail — toward a freighter. It was part of a Lockheed Hudson, one of the new twin-engine bombers built in the United States. It was so big it had to be disassembled to fit onto the cargo ship. I watched, feeling every twitch as the crane operator skilfully manoeuvred the large but fragile load toward the freighter. I breathed a sigh of relief when it touched down gently on the deck. The dock workers quickly began covering the plane with tarpaulins to protect it against the salt spray, then lashed it down. The instant they were finished, the crane operator began lowering an armoured personnel carrier toward them.
The length of the run was increased every day, so no matter how fit we got, by the end of the circuit there would always be a few guys throwing up on the pavement or into the bushes. Toward the end of our longest run, 8 miles, one of the fellows was suddenly overcome and almost vomited onto the feet of an expensively dressed woman out walking a miniature terrier. She curled up her lip and pulled her little dog closer. Then she screwed up her face and made a noise that sounded like “harumph.”
Only a week before, the Halifax-based destroyer Saguenay had been torpedoed off Ireland while escorting a convoy. The Saguenay made it to port, but with a loss of twenty-one dead crew members. It was very much on our minds, but certainly didn’t seem to be on hers.
From somewhere in our ranks a voice called out, “Don’t worry, lady! If the Führer tries to move into your house, we’ll do a lot more than just puke on him.” The woman turned and strutted away, the sour expression still on her face.
“No need to thank us!” shouted Finn.
For some reason, the citizens of Halifax didn’t seem too thrilled to see us. They would usually avoid our gaze when we passed them on the street. Nobody waved or cheered us on. I couldn’t understand why they behaved that way. We were there to fight for their freedom, but they acted like we were invisible … or at least they wished we were.
* * *
When our six weeks of basic training were over, we began to specialize. Because I already had experience on lake freighters as a cook, that’s where they wanted to put me, on a destroyer and out to sea right away. I protested. I was eager to do my part, but I hadn’t quit my job as a cook on a freighter and come all this way just to cook meals and scrub pots for a bunch of other guys who were going to get all the action and glory.
I explained to Petty Officer Lancaster that I had done a lot of hunting and was good with a rifle. I told him that I had done well on the geometry and spatial relations portion of my intelligence tests too.
He took it all in with a pained expression, then replied, “Listen, Deadeye, if you really think you’re that dangerous, you can join the other guys who are starting small-arms specialist training tomorrow. We’ll see what you can do.”
Early the next morning Lancaster led me out onto the rifle range. It was cold and damp. Fog was rolling in from the ocean. Not the greatest conditions. But then, in combat, conditions would rarely be ideal either. Lancaster held a Lee Enfield .303 infantry rifle, similar to the old bolt-action rifle that my father and brothers and I shared back in Iroquois, except this one held a military ammunition clip that contained ten rounds, so I wouldn’t have to stop and reload after each shot.
“Okay, let’s see what you can do with this,” he said, handing the gun to me.
I felt the weight of the Lee Enfield, noted the slightly different balance it had compared to my family’s rifle. I checked it over, and when I felt familiar enough with it, I lay down on the field. The ground was damp and cold, and I took several deep, slow breaths to relax my muscles and keep my body steady, despite the chilly air. I knew that shivering would throw my aim off.
I raised the rifle at the target, which was a set of concentric circles printed on paper, propped up against an earthen wall 200 yards across the field. I took a moment to clear my thoughts and slow down my breathing, the way I did when I was hunting. I took aim at the target, then exhaled, and at the end of my breath, when my chest was motionless, squeezed the trigger. An instant later a loud crack of gunfire sounded and the butt of the rifle kicked back into my shoulder.
Lancaster peered at the target through his binoculars, then handed them to me. I took a look. I’d hit the target, but on the outer ring. Better than a newbie for sure, but outside the kill zone and not exactly impressive. The bullet had gone low and to the right of where I’d actually aimed. I handed the binoculars back to Lancaster. If I didn’t do better, I’d end up in the galley for the rest of the war. But I pushed that kind of thought away so I could focus.
Part of being a good marksman is knowing how to correct for the inaccuracies of your rifle. I knew I had aimed slightly above the target to compensate for the bullet drop — the effect of gravity pulling the bullet down. But the other quirks of the gun had thrown off the shot. To compensate, this time I would aim higher and very slightly to the left of my target. It was a gamble, because I knew I wouldn’t get another chance. I aimed, let out my breath and squeezed the trigger. There was another metallic crack. Without stopping, I chambered another bullet. I sighted exactly the same as before, let out my breath, then gently squeezed the trigger. I repeated the sequence until I had fired three more bullets.
Lancaster looked carefully at the target through the binoculars, then handed them to me. “Have a look,” he said.
I had shot two bulls’ eyes and put the other rounds less than 4 inches from the centre of the target, well inside the kill zone.
“You gonna admire those holes all day, or can I have my binoculars back now?” said Lancaster.
“Yes, sir,” I replied, handing them up to him.
“All right, O’Connell, you can get up off the ground. Looks like you might be useful for something other than peeling potatoes after all. I’m recommending you for gunnery school.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said, clambering to my feet. I tried not to show my excitement, but I was so thrilled I felt like I’d jump right out of my skin.
So instead of being immediately posted to a ship to start cooking, I began a gunnery course in Halifax. Ken made it in too, on the basis of his geometry aptitude and having been
on his school’s archery team.
Over the next few months we learned how to use every gun in the Navy’s arsenal. The smallest was the Lewis gun, which was intended for anti-aircraft defence and close combat against the crews of surfaced submarines. It was a light machine gun left over from the First World War, firing the same ammunition that another Canadian, Roy Brown, had used to shoot down the Red Baron more than twenty years earlier. It might have been adequate to bring down a tiny, old-fashioned plane like the Baron’s, made from wood and fabric. But it was a museum piece by Second World War standards. It used the same calibre bullets that my brothers and I shot deer and moose with, and had a maximum range of only a couple thousand feet and change. If you were close enough, you might kill the crew of a surfaced U-boat or prevent them from getting to their own guns. But against a heavily armoured German bomber, it was just about useless. For all practical purposes, they might as well have issued us a big sack of rocks to throw.
We also learned how to use the 4-inch and the 4.7-inch guns, the Royal Canadian Navy’s main weapons on the corvettes and destroyers. We could never go into combat against a battleship or a cruiser with them — they’d be using their 11-inch guns — but they packed enough punch to send a German submarine straight to Davy Jones’ locker, and that’s exactly what corvettes were designed to do.
That didn’t mean the submarines were a pushover, though, even on the surface. The U-boats were equipped with an 88-millimetre deck gun that was only slightly smaller in diameter than ours and could easily sink a merchantman — or a corvette whose crew wasn’t accurate or fast enough with its own deck gun.
On that last point, we were at a disadvantage. Like so much of our other equipment, our guns were proof of our government’s stubborn refusal to prepare for war. The breech-loading 4-inch gun was an outdated relic from the First World War. Its shells weren’t all one solid piece as in more modern guns. There was a projectile and a separate bag filled with an explosive called cordite, plus a cartridge like a shotgun shell filled with gunpowder to ignite the cordite, which in turn fired the warhead. The U-boats’ 88-millimetre guns used shells that came with the firing charge built into them at the factory, like a bullet, so they didn’t need to stuff a bag of cordite into their guns to propel the warhead, or insert a gunpowder firing cartridge to ignite the cordite. A surfaced U-boat could fire a 20-pound shell every four seconds or so — fifteen a minute — a lot faster than we could with our cumbersome old guns. But our instructors were first-rate. They drilled us constantly, so we had lots of practice. We might not have been able to fire our shells as quickly as a U-boat crew could, but we were determined that each one of ours would count.
Finally, after months of practice on the various guns, we were deemed ready for combat service.
Chapter Three
Spring 1941
With my gunnery training complete, my first official duty was to become part of the crew on the maiden voyage of the Wildrose, a corvette that had just been built at the shipyard in Sorel, on the St. Lawrence River between Montreal and Trois-Rivières. A few of the guys from my gunnery class made the trip with me, including Ken.
When our train arrived in Sorel, we boarded a military transport that carried us straight to the docks. I scrambled down from the truck, eager to see the ship on which I would make my first Atlantic crossing. But when I laid eyes on the Wildrose the only thing I felt was disappointment. We all did. A lot of the guys just threw down their kit bags and stared.
“Rub a dub-dub,” I said.
“No kidding,” replied Ken. “Good thing the Krauts are under water in their submarines. If they saw this thing, they’d be laughing at us.”
Compared to other combat vessels, the Wildrose didn’t look like a thoroughbred at all. She was clearly built neither for speed nor beauty, with a squat, rounded hull and a stern that looked a bit like a bathtub. For an ocean-going ship, she wasn’t very long, either. Even in the sheltered waters of the dockyard, with just a slight breeze and light waves, the Wildrose rolled slightly from side to side.
“She’s based on a whaling ship design,” said one of the other sailors, a guy from Quebec City named Fontaine. “They can build them quicker and cheaper than any of the other types of ships.”
I tried to keep an open mind, but standing there taking in the sight of the Wildrose, those seemed like its only positive attributes.
The worst moment came when I glanced at the forward deck. “Hey, Ken, notice anything unusual about her?” I asked.
“Other than the fact that she looks like a giant chum bucket that could capsize on wet grass?”
“Guess again,” I said.
“Holy smoke!” he exclaimed as he followed my gaze to a crane that was hoisting a grey telephone pole to the mounting, right where the 4-inch gun — the only sizeable weapon on the ship — was supposed to be.
“You don’t think they’re serious, do you, O’Connell?” he asked. Shipyard workers lowered the telephone pole toward the Wildrose’s deck and guided it into the steel gun mount.
“Doesn’t look to me like they’re kidding,” I replied.
Then the workers bolted the pole into place so it looked like a gun barrel. “What the heck is with the pole?” I asked one of them.
“No more guns,” he replied in a French-Canadian accent. “Nobody makes them here in Canada. On the first corvettes we built, we got old artillery pieces taken from the the lawns of the Legion Halls. Then we even ran out of those. There’s not a gun left on any Legion Hall in the country. Guess you guys should have joined up sooner.”
“Lord love a duck,” said Ken, shaking his head.
So for its maiden voyage, the only working guns on the entire vessel were the two small-calibre Lewis machine guns. Being a cook on a destroyer was suddenly looking pretty good compared to being on this poor excuse for a ship. If a U-boat came to the surface beyond the range of our Lewis guns, we’d have no way to protect ourselves except for a telephone pole disguised to look like a gun to hide our near-defencelessness.
As we stepped onto the gangplank it occurred to me that this series of ship was called a “Flower-class” corvette. Mistake number one, I thought. Other ships were named after fierce tribes, like the Zulu and Ashanti, or warrior traits like Courageous or Indomitable, even tenacious or ferocious animals like Bulldog or Basilisk. But our little bathtub of a ship, with nothing but two First World War-era machine guns to defend itself, was named after a flower. And not just any flower. A flower that grew on the prairies, thousands of miles from the nearest salt water. It all felt like a giant joke. A joke that wasn’t funny.
I stepped off the gangplank onto the deck. The ship was a hive of activity. Most of the crew were already at their stations, preparing the ship for sea. There was no speech from the captain or anything like that. The chief petty officer told us where to stow our kit. We ducked through a hatch and went down a flight of metal stairs into the forward mess deck, a dimly lit area near the bow of the ship, just underneath what would have been the forward gun station — if we’d had a gun. There were tables and benches around the outside with lids that lifted to double as storage lockers. I found a spot to hang up my hammock, then stowed my other gear in one of the benches.
By the time our crew took over the Wildrose, the shipyard workers had already tested every part of the ship except for the weapons, so we were ready to take her out almost immediately. Once we were in the St. Lawrence, away from shore, we were told our destination: the port of Greenock, Scotland. There, Wildrose would get her 4-inch gun. The captain ordered the engine to be gradually powered up to maximum speed. Those of us who had never before served on a corvette, which was most of the crew, were puzzled. We were going pretty slowly.
“You think there’s something wrong with the engines, O’Connell?” Ken asked.
A passing stoker overheard us and shook his head. “Nothing wrong with the engines. This is all she’s got. A corvette will only do sixteen knots under full steam.”
That’s about 18 miles an hour — the same speed as somebody riding a bicycle, or half the speed of a destroyer, not much faster than a submerged U-boat, and actually slightly slower than a surfaced German submarine.
Ken and I rolled our eyes. He leaned over to me and whispered, “Jeez, O’Connell, is this what we’re supposed to take on the Krauts with? A chum bucket with a telephone pole?”
He didn’t say it in his usual smart-alecky way.
“Looks that way to me,” I replied.
He shook his head. “Then God help us all.”
It would be at least a day until we were past Quebec City and could safely test fire the Lewis guns. Given that, plus the fact that the ship was brand new and not in need of maintenance, there was very little for me to do. The Navy brass considered corvettes too small to have a trained cook on them, and after the second time that we were served peanut butter on toast in the same day, I realized the guys in the kitchen needed some help. So even though I had specifically taken on gun training to avoid “kitchen patrol,” I found myself back in the galley.
The kitchen was about the same size as the cooking area in typical family home. It had a four-burner stove, an oven and a countertop about 6 feet long, which was the only workspace. There was no refrigerator, so a lot of the food was canned, like tomatoes, green beans and corn, plus fresh root vegetables that wouldn’t spoil quickly, like potatoes, carrots and onions. There was also lots of jam and margarine, and something called ship’s biscuit, a cracker that was dry and hard so it didn’t go bad in the moist air.
The corvette was originally designed to carry a crew of about seventy, but with all the wartime gear, and operating on a twenty-four-hour-a-day basis for an Atlantic crossing, it needed close to one hundred men to keep it running. That meant it was already overcrowded with the crew and all their gear, plus the food needed to feed so many people for the two-week crossing. So the provisions were crammed into every nook and cranny, even stored in the sick bay, just down the hall from the galley.
