[BillCar]

This is a repost and expansion that grew out of discussions in the Silent Hunter III forum thread "Historical Hunting Techniques". As there seems to be some interest, I will post excerpts here from my grandfather's memoirs.

He served in the RCN/VR (Royal Canadian Navy/Volunteer Reserve) from 1940 to 1945, aboard the Flower-class corvettes Drumheller and Sudbury, and the Tribal-class destroyers Haida and Huron (all HMCS). He saw convoy duty in the Atlantic, and served repeatedly on the Murmansk Run from Scapa Flow. He saw combat with Elbing and Narvik-class destroyers in the channel, and combat in the Bay of Biscay. There is more to his story than available here right now – he has talked to me about some of the more horrible things he experienced, but did not feel like writing about them in great detail. As a result, with his permission, I may include my own paraphrasings of some of those more unpleasant stories.

Additionally, as this is an excerpt from his memoir, it only deals briefly with his naval history (he was an accomplished golf pro and the first pediatric doctor in our city, as well, and he seems to be much happier writing about these things).

I'll begin with the story of how he came to join the navy, and his first draft. Some of the dates presented may be slightly out of order, but this can be corrected, as his personal service records are with him (but not with me). Names of all but the commanders of ships / other most prominent sailors (i.e. Harry G. DeWolf, commander of Haida, who was the most decorated commonwealth sailor of the war) have been edited.

Also: if you have questions, I will take them down and ask my grandfather on the weekend when I am home from university. He'll answer to the best of his ability, but keep in mind, as he himself so frequently states: as one man in the midst of a very, very big war, he only had a small piece of the picture at any one time!

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Part I: In and out of the Army, Radar Education at UWO, and HMCS Drumheller

In the early months of 1938, a few of my friends and I found ourselves bored, and decided to join the army. My mother was not pleased. We joined the Canadian Fusiliers Reserve Regiment at London, Ontario in April of 1938 -- I was only seventeen at the time, and obviously did not present a birth certificate.

My only notable action in the army came when the Thames River flooded, putting London West under water, and I was stationed on Wharncliffe Road to assist in water-stopping. My other big moment came when King George V and Queen Elizabeth visited London, and the regiment lined up on Dundas Street. We stood at attention in front of the armouries in the blistering heat, wearing winter uniforms -- a couple of soldiers fainted.

The Second World War began in September of 1939, and it became obvious that the Fusiliers wouldn't be going anywhere for a while. We transferred instead to the Royal Canadian Army Corps. In September 1940, we still had not been called into active duty, and some of the fellows at Breezie's had heard that the navy was looking for men with at least a Grade 13 education to go to the University of Western Ontario for advanced radio science training. Earl *****, George **** and myself all transferred to the navy. So finally, I got to attend university -- I suppose I owe that much to Adolf Hitler.

Our course was supposed to last six months or more, but the situation in the North Atlantic was shaping up poorly for the allies, so we were rushed through and shipped out to the Stadacona Barracks in Halifax to commission the HMCS Drumheller. I had met Bunny ********* at Western, and was very happy when I discovered that we were both Drumheller draftees. To this day, he is still one of my best friends.

Drumheller, like all newly commissioned corvettes, had a very green crew. Most of us had never seen an ocean. The navy attempted to put sailors with actual experience on each new ship, but these were unfortunately few in number. We on the Drumheller were lucky to be given a few really good ones.

George Griffith had been a captain in the Royal Navy, and while in the service, he had visited Canada. He liked it so much that, on retiring, he purchased an apple orchard here. When Canada, desperate for experienced seamen, asked him, George joined our navy and was posted to Drumheller. We also got two RCN regular forcers with experience -- Leading Seamen Elwood ****** and Able Seamen Stan ****. All of the officers were RCNVR. Elwood and Stan would be my teachers, as well as being responsible for me getting an early able seaman rating and subsequently having Captain Griffith recommend that I go ashore to pass the oral, written and skill-testing leading seaman tests. When I passed the tests for leading seaman, my friend Ray ********* claimed that he had searched the records and that I was the youngest leading seaman in the Canadian navy.

Ray had been a member of the Drumheller's commissioning crew too, but now worked ashore in Naval Command. On our first convoy to Iceland, he had become horribly seasick on the first day at sea and did not recover at all during the course of the journey. When we got alongside Reykjavik, I went down to the mess deck and told Ray that he could get up; we had arrived. He said 'please don't kid me, I can still feel the ocean rolling'. Ray had to be carried ashore, hospitalized, and given IV fluids. He was returned to Halifax two weeks later and hospitalized yet again after his return voyage, eventually being assigned to permanent shore duty. Seasickness was common, but Ray's was certainly the most severe case that I ever saw. Some were stricken, while others were not. For whatever reason, neither Bunny nor I were ever affected.

When I left the Drumheller, Bunny took over the radar crew. A year previously, we had taken a convoy to Southampton so that we could be fitted with a state-of-the-art radar system. Our original set was a Canadian invention, but rather than being an improvement on the British version (the British being the first off the mark with radar, and constantly improving on their already-impressive systems), it was vastly inferior. The radar antenna was almost identical to the early television antennas -- a long rod with bars protruding from both sides. You still see the odd one of those television antennas today. The set worked perfectly on land (assuming the land was relatively flat), but on the rolling seas, the antenna would be pointing at the sky one second and at the ocean floor the next. The designers apparently knew roughly as much about radar as I did when I graduated so suddenly from Western -- that is to say, very little.