LIFE ON A CORVETTE
“Wartime service at sea in corvettes, frigates or destroyers is guaranteed to instill a profound respect for nature’s power,” warned Lieutenant Geoffrey Hughson. “Sometimes it seems that the real opponent is the sea itself.”1 The winter weather in the North Atlantic was, as one sailor remarked, “a terrible awakening.”2 Massive waves—the Green Ones, in the sailor’s slang—battered the ships, sweeping over them from bow to stern, tearing away lifeboats from their moorings, and knocking about 420-pound depth charges like marbles. “The waves were so high that when you would crest one, it looked like you were looking 40 or 50 feet, maybe 75 feet down into a trough,” remembered Seaman Gerald Bowen. “You would crest that wave and you’d fall into the trough. Everybody just held on. Then of course the next sea would come in…. We lost all track of time.”3 The monstrous waves seemed to grab the upper deck, wrenching the corvette out of the water and then dropping it down with a thundering crash; it was known as “hitting milestones,” and it was stomach-shuddering in its power. “As the ship rolled and pitched, you were thrown around continuously, not daring to move without holding fast to something,” reported Signalman Howard Cousins of HMCS Algoma.4 Stomachs were emptied. Men were injured. It was a mad ride.
Lieutenant L.B. “Yogi” Jenson, the second-in-command or “Jimmy the one” aboard HMCS Niagara, wrote of one dawn where the faint light revealed “a wilderness of large, bitterly cold waves with streaming greybeards.” He was on the bridge looking down and he saw the ordnance artificer coming along the starboard side. “As I watched, a large wave came up over the deck beside him and lifted him overboard to vanish instantly. He was a young man of cheerful and gentle nature, devoted to his work.”5 They searched for two hours, but the unfortunate sailor never surfaced.
The sea and the ship are at the core of the naval experience. These expensive vessels take sailors in and out of battle, and ease them through hostile environments. Yet the ship does not function without a crew, whose individual members can be too easily forgotten in the broader narrative, or simply lumped together in the story recorded by the ship’s commander. It is the crew that fights the ship and keeps it seaworthy, and without high morale and efficiency, they would have little chance of surviving the trials of the North Atlantic. “Facing the dangers of the sea and the violence of the enemy creates a very special bond between men,” wrote Lieutenant Commander Allan Stevens, who served on half a dozen warships during the war.6
The North Atlantic was violent and dangerous. Most sailors felt they battled both the German U-boats and the seas.
The corvette was crowded. The crew’s mess deck was the space for living, sleeping, eating, and relaxing off duty. It included two triangular compartments, each a mere 7 by 10 metres, where some sixty or so sailors were crammed. The chiefs and petty officers had a separate area, and the officers, their wardroom. In the mess deck, benches—which also doubled as lockers—were positioned around the perimeter, and at the centre was a large table that was used for everything. Canvas hammocks hung from every conceivable spot of the deckhead, and men slept at all times because of the watch-keeping schedule. On the overcrowded HMCS Sackville, John Margison remembered that the “micks”—the hammocks—were slung three deep.7 Even then, on most corvettes, there were rarely enough swinging beds, and so new sailors were directed to the benches. Here, men learned to sleep propped up, with at least one leg on the floor to balance against a sudden lurch in the ship. To wake up face down in a puddle of stagnant water, with cockroaches crawling over one’s body, was not the glory of war that any sailor had imagined.
Dim red and blue emergency lights provided a haunting glow, and there was a constant coming and going of men as the four-hour watches ended and new ones began. All sailors slept in their clothes for fear of the torpedo blast that would send them scrambling for safety in darkness, as power was usually lost. A jacket or sweater was always kept free, with heavy seaboots ready for searching feet. The working rig was a denim shirt and cotton dungarees. Men wore layers of clothing in all but the warmest weather. Discipline was looser on corvettes than on destroyers: the sailors took pride in their weathered boats and casual dress. When they were at sea, especially in good weather, members of a corvette’s crew could be seen wearing hockey sweaters or other unconventional clothing, leaving the “pusser” and by-the-books British looking down on them as mismatched pirates—pirates, that is, who supported the Montreal Canadiens or Toronto Maple Leafs.8
“You were always trying to dry your clothes,” recounted gunner Max Reid. “Even when you went to bed you were quite wet and cold … you always seemed to be shivering.”9 Water dripped from the condensation forming on the deckhead and, during storms, the sea found its way into most parts of the ship, creating a sloshing swill of foul-smelling water. In one storm, Lieutenant-Commander Alan Easton noted how there was “Water rushing from end to end of the mess carrying everything movable on its tide and crashing abruptly against the bulkhead.”10 Wet and stinking bundles of duffle coat and oil-skin were hung from any spare hook, or left in a corner to add to the stench.
Sailors eating dinner in the seamen’s mess of the corvette HMCS Kamsack underneath the swaying hammocks.
The irony was not lost on sailors that while everyone was damp, hardly any fresh water was stored on the ship, and almost all of that was earmarked for cooking. This made showering impossible, except for the occasional sponge bath. One sailor remarked, “When you are in a ship you go with about a two-litre jug to the galley every day. [The cook] fills it up with water, takes ½ for cooking and gives you the other half. That’s what you live on for water. That’s for drinking, cleaning your teeth, laundering, you name it. Which meant that you never laundered, hardly ever cleaned you teeth and it was really just for drinking water.”11 The shortage of water also meant that many men developed “sailor’s skin,” a nasty irritation resulting from the lack of water and the harsh soap needed to scrub away the oil.12
George Richmond, from Thunder Bay, Ontario, enlisted at seventeen and remembered how the sailors were routinely “seasick, and you can add that to the cocktail on the floor.”13 The chronically seasick, wrote James Lamb, lived “at sea in a sort of halfworld, between life and death, sustained only by a handful of crackers or soup for all the days and weeks of a voyage. Seasickness—real seasickness—is endured by these few with a resolute bravery that sometimes awes their heedless and healthy shipmates.”14 Ray Culley went to sea before his nineteenth birthday and served as a visual signalman in HMCS Summerside. His first trip out of St. John’s harbour introduced him to the bane that stalked sailors:
Ten minutes past the gates you were hit suddenly and very forcibly with a rolling and pitching sensation, as if you were standing on a cork in a bowl of water. It never relented and was compounded by very thunderous waves of ocean water, called “green ones,” which landed with a thud and when they hit you they left a very hard salty film on your face, hands, or outer garments. The pitching and rolling were relentless, and after only a few minutes you were completely void of any nourishment you had consumed within the past eight hours. You hung on to whatever was handy, be it a railing, bulkhead, fellow rating, officer, whatever. You also knew in your heart of hearts that you were going to DIE!15
Culley survived the sickness and fourteen trips across the Atlantic, but the first few hours of every voyage left him spewing.
John Peterson, who enlisted in the navy when he came of age in 1944, recounted the many cases of seasickness on the corvettes: “You see them crawled up in a corner just moaning and groaning.”16 Such was their misery, with no relief. The violently sick gravitated to the upper deck during their off hours, finding safe haven behind the single funnel. It provided a little shelter from the howling winds. There, the huddled ill—known as “the Funnel Gang”—found some comfort from heat radiating up from the warm engine room. Seasickness did not just strike landlubbers or the inexperienced. Frank Curry wrote of his first major ocean-crossing in HMCS Kamsack, where most of the crew, even “hardened Newfoundland fishermen, who had years of rough seagoing behind them,” all suffered “the misery of the deadliest plague of the sea, seasickness.”17 While most sailors got over the sickness, some never did. Harry Barrett always spent his first ten to twelve hours at sea after a spell on land throwing up continuously. He remembered a fellow sufferer who lost thirty pounds in a two-week crossing; reduced to a mere skeleton of a man, he had to be drafted ashore on medical leave, never to return to a ship.18
With vomit added to the stale water in the mess deck, and to the body odour of men living too close together, the fug from the below deck was something to behold. Moreover, the portholes had to be closed at night for fear of allowing light to escape and attract U-boats, and so the mess decks were impregnated with a dreadful stink. “The smell in the mess decks was forever a stench of wet clothing, sea spew, and dampness that would never go away until you arrived in port, opened scuttles and deadlights, and scrubbed with disinfectant,” recounted Clifford Ashton, who served nearly three years at sea on several ships.19 “Please take it from one that was there,” advised Al Bonner years after the war. “The stench of the foul air in the forward mess deck was indescribable!”20
SAILORS HAD TO EAT. Somehow the cook made meals for 60 to 100 crew members, three times a day, in what often resembled a roller coaster. The galley was about 4 metres long and 3 metres wide, and the stove and pots were designed to be locked in place. While a railing was fastened in front of the stove for the cook to hold on to, ladling stew or keeping boiling potatoes in their pots was a skill unto itself. There were few cooks whose arms did not bear the scars of their daily kitchen affrays.
Breakfast was oatmeal porridge and, when supplies lasted, eggs and toast, sometimes known as “chicken on a raft.” However, the switch from real eggs to powdered came distressingly fast, particularly on ships leaving Britain, where there were always shortages of fresh food. “Red lead and bacon” was one of the staples on the corvettes, and served at breakfast and lunch. It consisted of cans of tomatoes thrown in a pot with fatty bacon, and whatever else that could be found in the victualling store to stiffen the fare. The sight of barely cooked bacon floating like turds in a red sauce was enough to make more than a few sailors lose what was left in their stomach. And yet the dish recurs so often in sailors’ memoirs that they appear to have enjoyed something of a love–hate relationship with “red lead.” Bangers and mash was another staple, even as the sausage seemed, according to Lieutenant Geoffrey Hughson, to be made of “80% sawdust.”21 Because of the shortage of water, the chalky, chunky powdered milk was thick enough to be gag-worthy, and many young men turned to Coca-Cola, which they brought on board and drank morning, noon, and night. Some in the Royal Navy even took to calling the Canadian navy the “Coca-Cola navy.”
Lieutenant Richard Pearce of the corvette HMCS Arvida wrote, “The bread loaves got smaller each day as the green mould was cut away.”22 As fresh food was eaten or rotted, sailors turned towards canned goods, and found innovative ways to prepare meals. Complaints were common, but few men gave up on the meals that came from the galley. Patrick Nelson, who commanded ships in both the RCN and RN, remarked of his generation and their expectations: “We were mostly children of the Depression in Canada and brought up pretty frugally and I don’t recall actually having serious trouble about the food or the rations.”23 Many sailors were used to belttightening and going hungry.
CORVETTES WERE NOT EQUIPPED with a loud speaker system, and so most orders—other than the alert station’s alarm bell and direct communication to the boiler room—were transmitted through the traditional bosun’s call that was carried through the voice pipes that ran through the ship. While detailed commands through the voice pipes could also be attempted, they were usually garbled and difficult to decipher. So the bosun used a whistle to make his calls, modulating the sound by opening and closing his fist, and these signals were understood by all sailors. It was the whistle that communicated to the men “hands to dinner” and times for watch change.
Sailors stood watch in good weather and bad in search of enemy U-boats.
Each crew member was assigned regular tasks as well as additional duties when ordered to action stations. A ship had many specialized branches. The seamen looked after operations on deck, including radar and guns; the torpedo hands were responsible for electrical matters and torpedoes; the communication hands oversaw visual and radio signalling; the supply hands served as cooks and stewards; the asdic section sent out the sonar pings and listened for their echoes; and then there were the men in the bowels, the engine room and stoker crews, who kept the vessel at speed. Each branch had a chief petty officer or a petty officer, and there were, of course, the officers of the ship, all of whom reported to the captain.
The seamen were also required to engage in mundane maintenance. Steel ships required constant chipping of old paint and the application of new coats, as well as attention to the spreading rust spots. A couple of weeks in the Atlantic, wrote one officer, and a ship was “covered with rust and crap.”24 Months of continuous service left corvettes with dangerous rust holes in the deck, and ships were forced periodically to go for more extensive repair, known as a refit.
The other primary duty for most seamen was watch. The crew was organized into three watches: Red, White, and Blue. Each sailor put in an eight-hour day, divided into two four-hour shifts. Those on watch stood in the crow’s nest, on the bridge, and on the quarterdeck, surveying the sea. A four-hour watch was long, boring, and cold. Jeffry Brock, a Canadian who commanded a series of British warships, wrote of being reduced to the “match stick trick.” While on watch he was often so “weary, sick, and exhausted” that he propped open his eyelids by inserting matchsticks, broken at both ends, between the upper and lower lids.25 Seaman James Galloway recounted one of his first watches onboard HMCS Agassiz (pronounced Aga-see and named after a farming community in the Fraser Valley, British Columbia), where he was desperately afraid that he would miss a lurking U-boat in the gloom. “My eyes were aching, as were my hands from holding up the binoculars.”26 All of this was made worse by his constant vomiting. The first lieutenant scolded Galloway for the mess and gave him two buckets: one to clean up the wheelhouse and the second into which he could direct his spew.
A watch might be blessed by a cloudless, clear sky, stars abright, and the sea lapping gently at the ship. For these the crew were thankful. On dirtier nights they were blasted by gales, the frenzied wind lashing and nearly tearing oil skins from a seaman’s body. The midnight watch was a bone-chiller. To be roused from only a few hours of fitful sleep to face the roiling sea was a bitter experience. Strong men survived it through gritted teeth and set jaw. In the winter, the weather was so frigid that, according to one witness, the “life seemed to drain slowly out of the ends of the body.”27
“When you went to action stations on the upper deck, or if you were an upper deck man and your watch was up there, you put on every bit of clothing you had,” remembered Gerald Bowen, whose father survived the trenches of the Great War and whose brother was serving in the current conflict. “You had sweaters on and pants and big sea socks and sea boots and then you put a duffel coat on and if it was a stormy night, you’d put an oil skin over that, then over the top of that, you had to put your lifejacket. It was a very miserable existence.”28 Water still found its way down the backs of necks. Most men developed their own technique for avoiding this wet intrusion, usually some variation of a rolled-up towel worn as a scarf to sop up a measure of the leakage; but by the end of a watch, few men were dry.
Relief from the toil and hardship came in the form of the beloved kye, a viscous drink made from a block of coarse chocolate, scoops of sugar, and canned milk. Kye, according to Lieutenant A.G. W. Lamont, “brightened one’s life…. Nothing else could have approached its magic in raising flagging spirits on watch in the small hours of the morning.”29 In a proper pot of kye, according to one veteran of the North Atlantic, a spoon would “stand vertical in the cup at boiling temperature for at least 10 seconds before touching the side.”30 Served piping hot, it provided both comfort and caffeine, and tasted damn fine despite a frothy coating of fat. Harry Barrett remembered that the steaming cocoa’s “welcome warmth could be felt to your very toes.”31 But one was never warm for long, even in the summer, although the beauty of a still sea and a rising sun was something at which to marvel. Yet there was always the chance in the North Atlantic that the sea would shift from beautiful to bad in a frighteningly short time. “No corvette sailor ever talked of ‘ruling the waves’ or ‘conquering the deep,’” wrote James Lamb, and all sailors were wary of nature’s power.32
The winter months brought the added danger of a ship icing up, as the heaving water sprayed the vessel and froze to anything made of metal. Sailors called this “white mist.” When the air temperature dropped to freezing, or below, water droplets almost instantly turned to ice. It was as if the ship had been stricken by some terrifying mottling disease, as ice seemed to grow from every structure, as if it were alive. In a short period of time, the ice could thicken dangerously to 20 or 30 centimetres, adding enormous weight to a 60-metre corvette.33 The ship became a block of ice, but the weight was distributed unevenly, with ice coating one side more than the other and leaving it vulnerable to the crashing waves. “Every man on board had to turn to and chip ice,” recounted Gerald Bowen. “You used hammers, you used axes, you used crowbars, you used anything. You used your fists trying to get rid of the ice because if it built up to a sufficient weight, you might keel over.”34 The crew carried out their work as the waves pummelled them again and again. Even if he was tied down by lifelines, a sailor could be swept overboard by a rogue wave. After a few hours of this labour, a man was nearly done in. Still the sailors worked with the fury of the condemned, desperate to break the icy grip that might soon become a death grip. No Canadian warship ever went down from ice buildup, but all faced the possibility.
Ships iced up dangerously in the harsh North Atlantic. When they did, the entire crew chipped and smashed the ice to relieve the weight on the ship.
Good weather or bad, sailors were instructed to wear their deflated rubber life jacket, nicknamed a Mae West, around their waists. But many found them bulky and kept them in their lockers, observing mordantly that if a man fell into the Atlantic in winter, it did not matter if he was wearing a life vest or not, because the cold would kill him in minutes. However, the life jacket allowed countless sailors to chortle that they had slept with the movie star Mae West, or lain on her ample bosoms, or engaged in all manner of less printable activities. In 1943, the Mae West was replaced by a fuller, heavier life jacket, with a collar that kept an unconscious head out of the water. It also had a battery-powered blinking red light so that the wearer could be more easily spotted in the water. Many would-be rescuers found, tragically, that the light blinked on relentlessly, long after a man had succumbed to the freezing Atlantic.
Asdic and radar were crucial in the war against the U-boats, and the operators aboard a warship had a heavy responsibility in providing early warning against enemy attacks. Underwater submarine detection had been available since the last months of the Great War, but it was an unheralded aspect of naval warfare, and the Canadian navy had few experts in the difficult art. The corvette asdic operators were situated in the wheelhouse. They wore headphones and directed the sonar beam using a simple hand wheel, while listening to the pings and echoes for signs of a sub. The work of the “ping merchants” was mentally exhausting, and on destroyers they were cut off from most human contact, as they sat in the belly of the vessel. They worked on a two-and-four routine: two hours of listening and then four hours off, followed by the same again. The monotony was debilitating. A contact brought an adrenaline rush, but most of the return “pings” did not indicate enemy vessels. “Reverberations and tiny echoes from seaweed, fish, debris, fainter and fainter as the pulse of sound energy went out from the ship,” described Hal Lawrence. “Then, ping, again. Hour after hour, watch after watch. The asdic set had been going since sailing and wouldn’t stop until we reached safe haven.”35 After a few months of service, Frank Curry nearly collapsed from the strain of asdic operations and the responsibility for “safeguarding the ship … and the whole wing of the convoy.”36 Another operator remembered how the pings invaded his sleep, noting, “After two weeks at sea, we were completely drained, never getting a decent rest.”37
“YOU GOT TO KNOW A PERSON inside and out aboard ship,” observed Bill Nelligan.38 There were no secrets in the mess deck. These were “chummy” ships, one sailor remarked.39 Chummy they were, but not everyone was the best of friends. In the close living, the braggarts and liars were soon spotted, and arguments were not uncommon. Hal Lawrence, who served on many ships in his five and a half years of war service, wrote that while he loved most of the men he served with, he also learned “how to live and work cheek-by-jowl with men I actively disliked.”40 While a few bad seeds marred every crew, the young sailors banded together to deal with the constant adversity of life at sea. There were far more friendships than enmities, more good will than ill.
“Escorting convoys during the Second World War, was, for just a little under 100 per cent of the time, extraordinarily dull work,” penned Lieutenant L.B. Jenson.41 To pass the time and pinch some pleasure, almost everyone smoked. Most sailors stocked up on their favourite brand when they were in port. When the supply of North American cigarettes was exhausted, they turned to the British standard cigarette, the Churchman’s No. 1, which was generally despised, but not enough to keep it from a man’s lips. As Gerald Bowen remarked, “One of the most beautiful moments when you’re at sea was when you came down off watch and you went into the mess deck and somebody would have made a pot of tea and you’d have a cup of tea and a cigarette and nothing, nothing has ever tasted as good.”42 The bluish haze below deck was enough to make new men gag, but the tobacco aroma also masked some of the stench. Smoking was prohibited above deck. “At lookout stations, at the guns or on the bridge, the glow of a cigarette could mean a torpedo, and death,” wrote Lieutenant Geoffrey Hughson.43
“Up spirits” was piped daily at 11 A.M. All crew members over the age of twenty-one were given grog, a 2.5-ounce tot of rum mixed with two parts water, although some men preferred it with Coca-Cola. Chiefs and petty officers, and occasionally an old hand, could ask for the rum neat; however, undiluted navy rum was not for amateurs. One administering officer remarked that the rum “went straight down to your boots.” It was tough on the gut, but the “rum issue was the high point of the day for most men and was a major factor in maintaining morale.”44 While most men were classified “Grog,” those who chose temperance received an extra twenty-five cents a day in pay. Despite the not insubstantial bonus, the abstainers were in a minority, although all the young sailors under twenty-one were automatically “T,” for temperance. Most young sailors seem to have skirted the rules, and there are few mentions in letters, diaries, or memoirs of underage sailors not getting their rum.45
Singing was a common pastime, and often done with well-lubricated throats after the daily grog. “Sing-songs, limericks or parodies of songs were very popular, particularly ‘That was a Cute Little Rhyme, Sing us Another One, Do.’ Of course, ‘Roll Out the Barrel ’ and ‘Roll Along, Wavy Navy,’ were all sung with gusto,” recalled Al Bonner.46 “I served with one captain who had the greatest collection of pornographic songs that it is possible to imagine,” wrote Hal Lawrence, “and he sang them with an irrepressible gusto in a powerful, sonorous baritone, slapping his palms against his belly in the more rhythmic choruses and urging us to sing louder.”47 As sailors’ speech was already “salty”—with John Peterson, who served on the corvette, HMCS Midland, reporting that on a ship, “every other word is an F word”—songs demanded even more scandalous language, metaphors, and unadulterated vulgarity.48
The most famous, and dirty, song—although many vied for that plum recognition—was “The North Atlantic Squadron”:
Away, away with fife and drum,
Here we come, full of rum.
Looking for women who peddle their bum
In the North Atlantic Squadron.
When we arrived in Montreal, she spread her legs from wall to wall.
She took the Captain balls and all in the North Atlantic Squadron.
We were seven days at sea, the Captain took to buggery.
His only joy was the cabin boy in the North Atlantic Squadron.
A-sailing up and down the coast, now here’s the thing we love the most,
To fuck the girls and drink a toast to the North Atlantic Squadron.
Accolades and cheer were heaped on the singer who added original verses, and they never seemed to run dry, as amateur lyricists found new ways to describe improbable sexual gymnastics, loose women, and amorous farm animals. Like the popular and equally filthy “Mademoiselle from Armentières” from the previous war, few of the verses of “The North Atlantic Squadron” were written down, even as they remained legendary in the hearts of sailors and sung in closed company during the postwar years.
Commander Jeffry Brock recounted that while he was busy at sea, he still had time to consume 600 to 700 books during the war years.49 While most sailors did not have that sort of aptitude, during less boisterous times William P. Vradenburg, who served in HMCS Capilano, along with many of his mates passed off-hours by reading detective stories. “Whenever I was in port, I would pick up pocket books that I could stick in the top of my boot.”50 Lying in his hammock, Vradenburg generally did not get far into his novels before nodding off. “You never felt that you had fully caught up on your sleep, never.”51 With all the noise and commotion, it is a testament to the deep fatigue that plagued all men that anyone slept at all.
A poker game was underway day and night on the main table. The sharks ate the guppies, but the fish kept coming back. These men were accustomed to living with worse odds and higher stakes in the U-boat war. Gerald Bowen recounted how he sat down for some poker and “within five minutes the old hands had cleaned me out.”52 He endured a long month without tobacco and treats, an experience that taught him early in his career not to gamble, something he stuck with throughout his life. Most of his shipmates took longer to learn that lesson, if they learned at all. Lieutenant L.B. Jenson thought he had a gambling-free ship but found out after the war from old shipmates that the poker games ran continuously.53 The officers were excluded from most of the lower deck’s secrets.
A vibrant oral culture developed in the lower decks. Sailors talked and pontificated. There were some who were inveterate liars and stretched their stories with relish. Others had lived rich, wild, and occasionally desperate lives. New men learned from their briny elders about sex, prostitutes, and the mysteries of that world. There was shameless gossip and a constant exchange of rumours, yarns, and salty dips— nearly all of which were wildly wrong or exaggerated. Legends were shared that told of drinking, seafaring, and even of monsters of the deep. Superstitions were reinforced or discussed in hushed tones. New men learned, for instance, not to whistle on board the ship: the practice was said to invite storms.
Such seafaring traditions and legends forged bonds within the crew, but most sailors also kept up their connection to Canada, chiefly through letters. The return mail was often waiting in port. The missives “assuaged a terrible longing on the part of every one of the crew, a longing that ate and ate at a man’s heart,” wrote one sailor. Often accompanying the letters were packages filled with treats and cigarettes. “The arrival of mail,” wrote one veteran of the seas, “was a great occasion, magically restorative of morale and spirit to such an extent that the senders could hardly have imagined.”54
Letters from loved ones were central for morale, but Frank Curry felt a compelling need to create order and sense out of the chaotic war around him, and so he kept a diary. This was forbidden for security reasons and, he reported, when it was “discovered by my shipmates, [it] became a source of endless jokes at my expense. I think they were both puzzled and suspicious about my desire to write about our experiences. Wasn’t it bad enough to have to go through it all without re-living it again on paper?… But despite the many reasons for letting it go, I spent five long years jotting down the feelings, the events, the exhilaration, the fury of war, and the magic of the hours of respite.”55 Torpedo man John Peterson also kept a diary that he hid on his body throughout his wartime service for fear that it would be read or stolen: “It didn’t give me much space to write much. But a little note here and a little note there. Because I wanted to remember when the war was over a couple little things. Because you forget about things.”56 While some sailors felt the need to record their war, others were happy to ignore all thoughts of moments past or future, and simply to survive the present.
Card games ran day and night in the tight confines of the mess deck. Sailors who lived by the long odds of their dangerous profession did not seem to mind losing big stakes in games of chance.
Sailors faced death every day, but many did it with a smile. Humour, pranks, and jokes were common. Should we expect any different from adolescents and young men? Sub-Lieutenant Ray Richardson of the RCNVR, who served in several corvettes over five years, shared the story of a prank played on a hapless crew member. During one convoy crossing that took them close to the English coast, HMCS Mimico picked up the corpse of a pilot who had crashed his Spitfire. “We sewed the body up in canvas … and put him under the forward gun platform…. The midnight watch wanted to pull a joke on one of our fellows in the watch called ‘Happy.’ He was a great lad, but perhaps a little gullible.” The body of the flyer was transferred to a secure spot and one of the men was sewn up in some canvas. Happy was told to move the body. “As soon as Happy got a few feet carrying the body at the head end, the lad inside the canvas started to moan and wriggle. The poor guy was so frightened he ran the full length of the ship screaming bloody murder.” While the joke was crude, Richardson shared that he and his mates would do anything to “generate a laugh” and to “take our minds off the daily miserable work at hand.”57
Even the cockroaches could be conscripted into the fun. All ships were infested. The little monsters normally stayed out of heavily trafficked areas, but an unwary hand moving crates or baggage was more likely than not to be shocked by the discovery of a swarming mass of shiny, black uglies. Ray Culley remarked that prior to slicing the bread, “one had to remember to hit the end of the bread with the handle of the knife, until all the cockroaches scrambled out of the air holes.”58 By some accounts, sailors had to learn to sleep with their mouths closed for fear of cockroaches dropping from the deckhead. Still, it was said that cockroaches killed the bedbugs, which made them the lesser of two evils. The phlegmatic sailors found a way to make the cockroaches work for them, trapping them and entering them in races. “Each had his speedster in a matchbox and put up a shilling, a starting and finishing line was drawn on a table, money was put in a pot and the race was on,” wrote George Zarn, who served aboard the armed merchant cruiser HMCS Prince Robert.59
EVEN WITH THE PRANKS AND FUN, with the endless chat and cigarettes, and all of it enlivened by kye and grog, the war at sea wore down the Canadian sailors. They were pushed too hard, lacking enough ships to cover the convoys and enough time at the end of their arduous voyage to recover before doing it again. A saying in the corvettes, recounted Bill Perry of Victoria, British Columbia, who served on a number of ships including the Alberni, was that the sailors were “fed up, fucked up and far from home.”60 Captain E.B.K. Stevens wrote a report in October 1941, warning of the enormous stress on the Newfoundland Escort Force ships’ crews: “Recently corvettes have escorted convoys east-bound for sixteen days and then after between four and eighteen hours in harbour have returned with west-bound convoys, this voyage lasting between fourteen and sixteen days. This is quite unacceptable. There seems to be a strong tendency to estimate the endurance of these small ships principally on their fuel carrying capacity. This is not only fallacious, but positively dangerous…. Unless very urgent steps can be taken … I must report that grave danger exists of breakdowns in health, morale and discipline.”61 The RN and the United States Navy also commented in official communication that the RCN, and particularly the NEF, was stretched too thin. The Canadian crews were at sea about twice as frequently as their counterparts in the RN.62
Most convoys never encountered U-boats, but the subs always lurked out in the open seas, and the threat weighed heavily on the sailors’ minds. The strain was even worse when a U-boat was spotted trailing a convoy, and all the marked ships knew that it was holding back, vectoring other U-boats to the coordinates. James Lamb remembered the rising stress provoked by knowledge that a sub was on their trail: “We steam on, everyone on tenterhooks; on the bridge and in the messdecks the tension is almost palpable. Yet at sea we are all fatalists.”63 Sailors worried about the odds, but, as Ralph Burbridge revealed, “We were always hoping that if someone’s going to get it, it’ll be someone else, you see. Everybody has that. It doesn’t matter whether you’re on a naval ship or a merchant ship, or in the trenches, I guess, or in a plane.”64 If death was coming, every sailor had to believe that it would not strike at him. That was one of the mental tricks that allowed sailors to keep functioning. But of course the fear found ways to creep into a man’s mind. Often it came on during the pitch dark of a midnight watch. What was out there? What was to be one’s fate? Not even sleep brought escape from the tentacles of the deep. “I couldn’t fall asleep when I turned in, although I was exhausted,” wrote Hal Lawrence. “I would stare at the ship’s side by my bunk and think, ‘If a U-boat has worked herself up on the bow of the convoy, at, say, two miles, and if she is firing a spread of torpedoes, say, now, then it will take the fish three minutes to arrive.’ And then I would count up to a hundred and eighty seconds. One, two, three, four…. Then I would say, ‘Well, I guess she didn’t fire. But, if she were firing now. One, two, three, four, five…’ And in the morning I’d tell myself that it was just another form of counting sheep.”65
The fear of a sudden U-boat attack weighed on all seamen.
Life on board a corvette was mentally and physically exhausting. But these were tough men. They had grown up during the Depression and had known hardship all their adult lives. And, as many sailors recounted, they survived the bitter sea conditions particularly because they were young. Since they knew of no better or different life, they endured the privation and eventually shrugged it off. They might have been cynical and satirical. They groused and grew angry at their plight. But they knew what they were doing was important for the war effort. “I had a great feeling for the merchant sailors that were on those ships,” remembered Frank Curry. “If we got a convoy through without losing a ship, surely we were doing our job!”66 Despite the hardship, the weather, the rough crossings, and the terror of being hunted, morale remained high in the little corvettes. Herb Jones remarked proudly of his crew on the HMCS Dauphin, “my predominant memories remain of a very close comradeship, unselfish sharing, tremendous ‘esprit de corps’ and pride in our ship and the Navy.”67
