On May 4, 2010
On May 4, 2010, the centennial anniversary of the founding of the Canadian naval service, H.M.C.S. Fredericton sailed into Halifax harbour. The timing was deliberate. Fredericton had just completed a six-month deployment to the Arabian Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Strait of Hormuz. There, in waters now familiar to Canada’s sailors, Fredericton had chased pirates and terrorists in the sweltering tropic heat.
Operation Saiph, as Fredericton’s deployment was called, involved working with a “coalition of the willing” to check the chaos that threatened the free and peaceful movement of commerce on the waters of the Middle East. Her mission actually involved two separate activities. In the northern waters of the Arabian Gulf, along the Pakistani coast, and in through the Strait of Hormuz, the target was the flow of terrorists and the drugs that funded their campaigns. These were, in the words of Lieutenant (N) Dave Becerra, Fredericton’s intelligence officer, “intelligence driven” operations. The ship was linked to a global network of police, military, and special intelligence systems that targeted the movement of people, suspected terrorists, and drugs. It helped that most countries in the area are cooperating in the battle against the illegal drug trade, so laws on trafficking in hashish or cocaine were easy to enforce. A suspect vessel would be located by Fredericton’s helicopter and ordered to stop, and a boarding party sent over in the frigate’s rigid high-speed inflatable boat (R.H.I.B.) to conduct a search.
Chasing pirates off the Somali coast and in the Gulf of Aden was a combination of patrols and “incident”-driven operations. Trade passing through the area was sometimes escorted, especially World Food Aid vessels carrying supplies to Somalia, and convoys were conducted in the Gulf of Aden. Otherwise, Fredericton was on the lookout for trouble. The helicopter would be airborne just before dawn for a sweep around the area to upgrade and augment the frigate’s “situational awareness” following a night of steaming. The helo then would do another patrol around midday, and one at last light — when pirates preferred to attack.
The pirates Fredericton was looking for bear little resemblance to the garishly dressed swashbucklers of Hollywood movies. Somali pirates — and they are invariably Somali — are generally poor young men driven onto the sea by the chaos of their country. Equipped by land-based pirate cartels, they patrol several hundred kilometres to seaward in open wooden boats propelled by powerful outboard engines. Their equipment is rudimentary: a few assault rifles, some rocket-propelled grenades, and a ladder. The boats carry basic supplies of fuel and water, and probably a supply of khat, a local leaf they chew for its narcotic effect.
These small pirate boats generally operate in pairs and attack ships from the stern, approaching on either quarter so that, whether the ship steers left or right, one boat is well placed to lay alongside. If all goes well, the pirates are on board in a few minutes and the crew succumbs without a fight. The ship is then taken into port and the ransom process begins.
Not all pirate ventures end well, and Fredericton’s crew heard tales of small boats found well out into the Indian Ocean with desiccated bodies aboard: the result of engine failure or the pirates’ running out of water. In some instances, the crews of merchant ships, or the security personnel they have hired, fight back.
Fredericton’s anti-piracy and anti-terrorist patrols were largely uneventful. For six months, she shifted from the Strait of Hormuz to the Strait of Bab-el-Mendeb between the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea. “The action always seemed to be elsewhere,” Lieutenant Commander Steve Waddell, Fredericton’s captain, observed. “When we were in a quiet sector, things would flare up somewhere else. By the time we got to the scene of the action things were quiet again, but then something would happen in the area we just left.” It seems that Fredericton’s reputation as a “lucky ship,” inherited from her predecessor, the Second World War corvette that never saw a shot fired in anger, has survived.
At the time of the Canadian naval centennial in 2010, most of the fleet was designed and built in New Brunswick, including H.M.C.S. Fredericton, the only major Canadian warship to be deployed overseas that year. She is seen here in the Mediterranean returning from her six-month deployment to the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean. Milner Collection.
But the crew, the helicopter, and the ship performed superbly. Fredericton did everything Waddell asked of her and under conditions for which she was never designed. The C.P.F.s had been intended for use in the North Atlantic, so one of the greatest challenges in the Arabian Gulf was keeping the ship and its crew cool. The ship’s four air-conditioning systems — “chillers” in naval parlance — were mission-critical systems. In theory, Canadian Patrol Frigates have one hundred percent redundancy in their allocation of chillers: in the North Atlantic only two are usually needed, primarily to keep the computer, combat, and sensor systems cool, while the engines can be cooled with seawater. But when the sea temperature is over 30 degrees Celsius and the air temperature is at nearly 50 degrees, the four chillers work continuously. Had even one of them failed, Fredericton would have had to scurry into port for repairs. None did. Fredericton’s aging Sea King helicopters also performed exceptionally well, typically flying six or eight hours per day. When her first helicopter reached the limits of its allowable flying time, it was switched for another during a long layover in Dubai. The second worked flawlessly, too, nursed by a skilled collection of maintainers in Fredericton’s helicopter detachment. But the flying was hard on the aircrew, who had to operate the helicopter without either air conditioning or cooled flying suits. By the time the deployment was over, Fredericton’s helicopter had flown more than 650 hours, a new record for helicopters deployed to the Middle East.
When Fredericton turned for home in early April 2010, Operation Saiph had gone off without a hitch. The crew’s reward was a few days in Egypt and a chance to see the pyramids, a long weekend in Istanbul, and a quiet cruise across the Mediterranean. Some departments within the ship used the time to train personnel, while engine trials tested propulsion in anticipation of a prolonged docking starting in 2011, and the helicopter continued to fly.
Temperatures went down and the seas rose as Fredericton travelled west. Passage through the Strait of Gibraltar under low heavy clouds, cool temperatures, and rain brought smiles to many faces on board: Fredericton had not seen rain since before Christmas. Chief Petty Officer Gerry Ross would have liked the rain a little earlier. As the ship’s “Buffer,” the petty officer responsible for topside appearance, he had already spent some time hosing off the dust that had accumulated on the ship during long days at sea off the Arabian Peninsula. Once out into the Atlantic, where the sea colour turned deep green and the long ocean swell caused the frigate to pitch and roll, her crew began to feel that they were “home.” Close enough, at least, to commit the ashes of several deceased veteran sailors to the deep at the request of their relatives. As Coxswain Percy Rasmussen said, “We couldn’t bury them in a foreign sea.”
H.M.C.S. Brunswicker, the current naval establishment in Saint John and the last official navy presence in the province. DND Photo
The meander home included a weekend in Madeira for a “run ashore.” Not only did Madeira, known for its wine, prove to be a semi-tropical paradise, but also a place where, for the first time in six months, the ship was able to stand down from the high level of security she had maintained since November. The .50 calibre machine guns on the quarterdeck and the bridge wings used to protect the ship from suicide craft were quietly stowed. So, too, were the assault rifles and pistols of the duty watch, so much in evidence during her port visits in the Middle East. And the crew could straggle ashore and enjoy the island without fear of kidnapping or worse.
Then, a slow — much too slow for many aboard — passage to St. John’s, Newfoundland, on the frigate’s diesel engines followed in late April and early May. The long days of heat and a flat calm were now replaced by a six-metre following sea that set Fredericton into a rhythm familiar to North Atlantic veterans. In Newfoundland, a few local sailors were allowed to leave the ship, making room for family and dignitaries for the final passage to Halifax.
Finally, on the morning of May 4, 2010, Fredericton motored quietly up Halifax harbour to a tumultuous welcome from friends, family, the local community, and the national media. All eyes were on the navy and on Halifax, and rightfully so. That the ship was named for New Brunswick’s capital city drew little, if any, comment. In fairness, that was not remarkable: all of the modern warships in the Canadian navy are named for communities. It might just as well have been Charlottetown or Vancouver or Toronto arriving.
But it bears repeating that those vessels — like most of the operational fleet in the year of Canada’s naval centennial and like Canada’s National Naval Memorial itself, H.M.C.S. Sackville — were built in New Brunswick. It serves to remind us that, for the past four hundred years, New Brunswick has played a crucial but often neglected role in Canada’s naval history.