[BillCar]

@ Capt. Morgan: I agree, anyone with an interest in naval history should visit HMCS Haida, the only remaining Tribal class destroyer. Hamilton is only about an hour/hour and a half north of the US border, so anyone from NY state should certainly come visit, at least!

My grandfather has always lived within an hour's drive of her, ever since she was moved to Toronto. We usually celebrate his birthday on board.

KL-Alfman – I can already answer your questions.

1) On his part at least, respect. He has always told me "we never hated the Germans. We viewed them as having a job to do, like us, just on the wrong side of things. We didn't want them to succeed, but we also never thought of the guys serving on the ships as the real problem. We were out to beat Adolf Hitler."

2) Often times, the average seaman in the RCN and RN had only a picture of his own area of operations. My grandfather said – just last week, when he took me out for birthday lunch – that "we'd drive a U-Boat away from a convoy, or sometimes even sink it (or think we had, we'd see oil and debris, which sometimes they could fake, but usually, we would keep listening and if we heard nothing and they didn't come back up after several hours, we'd assume they were sunk). We often thought we were doing great, because we tended to luck out like that. We did have convoys take damage, of course, and we did lose ships, but it always seemed to us like we were succeeding for the most part. The thing was, that we didn't realize just how many of them there were! It was only after the war that I was reading about how many U-Boats were out there, and just how much damage they were doing. The worst fear I ever personally felt from a U-Boat was the time that Haida and Iroquois narrowly avoided being torpedoed on the Murmansk Run. I was on Huron by that point, but I heard the report come in live, and we could see them zigging and zagging on the far side of the convoy. I had a lot of friends on Haida, having served on her immediately before transfer to Huron."

3) I forget which ship it was, but he was on one that picked up survivors from a badly depth-charged U-Boat that managed to surface (this may have been the same incident he relates in the story above, when the task force was tracking the U-Boats to the Azores, and took prisoners). They threw down nets and hauled them up, and those men all wound up in a Canadian prisoner of war camp near Orillia or Timmins (sort of up towards central Ontario). They were given hot cocoa and blankets when they got on board. My grandfather doesn't know what happened to those specific men after the war ended and they were repatriated to Germany, but he does have friends today who were German POWs that came back to Canada because they liked it here (even though they were POWs at the time!). Some of them are Kriegsmarine, and I think he mentioned one or two U-Boat guys over the years. I know one big deal for German Kriegsmarine prisoners in Canada was getting to eat fresh eggs – they didn't get to see that while in the service, so in some ways, being a prisoner must not have been all bad!

Also, for his birthday some years ago, I gave him a DVD copy of the director's cut of Das Boot. He still watches it from time to time, and it always makes him cry.

Another point of interest, by the way, taken from uboat.net's page on Harry G. DeWolf (commander of Haida while my grandfather served aboard her):

2 Jul 1940
At 07.58 hours on 2 July 1940, the unescorted British passenger vessel Arandora Star was torpedoed and damaged by the German submarine U-47 about 125 nautical miles east by north of Malin Head, Co. Donegal and foundered later in position 56º30'N, 10º38'W. The ship had 479 German internees, 734 Italian internees, 86 German prisoners-of-war and 200 military guards on board. The master, 55 crew members, 91 guards and 713 Italians and Germans were lost. 118 crew members, 109 guards and 586 Italians and Germans were picked up by the Canadian destroyer HMCS St. Laurent (Cdr. H.G. De Wolf, RCN) and landed at Greenock.

So, it sounds like Commander De Wolf had a slight run-in with one Guenther Prien...