Meanwhile, the Red Cross in New York was sending several trains with engineers, doctors, nurses, tools, lumber, medical supplies, and 1,000 portable houses. Other relief trains also began arriving from Maine, Philadelphia, and Washington. The State of Maine Unit alone sent 110 doctors, plus nurses and other volunteers, who converted the Halifax Ladies College into a temporary hospital.[23]
Captain Eugene O’Donnell of the U.S. Steamboat Inspection Service in Boston organized a ship that sent supplies, including 25,000 blankets. The U.S. Army sent relief supplies as well, including food, and the Rhode Island Red Cross sent fifty doctors, fifty-three nurses, and a pharmacist. Ten days after the explosion, the Boston Symphony Orchestra gave a concert featuring Nellie Melba to raise funds.
These were just the major relief efforts organized by governments and the American Red Cross. Private donations of supplies and money came from all over the United States, ranging from a Christian Science train from Boston with clothing, food, and $10,000 in cash to individuals and organizations as far away as Tacoma, Kentucky, Iowa, and even Alaska—a list far too long and widespread to be reproduced. The city of Chicago, recalling generous aid sent by Canadians at the time of its great fire in October 1871, donated $125,000. Andrew Carnegie paid all the costs—more than $20,000—of repairing the damage caused by the explosion to Dalhousie University buildings.
Without deprecating the extraordinary spontaneous support that came from all over the United States, the greatest support undoubtedly came from Boston and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. When the Halifax Relief Commission later officially thanked Massachusetts for its overwhelming generosity and sympathy, Ratshesky responded that the hearts of the people of Massachusetts had “gone out to your citizens, not only in [their] generous supply of clothing, food and money, but, better than all, in that fine sentiment of affection for the people of your city that will bring about a strengthened friendship that will last for generations to come.”[24]
Remarkably, Massachusetts’s generosity did not end in December 1917. Upon their return home, many of the people involved in the relief effort formed an organization which they called the Halifax-Massachusetts Relief Associates, which worked with Halifax and the government of Nova Scotia for the next five years to improve the lives of survivors and general health conditions in the city. This involved an expenditure of $50,000 a year, which was matched by $15,000 from the Canadian government and $10,000 from the Nova Scotia government. In total, the Associates raised $716,000, a huge sum at the time, all of it donated by the people of Massachusetts.
The people of Nova Scotia, and particularly Halifax, were astonished and gratified by this extraordinary generosity on the part of their southern neighbors. Of course Halifax and Boston shared a long history. Indeed, most Nova Scotians—including Prime Minister Borden—could trace their ancestry to New Englanders who had moved north either as Planters in the 1750s or somewhat later as Loyalists during the American Revolution. At the same time, Boston and Massachusetts were home to thousands of Nova Scotians who had crossed the border over the years seeking better economic opportunities.
When the Spanish influenza epidemic swept North America in 1918, Nova Scotia demonstrated its appreciation, albeit on a smaller scale, by sending doctors to Massachusetts to help out, and in December of that year the Province sent Boston the first giant Christmas tree as a special thank-offering. The gesture was not immediately repeated, but it was revived in 1971 and continues to this day. How significant this annual gift is to the people of Boston and Massachusetts generally is difficult to assess, but the process of selecting the tree, cutting and shipping it off to Boston continues to be very significant in Nova Scotia and particularly Halifax. It reminds people not only of the terrible disaster that took place in December 1917 but also of the profound generosity of the people of Boston, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and—to be fair—other cities and states, and constitutes a unique bond of kinship between the two communities.
1. Quoted in Stacey, Canada and the Age of Conflict, 233.
2. Quoted in Stacey, 151.
3. Hugh L. Keenleyside, Canada and the United States: Some Aspects of their Historical Relations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952; First published 1929), 345. Hugh Llewellyn Keenleyside joined the Canadian Department of External (Foreign) Affairs in 1928 and served in Tokyo from 1929 to 1936. During the Second World War, he was secretary, then chairman of the Canadian section of the Canada-United States Permanent Joint Board on Defense. He later served as Director-General of the United Nations Technical Assistance Administration.
4. Keenleyside, 346.
5. Oscar D. Skelton, The Canadian Dominion: A Chronicle of Our Northern Neighbor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921), 274–75. Skelton was an academic at Queen’s University who had earned his PhD at the University of Chicago. In 1925 he became Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s undersecretary of state for external affairs (i.e., deputy minister of foreign affairs] and closest advisor. See also O. D. Skelton: The Work of the World, 1923–1941, ed. Norman Hillmer. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2013.
6. Skelton claimed in 1921 that 12,000 of the first 360,000 Canadian troops who went overseas were Americans. Skelton, Dominion, 275.
7. Quoted in Stacey, 180.
8. Gordon, 307.
9. Gordon, 301–02.
10. Gordon, 325.
11. Michael Bliss, “Sir Joseph Wesley Flavelle,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/flavelle_joseph_wesley_16E.html (accessed August 25, 2013).
12. Quoted in Morton and Granatstein, Marching to Armageddon, 192.
13. Stacey, 233.
14. See C. R. Young, “The White Eagle at Niagara: How Canada Trained the Polish Army,” MacLean’s Magazine 32, no 9 (September 1919): 23–25, 89.
15. Quoted in Thompson and Randall, Canada and the United States, 97–98.
16. Quoted in Thompson and Randall, 98.
17. Keenleyside, 359.
18. Keenleyside, 347.
19. Quoted in Laura MacDonald, Curse of the Narrows: The Halifax Explosion, 1917 (Toronto: Harper Collins Canada, 2005), 134.
20. Quoted in MacDonald, 105.
21. The USS Von Steuben, named after Baron Friedrich Wilhelm Von Steuben, a German general who served in the Continental Army during the American Revolution, was actually a former German passenger liner, one of the fastest and most luxurious when it was launched in 1901 as the SS Kronprinz Wilhelm. It served as a commerce raider in 1914–15 running out of supplies, when it was interned at Portsmouth, Virginia. When the U.S. entered the war, it was seized and renamed and served as a troop and cargo transport.
22. The correct name of this vessel was Lot M. Morrill, because it was named after Lot Morrill (1812–83), who served briefly as Secretary of the Treasury in 1876–77 under President Ulysses S. Grant, but in general usage it was known simply as the Morrill.
23. MacDonald, 206.
24. Quoted in MacDonald, 225.
Chapter 12
The War at Sea
Stirring times bring stirring opportunities and these be great days for Halifax.
—Rudyard Kipling[1]
In the decade before 1914, Britain abandoned its traditional policy of attempting to keep the world’s sea lanes open and serving as policeman of the world in favor of concentrating its resources in the North Sea and eastern Atlantic to be ready to confront the German navy. The Royal Navy’s dockyards at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Esquimalt, British Columbia, were closed and their garrisons were withdrawn, and the North America and West Indies Squadron was reduced to a single cruiser based at Bermuda. This shifted the complete responsibility for local Canadian naval defense over to the Canadian government.
As we have already seen, the Canadian government replaced the British garrisons with Canadian troops and in 1910, after intense political debate (much of it rather hysterical), passed legislation creating a Canadian navy. The Laurier government was defeated only months
later in the 1911 elections, however, and the new Borden government’s effort to provide a direct financial grant to the Admiralty was blocked by the Liberal-dominated Senate. As a result of this political deadlock, nothing had been done by August 1914, except that two cruisers had been purchased from the Royal Navy and a naval college had been established at Halifax.
The Royal Canadian Navy consisted of 350 regular personnel and 250 members of the Royal Naval Canadian Volunteer Reserve (RNCVR), a militia-type organization. As for its two ships, HMCS Niobe and HMCS Rainbow, most of their crews were sailors on loan from the Royal Navy. Borden, in what must have been a highly embarrassing reversal of policy, now asked the Admiralty to lend Canada destroyers and submarines, while the government built its own warships. The Admiralty refused to do so, mainly because it could not spare any warships but also because it knew that Canadian shipyards were not capable of building modern warships in the near future.
Actually, the situation was not as dire as it might appear at first glance because the Admiralty did not think there was any significant naval threat to Canada, and the Royal Navy would protect transatlantic shipping. It therefore recommended that Canada focus its war effort on contributing men to the British army. This was, in fact, what Canada did, but one cannot help speculating that if the navy had had a fleet in 1914 at least some of the thousands of men who fought and died in Europe would have served in it instead. As Marc Milner, Canada’s leading naval historian, has pointed out, “naval unpreparedness in 1914 left the Western Front [as] the only option for Canadian participation in the Great War. Perhaps the real cost for the failure to build Laurier’s fleet can be counted among the 60,000 Canadians who died on active army service between 1914 and 1918.”[2]
Still, the fledgling navy did what it could. It requisitioned ten small ships from other government agencies and purchased or chartered another ten, mostly private yachts, from private owners. One was the Waturus, which Toronto millionaire yachtsman Aemilius Jarvis purchased in the United States. It became HMCS Hochelaga in 1914. Another was the Tarantula, purchased from the Vanderbilts by Toronto businessman Jack Ross and renamed HMCS Tuna. A keen yachtsman, Ross donated the ship to the navy, got himself commissioned in the RNCVR, and commanded the Tuna until serious mechanical problems took it out of service in May 1917.
These ships were used as examining vessels at Halifax harbor, sweeping the immediate approaches for mines and mounting the occasional coastal patrol. Meanwhile, on the west coast, HMCS Rainbow and the two submarines purchased in Seattle patrolled the immediate waters around Vancouver Island. This little navy, which had quickly grown from two ships to twenty-two, was actually adequate until 1917 because the Royal Navy soon had the German navy bottled up in port and there was no real threat in the western Atlantic. Indeed, when the Niobe was declared no longer fit for service in July 1915, the Canadian government actually declined the offer of a replacement cruiser.[3]
At the same time, coastal fortifications were built at Halifax, the most important naval base on the east coast, and at Sydney, Nova Scotia, which not only had a spacious harbor on the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence but also was the site of most of the country’s coal mines and a major steel plant. Fortifications were also built at Saint John, New Brunswick, an important port on the Bay of Fundy.[4]
Although the risk was not considered great, the Admiralty warned Ottawa in June 1915 that German submarines might soon show up in Canadian waters and recommended that the Canadian navy increase its local patrolling, especially in the northern Gulf of St Lawrence. The St Lawrence Patrol was established, consisting of seven vessels operating from Sydney in the summer months and Halifax in the winter. These vessels included HMCS Canada, arguably Canada’s first real warship and its most heavily armed (excluding Niobe and Rainbow), with two twelve-pounder and two three-pounder guns. There was also the Margaret, transferred from the Canadian Customs Service, and the trawler Gulnare from the Fisheries Protection Service. Two other little Fisheries vessels, Constance and Curlew, served as minesweepers.
Once again prominent businessmen came to the navy’s aid. John Eaton—head of the T. Eaton Company, Canada’s largest chain of department stores—donated his yacht, the Florence, in July 1915. Armed with a single three-pounder gun, it guarded Saint John and patrolled the Bay of Fundy until 1916. Jack Ross again helped by purchasing the yacht Winchester for $100,000 on behalf of the government. Renamed HMCS Grilse, it was armed with two twelve-pounder guns and a torpedo tube and served throughout the war.
The St. Lawrence Patrol was Canada’s first wartime fleet. It was commanded by Captain Fred Pasco, a retired Royal Navy officer who arrived in Sydney in September 1915. A gruff man with high standards, Pasco knew the importance of common sense as well. Milner describes an occasion when Pasco found his men struggling to bring ashore a barrel of “sugar” that rather oddly clinked as they moved it. Instead of investigating, he simply reminded the men to “send some of that sugar to my cabin, too.”[5]
No submarines were encountered in 1915, but the situation changed dramatically in July 1916 when the Deutschland, a German cargo submarine, visited Baltimore, demonstrating that submarines were now capable of operating in North American waters. Then U-53, a combat submarine, visited Newport, Rhode Island, in October, after which it returned to sea—without refueling—and proceeded to sink five Allied merchant ships off Nantucket Island. This marked the beginning of the long anticipated submarine war in the western Atlantic. The New York Times probably spoke for many Americans when, somewhat incredibly, it observed of the warm welcome that U-53 had received at Newport that “no one had thought of the long gray visitor as a destroyer of shipping and perhaps of lives.”[6]
Allied shipping crossing the Atlantic from Canada and the United States now came under heavy attack, as Germany sought to starve Britain of food supplies and war materiel. In January 1917, Germany declared that it would carry out “unrestricted submarine warfare” on shipping going to Allied destinations, meaning that it would attack the ships of neutral—i.e., the United States—powers as well.
This was the critical point of the war in the Atlantic. As shipping losses mounted drastically, the Admiralty urged the Royal Canadian Navy to expand its coastal anti-submarine patrols as quickly as possible. Ottawa ordered the construction of twelve small submarine chasers, rounded up a few more local vessels, and also put the Acadia, a Fisheries research ship, into service. The Admiralty also ordered the construction in Canadian shipyards of 160 small anti-submarine vessels, promising that some of them would be made available to the Canadian navy if needed.
By 1917, Canada’s coastal patrol service was being commanded by Captain Walter Hose, a veteran of the Royal Navy who had transferred into the RCN and commanded the Rainbow on the west coast before being transferred to the more critical east coast.[7] By now the navy had almost 9,000 sailors, although many of them were on loan from Britain. But its twenty-two ships were “so poorly armed,” says Milner, “that the army had to keep the coast guns of the Halifax fortress fully manned because, if any German ship appeared, the navy would have to seek protection from the shore batteries.”[8]
The government did not seem unduly concerned about this situation, focused as it was by 1917 on the manpower crisis in the army. Indeed, it allowed the RNCVR to organize an overseas division, which by the spring of 1917 had provided nearly 1,200 recruits for the Royal Navy, in addition to the 47 RCN officers already in the service.[9] Among them were Lambert Griffith and Leslie Goodwin. Griffith at least was posted to HMCS Niobe in Halifax harbor,[10] but Goodwin was almost immediately sent to England and served on a Royal Navy minesweeper and at Gilbraltar.[11]
Submarines would undoubtedly have been helpful on the east coast but none were available. Even when Borden learned early in 1915 that the British were assembling American-made submarines at the Canadian Vickers shipyard in Montreal and asked that some of them be allocated to the east coast, he was turned down flat.[12] But when the government decided to
move its two submarines from Esquimalt to Halifax, it was only in order to send them overseas. The Admiralty logically suggested that they be kept at Halifax for anti-submarine patrol work, however, and this was done. Because of on-going mechanical problems, however, they never became fully operational and were used primarily for anti-submarine training exercises with patrol vessels in the last few months of the war.[13]
Meanwhile, German submarines were sinking as much as 25% of the merchant shipping crossing the Atlantic, creating serious shortages of war materiel and food supplies. Because it was fully expected that 1917 would be worse than 1916 had been, the Admiralty recommended early in the year that Canada establish a naval air service, similar to the RNAS, to help the navy protect coastal waters and escort merchant shipping. J. D. Hazen, the minister of marine fisheries and minister of the naval service, agreed in February 1917 to do so, and Wing Commander J. W. Seddon, who had commanded Britain’s first seaplane base when it was established in 1912, was sent over to provide expert advice. He recommended that the navy establish air bases at Halifax and Sydney, with a force of 34 seaplanes and 300 men, but the government balked at the cost and placed in storage the 4 seaplanes which the admiralty had optimistically contributed for the service.
Canada's Great War, 1914-1918 Page 23