Joey Jacobson's War

by Peter J. Usher

  As you see the ease with which young men drawn from all fields of work and different parts of the country can adapt themselves to a specific job requiring study, precision and daring, you can’t help but figure that we are capable of producing men that can adapt themselves to any task or job which might be required and do as good and probably a whole lot better at it than any other young men in any other country. Not only that but without any pushing, prodding or pep talks there is not a man who has anything but the most ardent desire to set the Germans where they belong – the Italians don’t rate – but the Germans certainly are not held in any awe around here – nobody is for that matter. We all feel we are as good as the next man and have not been brought up to bow to any man and don’t expect anyone to do likewise – which is just one reason why a master race won’t make much headway around here. … (JJL 27 March 1941)

  As Debert became ever more crowded, Joe and his non-commissioned Hell Hooter pals were evicted from their rooms in officers’ quarters and moved to a hangar. Their separate status was a taste of things to come. They saw less of their classmates who had privileges in the officers’ mess. The NCOs stuck together even more closely, and had all the more incentive to get off the base at night and binge in Halifax, or get away to the countryside. One weekend they went to Pictou harbour to clamber around the boats and enjoy the sunshine, and then proceeded to a big dance in Stellarton. As Joe related to the Pony Club, his failure to get a commission was not without advantage, at least for the time being.

  Our gang of officers are not too happy. They have duties – and very boring ones on the station – have to put on the dog at all times and never really feel at home. We on the other hand can go where we please – do as we wish.

  … once in a while a woman is great – once in a while a real good drunk is swell – but nothing compares with a good outing with your pals when you all have the physical and mental equipment to be able to undertake any form of exercise or activity with ease – I suppose the ideal is the right mixture of each and I guess we have come as close to the ideal during our times together as it is possible to come. Unfortunately there are only women and drink for us here – I exercise strenuously in the morning. Outside of that there are absolutely no facilities or opportunities to do anything here but wait and binge – can’t even get a place to read so the sooner we scram the better it will be for all concerned.

  (JJL 31 March 1941)

  By early April, Joe told his family that the boys at Debert were getting “restless and crabby”:

  This is army life in the raw. Absolutely no work, no facilities to keep us busy. Debert a sea of mud – quarters jammed – one thousand sleeping in hangars – no recreation rooms – barracks too stuffy to stay in – I do my exercises in morning, stand around on parade then get away to town. Then the fun begins. It cost 1 buck to get to Truro and back – you get hosed at every turn, meals, dances etc. (JJL 5 April 1941)

  After two weeks of this stew of boredom and anxiety, Joe’s thoughts turned to how he might engineer a final Pony Club reunion.

  If we are going to be here another couple of weeks, there is no reason why I should not get home for a couple of days, say next weekend – except that the C.O. stated that leaves will only be granted on compassionate grounds. In other words, Mub, I need a letter followed by a wire around next Tuesday telling me of a serious accident, sickness, death or tragedy and you must be ready to substantiate the story when the C.O. phones himself – might I suggest putting Janet in a Quebec hospital, having Edith get married, Smitty catch leprosy, Herb the clap or some such compassionate tear-jerking story. (JJL 26 March 1941)

  A few days later he reconsidered:

  We are having a mass movement to another station, probably Halifax or Sydney, N.S. and I am liable to be stuck if I go home. Besides, after thinking it all over I decided that maybe it would not be a wise move to go home again. We did everything we should have done and did it as it can only be done by us during my three weeks at home. That phase is over and altho it would be nice to spin home it would probably be rather hard on my folks and I am liable to miss a draft. Further we are all decided on one thing our reunion shall be at Christmas – over the ocean. (JJL 31 March 1941)

  There was much discussion that week about Herb’s standing in the Pony Club. He had not returned to Canada during Joe’s last leave, nor offered much explanation other than the demands of his work. Monty admonished him:

  Remember this: our boy is going overseas – the Lord knows when or if we’ll ever see him again. Even allowing for his tales of wine & women, it still leaves him oodles of time to kill, to ponder, etc. He’s gone thru periods – and still goes thru them – of wondering whether his pals have any qualities of courage or manhood in them. The least we can do is show him that we have qualities of loyalty – and buoy him up as much as we can.

  I know that five minutes means a lot to you, but think of what that five minutes of your effort means to him – especially when multiplied by three – it means – or should mean a letter a day from one of the three of us. I’m hitting at least three letters a week, Lord knows what I write but I write. I am in my office for 7:30 every morn, write all day, have just returned from 3 ½ hours of drill in zero weather, missed supper – my routine is something like that most every day. I certainly am rarely in a mood to write. But I still write. … Getting a letter out to Joe is more important to me than my job. That’s my first duty. Once that is done the rest comes easy. (31 March 1941)

  There would be no last-minute reunion of the four. Joe had not seen Herb for a year, and he would never see him or Gerald again. Only Joe and Monty would be reunited in England in the coming months. Joe was now by force of circumstance part of a new fellowship of shared situation and purpose. Yet, as he declared in his diary, the bonds of the Pony Club were closer than ever, and its circulating correspondence would carry on undiminished. Joe phoned home from Truro a few days later. Percy recorded:

  we knew what that meant … ready to embark for overseas … he is not permitted to say anything about it. … his voice sounded clear and happy … queer how much we wanted to say to each other and how little we could say … his mother was on a branch telephone upstairs and we passed the usual banalities and finally wound up with just the usual feeble “best of luck.” What I wanted to say was … God Bless you my lad, do your job well and come back to us sound in mind and body. Well that is our prayer. There is the right stuff in Joe and as I said before I am proud to have fathered him. (PJD 5 April 1941)

  That same day, however, a case of scarlet fever was detected, and all those waiting to leave had to be tested. Nearly nine hundred were posted for departure that day, but Joe and over a hundred others were left out of that draft, which prompted another drinking binge.

  Gang split up as G.P. & Mac were positive & left, Art & I negative and were left – all pretty gloomy especially as phoned home to folks & Monty for false alarm farewell. (JJD 5 April 1941)

  Most depressing day yet – boys left – about 200 sgts left on station. Place desolate. Pop Miller called Art and I over for a drink in evening. …

  (JJD 6 April 1941)

  Hopes renewed – dick test again for those with previous inoculations.3 Many of us tried to suck serum out, used hot towels, bottles, poultices and did everything imaginable to keep the red mark away.

  (JJD 7 April 1941)

  Art & I got past dick test – by using powder, noxema and squeezing arm to keep red mark down – we are supposed to be going on draft – whole thing a muddle – fellows all disgusted, thoroughly annoyed at being left behind & incompetence here. (JJD 8 April 1941)

  The trick worked. Joe and his pals managed to pass negative the next day. Officially posted from Debert to “elsewhere,” they were on their way. As the troop train emerged from the rock cut at the south end of Halifax, Joe could see the harbour lined with outbound ships. His whereabouts were now enshrouded in secrecy. He boarded the RMS Laconia on the 9th, although it did not weigh anchor unti
l the morning of the 11th.

  Canadians were a parochial lot in 1940, regardless of their social class or economic circumstances. No road connected east and west, and the newly established Trans-Canada Airlines route was prohibitively expensive for most. It took four days to cross Canada by train. English Canadians were tied together more by the Empire and the Union Jack than by personal bonds or mutual awareness. Most Canadians knew little of their country beyond their hometown. The war, and not least the Air Training Program, did much to change that. The Air Training Program quickly separated recruits by trade and assigned them to schools scattered across the country. Young men from all over Canada were thrown together in common cause and circumstance to spend months training in unfamiliar places far from home. Not only did they forge bonds of comradeship, they gained a larger sense of their country and what it meant to be Canadian.

  The country Joey and his classmates left behind was still largely rural, and much of it impoverished by ten years of economic depression. It was provincial in outlook and socially conservative. Even Montreal, the nation’s most cosmopolitan centre and largest port, was a commercial outpost of empire. The city’s social and business elites looked across the sea to Britain as much as they did to the United States, fifty miles down the road. Britain represented sophistication and “class” in a way that the United States (except New York City) did not. But Canadians were also acutely aware that their American neighbours were richer and more technologically advanced, and Canadians were enthralled by American popular culture. The wonders of human achievement – technical, architectural, or intellectual – were to be found in Britain and the United States, not at home. So too was modernity – in surroundings and in attitudes – to be found elsewhere. Yet Joe, and surely the lads he had trained with, had also come to see Canada as a project under construction, a land of opportunity not just to benefit from but to shape.

  And Canada had done something very big in 1940. It had become, as President Roosevelt would later say, the aerodrome of democracy. The Air Training Program would eventually send 130,000 aircrew to Britain. The boys on the boat were among the first three hundred air observers to go. They were the cream of the crop and they knew it. They went overseas with confidence and swagger, ready to take on the enemy. They had bonded as warriors, believing their cause just and themselves invincible.

  Part Two

  Discoveries

  Existence is never so sweet as when it is at hazard.

  — Winston Churchill, South Africa, 1900 (cited in Max Hastings, Warriors)

  After the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, [we] hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.

  — Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, The Atlantic Charter, August 1941

  Ten

  The North Atlantic

  When the RMS Laconia left the confines of Halifax harbour for the open Atlantic on the morning of 11 April, Joe Jacobson entered a war zone. The Battle of the Atlantic, Germany’s attempt to strangle Britain by naval blockade, was tilting in Germany’s favour. The feared and effective U-boats preyed on the freighters and troop carriers that constituted Britain’s lifeline from Halifax. Forward naval bases built in Brittany since France had capitulated the previous summer had enabled German submarines to operate far into the Atlantic. The U-boats had taken to operating in “wolf packs,” a tactic that enabled them to detect and penetrate convoys with devastating effect. Over the winter, their success had been enhanced by the long hours of darkness when they could prowl on the surface undetected.

  The best defence for merchant shipping was to travel in convoy. Halifax was the chief point of assembly for shipping to Britain, and several convoys departed each month. These typically consisted of three or four dozen freighters, escorted by naval vessels and armed merchant cruisers. Freighter convoys travelled at seven to nine knots, and might take two weeks to cross the ocean. The armed merchant cruisers were mostly ocean liners that had been requisitioned by the British Admiralty. Travelling at twice the speed of the freighters and fitted with batteries of six-inch naval guns, they had a better chance of outrunning U-boats and defending themselves. But not all convoys got through unscathed. Two that had left Halifax in February and early March lost ships before reaching Britain. In early April, U-boats sank ten ships travelling in a convoy that had left Halifax two weeks prior, with the loss of nearly one hundred merchant sailors.

  Two troop ships and forty-two slow freighters carrying food, fuel, and steel had assembled into two convoys, TC10 and HX120, respectively. They left Halifax on 10 and 11 April, in fine weather, accompanied by eighteen escort vessels.1 TC10 carried nearly four thousand men, among them over a thousand aircrew who had cleared out of Debert in the days before. Most were on board the MV Georgic, a converted Cunard passenger liner. The rest of the airmen departing Debert were allotted to armed escorts: the Laconia, and the Montclare, Wolfe, and Rajputana, which were accompanying convoys that had left a few days before. All had been assigned to patrol duty on the North Atlantic convoy route beyond Britain’s western approaches. On this occasion, they were also carrying troops, but they would be dropping them off in Iceland before returning to Halifax.

  HX120 steamed at seven knots for ten days. By the end of the second day, it was crossing the southern tip of the Grand Banks, well south of Newfoundland and the hazardous springtime parade of icebergs, growlers, and bergy bits. Then it turned sharply northeast into the Gulf Stream and the danger zone. From there on, gun crews were put on regular exercise. For the first few days, sun and fog alternated over calm seas. At night the convoy travelled under blackout orders, except in heavy fog, when running lights were needed to avoid collisions. Nonetheless two vessels collided in fog on the 15th, and the damaged oil tanker Circe Shell was forced to return to Halifax. Joe recorded the progress of the convoy in his diary:

  Hooray – left Debert – boarded the armed merchant cruiser S.S. Laconia – 124 airmen, 50 Norwegian seamen – slept on deck the first night, learnt that we carry six six-inch guns – two eight – we do the convoying – act as a suicide ship to draw enemy fire. (JJD 9 April 1941)

  Had a great time getting acquainted with the ship the crew and prospective trip while still in port. Men claim guns no good, not enough life boats, ship ready to be scuttled, captain goes looking for trouble – … but we should have some fun. (JJD 10 April 1941)

  Ship ahoy – anchors afloat at 0815 – beautiful day – battleship, subs, corvettes, cruisers and merchant ships all out – should be some real action – rumours – bound for Iceland they claim. Weather beautiful. Given hammocks to sleep in – real comfy. Food excellent.

  (JJD 11 April 1941)

  Fair weather – caught up to convoy by dinner time – started patrol for 39 ships in our convoy – Battleship left us on our own. Art [Hunter] & I started routine. Kept my big flask full of rum took it neat before every meal & bed time – we walk the decks write our diaries, do exercises, read a bit, eat a lot, Art & I growing mustaches, smoking pipes.

  (JJD 12 April 1941)

  Approaching danger area – trip full of suspense since we are protecting a large convoy and have neither the speed or armament to do it with. We go to stations at 5:30 AM. Art & I are on a spare gun crew – we do 7 knots on this convoy – our ship can do 16 – guns range but 5 miles – Battle of Atlantic raging so we expect trouble & don’t expect to do much more than get sunk – this is a real adventure – sea still calm … (JJD 13 April 1941)

  4th day at sea – calm, foggy – all’s still well – weather warmer here in Gulf Stream. Reading Butler’s Way of All Flesh – news reports British & Greeks holding out in Balkans, American ships allowed in Red Sea now – Battle of the Atlantic starting in earnest – that’s us – boys getting lazy & no longer get up for action stations. (JJD 14 April 1941)

  Beautif
ul sunny day – Art & I sunned ourselves half nude all morning – Royal Sovereign2 back again with us – makes us feel much more comfortable – sea still calm. Sleeping in hammocks extremely cozy. We found a gym – Art & I can now work out … to supplement our walking – visited engine room today. Poor devils get locked in during action. No worse than us though. (JJD 15 April 1941)

  Enjoying cruise immensely – visited helm – navigating a ship is a cinch – crew all English & Scotch – pretty good gang – we flatter them with questions they bullshoot us with rumours – keep in shape boxing, wrestling – skipping and walking with Art – We stick together at all times. (JJD 16 April 1941)

  Rough weather but only a couple of boys sick – saw a grudge fight with two sailors last night – played bridge … down in ship’s hold. Getting to know sailors pretty well – they all worry about subs are scared stiff of armed raiders & pocket battleships – they have had no leave in 18 months – are dissatisfied & scared – but a mighty fine crew just the same. (JJD 17 April 1941)

  Played in a pingpong match – RCAF vs Navy – won both my matches – contest a draw. Finished MacBeth – reading King Lear – strong character & language appeals to me – weather rough – but Art & I eat better than ever – we good sailor boys – news broadcast seems to indicate Balkan war ended in favor of Germans – will probably see another issue & another front appear before long – mustache sprouting nicely.

  (JJD 18 April 1941)

  Started reading Galsworthy’s Forsyth Saga – weather calm – picked up another convoy3 – battleship keeps pretty close by. Played chess last nite – we have 16 at our mess table – all observers – we get along swell – have lots of fun at meal time – every man speaks for himself – don’t do much during day but sleep eat, read, exercise a bit. …