Ships serving in the RCN in WW2. Carriers 2 Ameer Class (Escorts) Nabob- Saw action in the Atlantic, including an attack on the Tripiz, was torpedoed August 22nd 1944, causing a 32 square foot hole below the water line, luckly she made her self back to Scapa Flow on her own, but then she was deemed unrepairable. Puncher saw no auction, but was part of bringing Canadians home from Europe. Crusiers Light Crusiers HMCS UGANDA (Quebec)- Uganda began with the RN and was damaged by a German glider bomb, was repaired in the US then was handed over to the RCN, in 1945 she joined 4th Crusier squadron (British Headed) in the Pacific and did operations against the Japanese. Served in RCN tell 1958. HMCS Ontario - Saw no major action, was on way to join the 4th Crusier Squadron (British headed) but arived to late, Served in RCN tell 1960. Armed Merchant Crusiers HMCS Prince Robert - before her 1943 conversion. PRINCE ROBERT spent her time from commissioning until 1943 in the Pacific, primarily looking for enemy merchant shipping. In 1943 she was refitted with AA armament, and transferred to the Atlantic and Mediterranean to escort convoys before refitting at Esqimalt until June 1945. She was then assigned to the British Pacific Fleet until the end of the war. HMCS Prince David - Was assigned to US Command for opperations in Aleutians, was made in to a troop landing ship for D-DAY and invasion of Southern France, and served in the Med, she hit a mine off Greece and that ended her wartime service. HMCS Prince Henry - Was made into a troop landing ship for D-Day and Southern France, and served in the Med. Frigates 70 3 Loch Class AA frigates 67 River Class Frigates Mine Countermeasures/Convoy Escorts 96 ALGERINE class convoy escort 12 BANGOR class minesweeper/convoy escort 54 FUNDY class minesweeper 4 LLEWELLYN class minesweeper 10 LAKE class minesweeper 16 Corvettes / Dedicated ASW 131 CASTLE class corvette 12 Revised FLOWER class corvette 41 FLOWER class corvette 70 WESTERN ISLES class ASW trawler 8 Destroyers 28 'V' class (DD) destroyer 2 TOWN class (DD) destroyer 8 (Recieved in Land Lease) RIVER class (DD) destroyer 14 TRIBAL class (DD) destroyer 4 All four of these ships saw extensive service in the Second World War. On April 29, 1944, ATHABASKAN was sunk after being hit by several torpedoes, with the outright loss of 128 men. The remaining three were all converted to DDEs similiar to the postwar-built TRIBALs, served in the Korean War, and were paid off in the early-1960s. On August 25, 1964, HAIDA arrived under tow in Toronto to become a floating memorial, and now rests at Ontario Place on the Toronto waterfront HMCS Haida HMCS ALGONQUIN (V Class) entering the harbour at Malta. The Canadian Navy was the 4th Largest in the World by 1945, and continued to serve until today.
Very interesting, Brad! I had always been curious about the Royal Canadian Navy, always described as "small but effective". Thanks!
Small but effective hardly goes anywhere close to describing the Canadian navy in ww2 Friedrich.. Grew from a small force to one of the biggest navies on the planet by end of ww2. Was up in Liverpool this weekend to see the old boys of the Atlantic battle.. Had what could be their last commemoration this weekend and held in Liverpool...which has many memories and associations with the battle of the Atlantic including a close associaton with the RCN.. Without them..the RCN, and RCNVR..Britain could never have hoped to defeat the U boats.. God bless Canada. Said many times at parades this weekend. http://members.shaw.ca/jollytar/WW2%20Ship%20Losses/Roll%20of%20Ships.htm http://www.hazegray.org/navhist/canada/ww2/
http://www.merseyside.org.uk/battleoftheatlantic2003/battle-of-the-atlantic-events.html Nephew marched in one of the sea scout parades honouring the old timers...City of Liverpool welcomes these guys back time and time again..very emotional stuff.. http://www.merseyside.org.uk/battleoftheatlantic2003/battle-of-the-atlantic-events.html
U boat enthusiasts should scroll down to historic warships section..nice pic of raised u boat.. in that last post
BBC page on the commemorations.. http://www.bbc.co.uk/liverpool/features/2003/04/battle_atlantic/index.shtml
And one last post..just as an aside...interesting dockyark museum hre across Mersey at Birkenhead.. http://www.warships.freeserve.co.uk/
NEWS STORY WAR HEROES HONOURED BY RUSSIA British veterans who braved Arctic seas and enemy attacks to carry supplies to Russia in the Second World War have been honoured for their bravery. Forty men who served in the famous Arctic Convoys of 1941-1945 received medals from Russian Ambassador Grigory Karasin at his London residence. Thousands of Britons were killed during the crucial convoy missions that kept the eastern front supplied. RECEIVED: 15/05/2003 18:51:25
The battle that made the Royal Canadian Navy Sixty years after the Battle of the Atlantic, Canada honours its sailors' finest hour. HALIFAX - The last floating remnant of Canada's most important contribution to the Second World War sits quietly on the Halifax waterfront, dwarfed by the modern warships anchored nearby. HMCS Sackville is a small and simple vessel, a slightly rusty, 60-year-old naval corvette. It's a museum piece now, the last of a fleet of ships built to escort convoys carrying everything from oranges, oil and military ordnance to the beleaguered isles of wartime Britain. While not a glamorous mission, it earned thousands of Canadian sailors a heroic place in history, and allowed Canada to claim an indispensable role in the defeat of Nazi Germany. "The Atlantic was perhaps the best thing we did, and we did it thoroughly," said Desmond Piers, 89, a retired rear admiral who commanded convoys of ships across 3,000 kilometres of perilous seas from 1939 to 1945. "Without the convoys, D-Day might not have been possible. We just had to get those supplies over to England." Rear Admiral Piers and hundreds of fellow veterans from the cold, wet struggle that Winston Churchill named the Battle of the Atlantic, will gather this weekend to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the longest campaign of the Second World War. In Ottawa, Halifax, Esquimalt, B.C., and Liverpool, England, aging sailors will march with military bands and say prayers today, at what is likely to be the final large-scale commemoration of the Atlantic campaign. Most of the Canadian sailors who fought against Germany were young men in their late teens and 20s. Their average age is now 81. Almost all will be gone for the next major anniversary in a decade. So the Canadian and British navies are mounting elaborate ceremonies this year to honour the battle before the last of its warriors disappear. One man who hopes to attend the events in Halifax, if his old bones will allow it, is Percy Lambert, an 81-year-old Newfoundlander and retired merchant mariner. Mr. Lambert was 17 when war broke out, and he is typical of his fellow veterans who seek neither praise nor sympathy -- only remembrance -- for the years they toiled and sometimes died on storm-tossed ships, dodging U-boats in the depths. As Mr. Lambert puts it, the rigours of the convoys and the risk of dying at sea were a decent tradeoff for the dreary, dead-end lives many young men faced in Canada in 1939. "We had nothing before the war," he says. "It was a rough life growing up. I was making six cents an hour cleaning fish in Grand Bank, Nfld., and all of a sudden I'm making $60 a month and I'm steering a ship around the world. It's a big difference." Mr. Lambert and other veterans of the Atlantic commemorate their experience in May because the spring of 1943 marked a turning point in the battle, when the Allies began to overcome the deadly assaults of the enemy submarines. Germany's fleet of U-boats was the most professional and highly trained submarine force in the world. It began striking targets from the earliest days of the war, first sinking the British liner Athenia -- bound for Montreal with 1,400 passengers -- on Sept. 4, 1939, off the coast of Scotland. Both sides understood that Britain's survival depended almost entirely on supplies of food, men and material brought by ship from North America and around the Empire. Britain and Canada were quick to organize convoys of merchant vessels along the Canadian seaboard and across the ocean, but for years these relied more on luck than strategy in surviving the U-boat "wolf packs." Until 1942, almost all eastbound convoys gathered in Halifax harbour, which bustled with hundreds of tankers and freighters from around the Americas, assembling in the safe, ice-free expanse of Bedford Basin. Once past the submarine nets and the guns that guarded the harbour entrance, 30 or 40 ships would line up in rectangular formations, escorted by Canadian corvettes on three sides with a destroyer at the rear. Together this unwieldy group of vessels would zigzag its way toward Iceland, the corvettes searching with rudimentary sonar gear and sailors' eyes for any sign of the enemy. At Iceland, the Canadians would often transfer an eastbound convoy to Britain's Royal Navy, and assume escort duties with another group of ships sailing west. The merchant fleets were an impressive sight: tankers filled with aviation fuel or Venezuelan crude, cargo carriers brimming with grain and lumber, others laden with trucks, new aircraft and even locomotives on their decks. In winter, the Atlantic was foul and foggy. Gales blew down from Greenland, and the decks of ships lay encrusted in layers of salt and ice. But this mattered little compared to the threat of the U-boats, which enjoyed almost free rein over the North Atlantic in the early years of the war. The Germans liked to lie in wait, in packs of eight or nine submarines, in a line across the sea. When one sighted a convoy, it would summon others to the kill. The U-boats attacked at night when they could surface without being seen. Working on the surface allowed them more speed to slip quickly between the unsuspecting ships, firing multiple torpedoes before escaping into the dark. The corvettes would give chase, firing their cannons and dropping depth charges. But without adequate radar, sonar or communications gear, co-ordinating an attack on a U-boat was a game of chance. Mr. Lambert remembers the night his merchant ship was torpedoed off the Canadian coast. He was the wheelsman on the midnight-to-4 a.m. watch and had gone to the ship's galley to rustle up a coffee for an officer. He says the pot was on the boil when the torpedo hit the engine room, killing the men inside. "My officer never did get his coffee," he says. "I went on deck and started lowering lifeboats. I lowered one, then another. And then I said, 'To hell with this, I'm going too,' so I lowered myself down the rope and jumped into the second one." As some men panicked and jumped into the sea, Mr. Lambert and the others in his lifeboat rowed away from the sinking ship. "My hands were badly blistered," says Mr. Lambert, "but I didn't realize it until I reached overboard to haul a fellow in, and the saltwater hit my hand. That's when I realized the ropes had burned my hands when I put those lifeboats over. "It all happened so fast. There had been 50 of us onboard. To this day I still don't know how many survived." Mr. Lambert was lucky: A corvette found his lifeboat and picked up the survivors inside. Sailors were not the only ones to suffer. U-boats prowled the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sinking passenger ferries well inside Canadian waters. They also torpedoed ships carrying English schoolchildren, sent across the ocean by their parents to the apparent safety of Canada. By 1942, the U-boats had sunk more than 200 ships in the North Atlantic, including as many as half of all vessels in some convoys. Rear Admiral Piers retired from the navy in 1966, after serving as Canada's military representative in Washington D.C. But he remembers his wartime convoy duties as the most exciting -- and emotional -- of his career. As second-in-command and then commander of the destroyer HMCS Restigouche, Rear Admiral Piers led convoys across the Atlantic for five years. The work went well through 1940 and 1941, and Rear Admiral Piers and his ship gained a reputation as a good luck charm for nervous merchant mariners. Sailing out of Scotland in 1942, he picked up one convoy that had lost its escorts in a gale and was being pursued by nine enemy submarines. "We got them through to Newfoundland and never lost a single ship," he says. "My ship's number was H-O-O and was known as the 'lucky HOO.' The merchant captains knew it and they loved to come with the Restigouche." By the end of 1942, however, Rear Admiral Piers' luck ran out. He sailed from Nova Scotia with a convoy of 42 ships. Upon reaching the notorious "black pit" -- a section of water in the mid-Atlantic that lay beyond the range and protection of submarine-hunting maritime patrol aircraft -- the convoy was attacked by 11 U-boats and lost eight of its ships. The following day five more were attacked and sunk. On Nov. 4, a few days sail from Iceland, two more ships were lost. Rear Admiral Piers grows quiet at the memory of having to chase U-boats in the dark while hundreds of men foundered in the sea. "I went limping into Iceland, trying to comes to grips with it. It was a very sad business," he says." Faced with enormous losses, the Allies reorganized their efforts. One problem they corrected was the pressure being placed on exhausted, undertrained, greenhorn Canadian crews. "In the early years, because Canada had such a small navy, there were a limited number of escort vessels. So they'd get over to England or Iceland, have a day or two rest, and then be on a convoy back," says Lt.-Com. Graeme Arbuckle, an officer with the navy's heritage branch. "It was a debilitating lifestyle, not only for the ships but for the crews themselves. And until training caught up, it would not be unusual for the captain of a corvette to be the only qualified bridge-watch keeper." By 1943, shipbuilding and crew training had caught up with demands. Canadian warships were also being fitted with up-to-date radar, sonar and radio equipment, allowing escorts to better detect and track submarines. After the United States entered the war, many convoys began leaving from New York, easing demands on Canadian warships. The Allies also organized teams of sub-hunting surface ships, allowing escorts to focus more on the needs of their convoys than on carrying out offensive actions against U-boats prowling nearby. Most important, the number and range of air patrols increased, giving aircrews from the U.S., Canada and Britain an eye in the sky over the entire North Atlantic. Flying from bases in Newfoundland and elsewhere, the patrols prevented U-boats from surfacing, for fear of being spotted and attacked from the air. By 1944, more than 70 per cent of all U-boats leaving German bases in occupied France and Norway were destroyed before they reached the open ocean. Yet, although the Germans had abandoned their mid-Atlantic convoy attacks by the end of 1943, their submarines remained a constant threat until the war's end, picking off victims along the entire North American seaboard. In 1943, U-boats also tried -- but failed -- to rescue German prisoners from camps in New Brunswick, Quebec and P.E.I. By 1945, the Canadian navy had shepherded half of all convoys that had crossed the North Atlantic during the war, playing a crucial role in the shipment of soldiers and arms into Britain, particularly in the months before D-Day. Over five years, according to the Defence Department, Canada escorted more than 25,000 merchant ships across the sea, protecting 166 million tonnes of cargo -- enough to fill 11 lines of railway boxcars each stretching from Vancouver to Halifax. Losses were high: The Merchant navy lost 70 ships and 1,700 sailors, the navy lost 24 warships and more than 2,200 crew. In return, Canadian ships and aircraft sank 33 enemy submarines. "The Battle of the Atlantic made the Canadian navy," says Lt.-Com. Arbuckle. "From a very small organization of six destroyers, it grew during the war to 95,000 officers and men and over 300 warships." For Earl Wagner, the ultimate success of the battle was sweet, but his memories have grown more difficult with time. "I think the greatest impact on me was the loss of thousands of young people so early in their adult life who never had a proper chance to live," he says. "When you're 18 or 19, this doesn't mean a lot. But in retrospect it's very sad -- all those people who didn't make it." Wrote one anonymous sailor following the war: "To the memory of those stout hearts, our mates, who have not returned and will not be returning from the dark waters. Somewhere in those unlit depths today they lie."
