by Edward Kay
By now our other guns had opened up on him as well. The Lewis guns were spewing streams of bullets enthusiastically if ineffectively, and the 4-inch gun was loaded with an anti-aircraft shell and being swung into position. When one of those shells exploded not far from the Ju 88 several seconds later, it must have been all the discouragement the pilot needed. He released his bombs into the ocean to lighten the damaged plane and make it easier to control. Then he hightailed it for home, skimming the wavetops.
My pulse was racing. This had been my first real test. I hadn’t crumpled under the pressure, and I had survived. I hadn’t shot the plane down, but I’d prevented it from sinking us. I’d damaged it badly enough that it would tie up German repair crews and keep it from attacking anyone else for a few days. I wondered what had become of the German nose gunner, and realized how easily it could have been the other way around. But I realized something else too: if I hadn’t trusted my instincts and taken the initiative to defend myself, there was a good chance that the plane would have dropped its bombs on us before we had time to react, and we all might be dead now, instead of heading back to port.
* * *
Glasgow began to feel like a second home. Whenever we had shore leave, Ken and I went there to call on Aileen and Heather. There might have been a shortage of food in Glasgow, but unlike Halifax there was no shortage of fun, and we didn’t want to miss any of it. One night Aileen took me to a dance hall called the Locarno. It had two live bands that performed on a rotating stage so there was never any gap in between sets. One of the bands played Tommy Dorsey numbers, my favourite. Over the next few weeks the Locarno became our special place whenever I had leave. Then as I neared the end of my gunnery course, I was given orders to head back to Halifax. I called on Aileen one last time.
We went to the Locarno as always. We ordered our drinks — soft drinks were the only thing on the menu — and listened as the band kicked into some spirited boogie-woogie music with a heavy backbeat.
Aileen leaned over to me. “All this time we’ve been going out, Billy O’Connell, and you’ve never once asked me to dance,” she teased. “You’re starting to make me feel insecure.”
I explained to her that I had never learned how to dance. “My mother’s Methodist. Dancing isn’t allowed.”
“Why not?” Aileen asked.
“They think it leads to more serious sins. Like going to the movies and drinking coffee,” I joked.
She laughed and said, “Well, Billy O’Connell, we can’t just sit here all night or we’ll grow roots. Up you get.”
I protested, but she stood up, took my hand and pulled me onto the dance floor. She was as quick on her feet as she was with her wit.
“You’re amazing!” I exclaimed as Aileen skilfully moved to the music.
“Comes from being forced to take Highland dancing when you’re seven!” she called to me over the music.
Aileen seemed to float on her feet. Compared to her, I felt like I was lumbering around on snowshoes. But she was such a good dancer that she created the impression that I was leading even when it was her guiding me. I managed to get through it, and in the end, only stepped on her toes twice.
Then the song ended and the band quickly segued into a slow number, “Stardust.” I had now gone head-to-head with a German bomber and fired shells big enough to blow a submarine out of the water, but being out on this dance floor made me more nervous. Aileen looked at me expectantly. I could see that she really wanted to dance, and I didn’t want to let her down. So I put my arm around her waist and mimicked the movements of the other dancers, who seemed to know what they were doing. I watched the way they swayed to the music and held their partners close, and followed their movements.
After spending so much time inhaling the stench of cordite, paint fumes, bunker oil and the sweat of fifty other sailors, her faint scent of perfume and shampoo gave me a heady feeling. And after sleeping in a wet uniform under a clammy wool blanket, it was exciting to feel her warm, soft skin against mine as her body moved to the music. Soon I forgot how nervous I had been. As we swirled around the dance floor, arms around each other, with the music playing and the happy crowd moving in unison, I discovered that I actually liked dancing — mostly because it gave me a chance to hold Aileen close to me. And for a few brief minutes, I didn’t think about submarines or bombers or getting killed.
That night when I walked Aileen home, I told her that my gunnery course was finished and I was being sent back to Halifax.
“Will I see you again, Billy O’Connell?” she asked.
“Of course,” I replied. “Greenock is our base on this side of the Atlantic. And it doesn’t seem like those German submarines or the war are going away any time soon. So I’ll be back.”
After that we didn’t say anything else about the war. We didn’t want to think about it. But I did make a mental note of where the air raid shelters were, just in case.
But this night was overcast, so there wasn’t much chance of the Luftwaffe coming. I walked as slowly as I could, but inevitably we arrived back at Aileen’s house. For a few minutes we made small talk, barely above a whisper. Then she said, “I’d better go inside now, before we wake the neighbourhood.”
She reached out and squeezed my hand. “Take care of yourself, Billy O’Connell. And you can write to me if you want to.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
“Just remember, thirty-seven Bell Lane. Like the Scottish-Canadian inventor.”
I smiled. Aileen didn’t miss a single detail.
A strange feeling passed over me. Standing there on her doorstep, I suddenly missed her already, even though she was right in front of me.
For a brief moment, neither of us knew what to say. Then I leaned in and pressed my lips to hers. She reached up and touched my cheek, then I put my arms around her and drew her close to me. I could feel her hands on my back now, pressing me tightly to her. My heart began pounding so hard, I was afraid she’d be able to hear it.
Then she pulled back just enough to look into my eyes. “Goodbye, Billy O’Connell,” she whispered. “Safe journeys.”
“Goodbye, Aileen,” I replied. “I’ll write soon.”
She turned and put her key in the front door lock. Our eyes met one last time. She smiled wistfully, then disappeared from view as she closed the door, leaving me alone in the darkened street.
Chapter Six
Mid-June 1941–January 1942
When we arrived at the dock the next morning and saw what was waiting in the harbour for us, Ken and I laughed out loud.
“God almighty,” I said, “getting away from the Wildrose is harder than scraping gum off your shoe!”
“Yes, back into the old chum bucket for us,” Ken muttered.
Now, though, she was at least looking ready for action. On her forward deck was a proper 4-inch gun.
We sailed back to Halifax with a convoy of thirty-six ships, all of them riding high in the water now that they were empty. The trip was almost eerily quiet. Much better than the alternative though. The Germans had just invaded their former ally, the Soviet Union, but we knew that the U-boats would still be out in full force in the North Atlantic. We also knew that HQ in Britain and Halifax had a new weapon, called HuffDuff, that could determine the general location of German submarines by triangulating their radio signals. That enabled Allied command to guide our convoys away from the direction of the submarine radio transmissions.
But as I knew from stalking deer in the backwoods around Iroquois, a good hunter never lets his prey know he’s there. The U-boat crews were stealthy hunters specializing in sudden death, and we had no intention of becoming their prey. So we were constantly vigilant. The ASDIC operators, two at a time, were on duty twenty-four hours a day, listening for a telltale ping that told them there was a submarine lurking in the depths. And for every moment of the trip, there was someone in the crow’s nest — sometimes me — scanning the water around us all the way to the horizon, on the lookout fo
r a periscope. And my gun crew and I practise fired the 4-inch gun every day to stay sharp. We knew we couldn’t always count on technology like HuffDuff to evade the enemy, but on this occasion it worked perfectly and we made it across without a single contact with a German submarine.
* * *
When I got ashore in Halifax I was amazed at how many more new recruits there were on the base, even though we’d only been gone for three months. I was even more surprised to discover that I was now being made an instructor. I had only nine months more experience than my students. But in these desperate times that apparently made me an old salt. And I suppose that compared to the trainees from inland cities like Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Red Deer, I was.
I spent the next few months feeling frustrated about being stuck in Halifax instead of getting in on the action. But there was no arguing with the fact that more instructors were needed to train all the new crews. In North Africa, the Allies were fighting Germany’s Afrika Korps, and our forces there and in Malta were in need of constant resupply, so the route from Britain, past Gibraltar and to Africa became an important convoy route, demanding more escort ships and more crews. Ken was assigned to instructor duty too, so at least I had him around to give me his usual running commentary.
There were now so many recruits that even the skating rink or the new barracks couldn’t hold them all. Lots of the new recruits I was training grumbled about having to rent space in rooming houses in Halifax. Our guys fumed about landlords renting out rooms for far more than their usual value, taking advantage of the fact that we sailors had nowhere else to go. Some landlords really got them furious by charging half a month’s salary for a bedroom that a sailor had to share with three other sailors. There were even stories of some landlords pitting sailor against sailor, auctioning off rooms to the highest bidder. That did nothing to ingratiate the town with us.
After being in Glasgow, Halifax seemed especially dull. Another point of tension was that there were so few places for us sailors to relax when we were ashore. There were still no pubs and few restaurants, and we were discouraged from going into those. There was one bright spot amid the dreariness of Halifax. Dolly McEuen, the wife of a Navy officer, had created the Ajax Club, a place where sailors could have a beer or a soft drink and an inexpensive meal, read, play cards and socialize when we were ashore. Mrs. McEuen had opened it in 1940, and I took full advantage of it over the fall and into the winter of 1941.
Whenever I got a letter from Aileen or my parents, I would head over to the Ajax. There, it was my ritual to settle into an armchair with a Coke, catch up on the news from Iroquois or Glasgow, then write a return letter, which I would post on my way back to the base. It was an oasis of calm and comfort in the middle of a lot of hardship.
On the evening of December 7, 1941, I was sitting in an armchair at the Ajax, having a soft drink and reading a letter from my mom.
Things are really changing around here, she wrote. A lot of your friends from school have signed up for military service. I ran into Jack Byers down at the post office. He’s just joined the Army. He told me to say hi, and that he hopes you’re enjoying your “summer vacation,” whatever that means.
Then I remembered that day back in class when Mr. Martin had said that the diplomats would probably negotiate an end to the war and it would be over before summer vacation. I shook my head. It sure hadn’t worked out that way. Then I continued reading.
Don and George both got jobs working for the government in Ottawa last month. They’re hiring all kinds of people to help run the War Department, clerks and other office workers. The two of them moved into a little flat together there, so with only Burt and Marian left at home now, the place is starting to feel pretty empty. I was just picturing our house like that, half empty, when a sailor ran in from one of the other rooms, shouting, “Guys, you won’t believe this! The Japs just bombed Pearl Harbor!”
At first, none of us did know whether to believe it, because as far as we were aware, Japan hadn’t even declared war on the United States. But the next day on the radio I heard President Roosevelt say that December 7 was “a date which will live in infamy” as he went on to describe the sneak attack on the U.S. naval base by Japanese aircraft. At the end of his speech he asked Congress to declare war on Japan, and later that same day they did, which in turn prompted the Germans to declare war on the United States.
We had mixed feelings.
It was horrifying to hear of so many thousands of American sailors, guys just like ourselves, being killed and wounded. But on the other hand, America had ten times the population of Canada, and nearly three times that of Great Britain, so having America in the war meant that we had gained a very powerful ally.
“You have to admit, in one way it’s a relief,” said Ken. “With the Yanks in the war, we’ll finally have all their military and industrial clout behind us. Those Krauts won’t know what hit ’em!”
As it turned out, in the short term it actually made the war deadlier than ever. German submarines had usually stayed away from North American coastal waters for fear of provoking the United States into declaring war. But now that the United States had joined the Allies, there was no reason for the Germans to avoid sinking ships anywhere they wanted to. And they didn’t waste any time getting to work. By January of 1942 they were torpedoing ships up and down the eastern seaboard. The Americans were unready for war and were caught just as flat-footed in the Atlantic as they had been at Pearl Harbor. One German submarine sank a tanker within sight of New York City, and the Americans were so unprepared that not a single U.S. warship was dispatched to counterattack or even investigate. The Germans sank six more ships off the American coast over the next few nights. The U-boats were now almost literally on our doorstep.
Now we had to watch for submarines right off our own coast, not just out in the Atlantic and around Britain. So I wasn’t surprised when Ken and I were abruptly reassigned to convoy duty. In truth, I was relieved. I hadn’t joined the Navy to become a “barrack stanchion.” I wanted to sink some German submarines and wipe that smug look off Hitler’s face just as much as I ever did. And now that I’d be on convoy duty again, I’d have a chance to see Aileen.
Chapter Seven
January 1942
As we left Halifax Harbour to form up the convoy, the weather was fair. The water was bitingly cold, but the seas were calm and the skies clear. Normally, calm seas and clear skies were the answer to a sailor’s prayers in a North Atlantic winter, but in wartime it was the worst situation you could imagine, because it was easier for the U-boats to operate. For the first few days of the trip we had air cover from the Royal Canadian Air Force. Subs were so fearful of air attacks that they would dive at the first sign of a plane. On this occasion we were kept company by an RCAF Digby bomber, which provided plenty of deterrent, riding shotgun out ahead of the convoy. Unfortunately, none of our aircraft had the range to provide protection for us all the way. About 600 miles east of Newfoundland, as Ken and I stood watch on the forward gun deck, the Digby reached the outer edge of its operational range. It banked and doubled back toward us, wagging its wings in farewell as it flew over our deck and back toward its base in Newfoundland.
“Well, there goes our big friend,” Ken muttered. “It’s into the Black Pit with us.”
We had now entered what was officially known as the mid-Atlantic Air Gap. But the Black Pit is what we called it, and that’s exactly what it felt like when we were sailing into it.
“Six hundred miles of open ocean to cross, with no air protection. It’s just us against the U-boats now,” muttered Ken as he cleaned the salt off the Lewis gun.
One of the petty officers, a guy by the name of Jenkins who had been reassigned to our ship for this leg, added, “I’ve just come off a westbound run. The Black Pit is crawling with subs now. They’ve figured out the range of our escort aircraft almost to the mile. So they’ve been massing their wolf packs out there in the Gap, where they can hit us hardest without worrying a
bout our bombers getting the drop on them.”
“I’ll check the four-inch gun,” I said. “Sounds like we might need it.”
Later that afternoon after inspecting the gun, I spent an hour up in the crow’s nest. The sea was calm. The sunset was red and gold, the last rays glinting silver off the gentle wavetops. By the time I was about to go off duty, the ocean and the sky above it had grown dark. The moon hadn’t risen yet, so we were sailing in near complete darkness. I was thinking that for once the sea was gentle enough that my clothes weren’t wet, my hammock wasn’t wet, the mess deck wasn’t wet, and I might actually get four luxuriously dry hours of sleep without being flung about like a rag doll.
I was on the gun deck when I heard a voice from the ASDIC room behind me.
“Incoming torpedoes!” shouted the ASDIC operator. “Sounds like a freight train! They’re coming straight at us from the stern, off to port side!”
Without a moment’s hesitation the captain called out, “Hard to starboard!”
The bow swung round and the ship leaned over at a crazy angle. I hung on to my 4-inch gun to keep from getting thrown overboard. From my position I could see two trails of bubbles racing toward us from out of the dark, frigid water. Beyond that, there was just the blackness of a North Atlantic night.
After months of preparing and waiting, I finally had my first encounter with a U-boat. And now, as I watched the torpedo trails homing in on us and felt the ship turning agonizingly slowly as the helmsman threw the wheel around, I wondered if it would be my last.
I looked past the trails from the torpedoes, out over the ocean, but saw nothing but blackness.
