A NAVAL OFFICER'S WAR

"War is hell," Sherman said, as he blackened the pleasant fields and towns of Georgia "from Atlanta to the sea." Wars in our terrible century alone have accounted for over 87 million lives lost with devastation unparalleled in history. So we rightly strive and pray, as Lincoln said, "that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away." But it is clearly part of the human condition. And though the scale of major war has been reduced, its frequency-over a hundred and fifty since the Second World War with 25 million killed-has grown, with no sign of abatement.

It may seem strange then, to link a sense of personal fulfilment to such destructive, murderous human folly. But the paradox is there. The war was publicly detestable but, for those who fought it cleanly-and some did not-it was privately enobling. So it is perhaps understandable that war service was, for many, one of the immense and unforgettable experiences of life.

The inevitability of war was clear two years ahead of its arrival, even to those innocent and uninformed on strategical questions. In Germany, relief of unemployment arising mainly from rearmament, the burning resentment after twenty years of the short-sighted, vengeful terms of the Versailles Treaty and, above all, the new sense of destiny, conveyed with overwhelming forcefulness and effect by Adolph Hitler, had galvanized the German people and blinded them to the inhumanities, already apparent, of their regime. Or in Churchill's incomparable language: "Thereafter mighty forces were adrift, the void was open and into that void after a pause there strode a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast-Corporal Hitler."

All through the summer of 1938 we huddled before the radio and listened with mixed emotions, to the news and analyses leading up to the event known as the Munich Agreement. Although "Munich" has become a synonym for craven defeatism and appeasement, I had at the time a certain sympathy for the motivation of Neville Chamberlain in his assessment of the relative strength of the opposing forces. It seemed to me crucial to buy some time to rearm and to catch up. In retrospect, I was probably wrong in this; the increase in German war production in the year that followed was at least equal to and probably surpassed Britain's. In short, I could condone appeasement only if it was combined with total rearmament. But it was not.

There was an even more important factor. The war psychology, not to say fever, in Germany had developed over several years, whereas it had hardly begun in Britain. In fact there were anti-war demonstrations with the cry: "Tear up the white paper; not a penny for war!" and the well-remembered Oxford Union resolution, refusing "to fight for King and Country." Obviously, public preparation through exhortation both in Britain and Canada was necessary in order to produce the spirit needed for universal effort.

I remember as clearly as yesterday the final collapse of negotiations, the announcement that the British ultimatum to Germany over Poland had expired and that Britain had declared war. It was September 3, 1939. Kitty [Tony's wife] and I stood together silently in the living room of our little house in Hamilton, looking down John Street, listening to the newspaper boy shouting, "War is declared."

It was a dramatic and serious moment for us. It was clear that Canada's declaration would soon follow and that my enlistment would, as it must, be automatic and inevitable. Our lives would be completely changed. Even at that early stage I knew it would be hard on Kitty. She was essentially a person of action, one whose psyche would naturally respond in a tangible way to a call for a great cause and one which we all unequivocally supported. Furthermore, her style of life, her athleticism, her high intelligence, her competitive spirit, her adventurous instinct and desire to excel, perfectly fitted her for wartime service, even on the restricted basis in which women were involved, especially in the early stages of the war. This being said however, she was also strongly maternal. And that made any other than the domestic route unthinkable. But I often thought as the war and my own naval career unfolded, what a great Wren she would have made.

I was accepted as an officer in training in late 1939. My decision to choose the navy was not easily made; the long family association with the 48th Highlanders and my own service with the regiment made any other choice seem almost disloyal. But, I had long had a hankering for the navy; the sea exerted a powerful influence on my imagination, helped along by the works of Conrad. Also, our family history had some naval colouring. My great-grandfather, John Harris, was a master in the Royal Navy which he had joined in the year of Trafalgar. My distant cousin Victor Crutchley had won the Victoria Cross at Zeebrugge in the First World War and was captain of the great battleship HMS Warspite in World War II.

So, the navy it was. I did some elementary evening training, Morse code, semaphore, flag signals and theory of seamanship at the naval division in Hamilton, HMCS Star, for several months, wondering when the war, for me, was going to begin. I had no rank and was only a candidate for commission. Naval recruitment had been pretty leisurely during the early "phoney war" period but, when Germany in 1940 suddenly unleashed its ferocious blitzkrieg, blasting through the Low Countries and even overcoming France, Canada bestirred itself.

The call finally came in July 1940. I received my commission as a Lieutenant, RCNVR, an impressive document signed by the Governor General the Earl of Athlone, and awaited "disposal." It came in the first week of September when I was sent down to Halifax by train in a huge draft of new entries on the Ocean Limited.

I remember conflicting feelings. Kitty and I had a tearful goodbye, the first of many over the next five years. We had only been married for three years and our family life was just setting its pattern. It was a wrench. On the other hand, we both came from a background which regarded military participation in time of war as instantaneous. Also, the combination of unfulfilment in my job over a rather long period and the excitement and romance of the challenge ahead produced a very positive state of mind. I seemed to stand for the first time at " the awful verge of manhood."

At that early stage I knew little of the service I had entered. I was aware that the Royal Canadian Navy was wholly an inheritance of the Royal Navy, through the full extent of the relationship, the degree to which the RCN officers modelled themselves on their RN counterparts (even adopting the accents and mannerisms) surprised me. I had no objection to this; the RCN was the child of the RN and what better naval tradition could we have inherited? But I did believe, and still do, that the development of a more distinctive Canadian style, within the RN general pattern, might have come earlier. When it did come, after the war, it went too far and too self-consciously. More on this, and of my view of the RN later.

On arrival in Halifax, I was posted to HMCS Stadacona, the shore establishment. Kitty came down and we rented a house at 10 Mott Street with friends, the Stirling Maxwell's of Montreal. They were a congenial couple. Stirling and I enrolled in a thirteen-week course covering all aspects of general naval officer duties , mainly for sea service but also for barracks. This was divided into gunnery, signals, navigation, ASDIC, torpedoes and seamanship. These courses were all on shore and were followed by three consecutive days at sea, minesweeping off Halifax harbour.

This was the sum total of all the training we received on entry, and it was the best that could be done. The instructors were almost all "dugouts;" retired petty and chief petty officers from the RN. They were memorable characters. I remember vividly my first impression of the gunnery school, a shed with three enormous guns surmounted by a huge sign: "See First, Hit First, Hit Hard and Keep on Hitting"-a slogan attributed to the great Admiral of the Fleet, Jacky Fisher. I got the message. The chief gunner's mate was formidable; he exuded authority and his voice could be heard over in Dartmouth. He terrorized the class, who naturally addressed him as "Sir." This called forth a bellow: "Don't call me 'Sir'-Chief." Here is where my RMC training [Tony attended U of T 1929-30 and RMC 1930-31] came to my rescue: I knew that he, in fact was supposed to call us "Sir." And he did; when one of us was a bit slow around the gun, he would come up close to the offender's ear and ferociously growl into it, "Will you pull the lead out of your hindquarters … (pause) … Sir?"

Gunnery was splendid training for new entry officers with no previous service experience. Power of command was essential, though only a few, on my observation, really acquired it. The gunnery school was in charge of all parades and ceremonial functions and "gunnery types," consisting of those who later took the "Long G" course either in Halifax or in the UK at Portsmouth, were always distinguishable by their special brand of assertiveness. The officer who, I thought, best typified the gunnery tradition and demeanour was my friend St. Clair Balfour.

The signals course placed heavy emphasis on flag signals. It was a tough memory test; not only did we have to learn what each of the twenty-six flags and pendants of the alphabet stood for, there were also the ten numerical signals in both the fleet signal book and the civilian international code to be memorized. This training turned out to be much over-stressed. While flags were used to some limited extent in actual operations, they were increasingly superseded, early in the war, by radio/telephone (R/T). There was also some instruction, pretty sketchy, in radio (W/T) with information about the atmospheric layers, the Admiralty world network of transmitters and receivers, and the procedures for sending and receiving messages by ships at sea. Morse code was taught by flashing light, and semaphore by hand-flags.

The navigation course provided complete instruction in pilotage, i.e., coastal navigation. There was no attempt to teach us celestial offshore navigation in the short time available; we were told that every ship commissioned would have either a fully qualified "Long N" taught at the navigation school in Greenwich, or an RCNR (ex-merchant service) navigating officer on board. It did occur to me to wonder what might happen if this super-essential character was put out of action in mid-ocean; it was a fleeting thought, born of ignorance. Nevertheless, two or three of us persuaded our instructor, Bent Sivertz, an RCNR officer who after the war became a distinguished civil servant, to give us the rudiments of celestial.

The most important subject of all, ASDIC, got fairly short shrift. This was because there were practically no facilities available, all sets going straight into new ships. Shortly after our class graduated, an ASDIC simulator was developed which was helpful. But all we could get at our stage of the war was one day aboard a ship in harbour getting echoes ("pings") off a derelict on the opposite shore. At least we saw the equipment in use. ASDIC was a decisive invention. Without it, almost beyond question, the U-boat war would have been lost. The Germans cleverly devised methods for evasion from time to time and an exciting "battle of the laboratories" was continually in motion. But the combination of a highly trained, skilful captain and an ASDIC operator (who could accurately classify the echoes he was getting) was formidable.

The torpedo course was interesting mainly because it included an overview of all the electrics on board a ship. Most of us where headed for corvettes and minesweepers which did not carry torpedoes, but a few of us were sure to be drafted at some point to destroyers, which did. The electrical layout in a ship is highly complicated and the best that could be hoped for was some knowledge of technical terms so that the special torpedo ratings on board could be supported. Here again, in the bigger ships there was a "Long T" officer (trained at HMS Vernon) and a chief torpedo gunner's mate, a specialist in electrics and torpedoes.

The last discipline in the course was seamanship, the best of the lot for me. I was taught by an unforgettable bosun's mate who looked (and smelled) as if he had risen from the sea. I learned more from him in ten days than I ever learned in anything else in ten weeks.

The "Manual of Seamanship" was a model of concision, and he took us through it down on the jetty with clarity, force and a wonderful romantic devotion; knots and lashings, rope and wire splicing, boat drill, anchor work, securing alongside or to a mooring. He made sailors out of us.

episode 2

(Originally Published in Vol VII, No. 6, Sping 1999 Issue of Starshell)