by Edward Kay
“Look at you,” he said. “You’ve grown into a man. What do they feed you in the Navy?”
I guess Burt and Marian weren’t the only ones who had gotten bigger. “You wouldn’t want to know, Dad,” I replied. “The food in port is okay, but out at sea? Well, let’s just say we do a lot better at home with Mom’s cooking. Trust me!”
My mother smiled. After the many barely edible meals I’d eaten aboard corvettes, I had a new appreciation for what a good job Mom had accomplished, feeding us with limited resources throughout the Depression.
We had supper together in the dining room, with a tablecloth, placemats and the best napkins, something she normally only ever used when we had guests for dinner. We had a roast chicken, one of the birds from the coop that my parents kept in the backyard. They grew beautiful beans and tomatoes in their garden too, but it was winter, so we just had root vegetables from last season that they had stored in the cold cellar: potatoes, carrots and turnips. They were delicious. I hadn’t had such a good meal since I’d gone to Aileen’s home for dinner. We didn’t talk about the war that first night. Just about the news in Iroquois and the weather that winter, and I told them about Halifax, and Glasgow and Aileen. My parents smiled a little to each other when I mentioned her.
The next day, when Marian and Burt were finished school, I took them out shopping on Iroquois’s small main street. We went to Beamish, our modest version of a department store. I told Marian and Burt to pick out whatever they wanted. After the long years of the Depression, and the constant, grinding deprivation that made my parents very thrifty, it gave Marian and Burt both a thrill to be able to buy something without thinking about the cost. And it gave me a thrill to indulge them. Marian chose some hair ribbons and a little bathtub filled with dolls. Burt picked out a model ship.
As for Iroquois, the main street seemed even sleepier than before the war. In fact, it was a bit of a ghost town. I went by Jack’s place, but his mom told me that he’d already shipped out to Camp Borden, where he was training in the Canadian Armoured Corps. Most of the other guys I’d known in school were either off fighting in the war, or had moved to Toronto or Montreal to work in armaments factories. Many of the girls I’d known, as well as the guys who, like Don and George, couldn’t pass the military physical, had moved to Ottawa to work in the federal civil service, which was growing rapidly because of the war.
After the bustle of places like Halifax, Greenock and Glasgow, Iroquois was pretty dull, though I didn’t tell my family that. I kept myself busy doing chores, like feeding the chickens and collecting eggs. But the henhouse out back had become more or less a hobby for my family, because like me, my older brothers were sending money home, and my dad’s job was steady, so the financial pressure on my folks had eased up a lot.
Much as I loved seeing my parents and brother and sister, there was nothing for me to really do in Iroquois. It felt like I was in a sort of limbo. Because my dad had never served in the military, he wasn’t able to understand what I was going through. I didn’t want my parents to worry, so I didn’t tell them about the horrors I’d seen.
One night when my mom and Burt and Marian weren’t around, Dad quietly asked me, “What’s it like out there on the ocean? From what I hear, it sounds pretty dangerous.” I hesitated, unsure how to answer him. He continued. “Some of the lake freighter captains say there are even German submarines out in the St. Lawrence now, up past Quebec City.”
He had heard right. At least the rumours. But I didn’t want him to worry.
“That’s just talk, Dad.” I said. “There might be the odd submarine that goes off course, but with all the air cover we have, the Germans would be crazy to spend much time in the St. Lawrence. And when there are corvettes around, the U-boats hightail it,” I lied, “because they know if they get anywhere near us, we’ll blow them out of the water.”
My dad smiled. I think he believed me. Or wanted to. So he didn’t press the point.
But I knew my comrades on other ships were out battling the submarines, and I knew I was needed there too. I didn’t feel particularly useful hanging around Iroquois, so when it was time to return to base, I was actually a little relieved.
Chapter Ten
March 1942–February 1943
When I returned to duty, the worst of the winter storms had passed. Crew members were constantly being transferred between ships, and I was sorry to discover when I got to the barracks in Halifax that Ken was gone. He’d been assigned to destroyer duty. I found out that he was being trained on a new type of gun called a Bofors, a devastating new anti-aircraft weapon. Lucky dog, I thought. I envied Ken the chance to train on something powerful and brand new, instead of being stuck on the Wildrose with antique weapons.
Despite the shortcomings of some of our equipment, we were gaining experience we had lacked at the beginning of the war. More and more of our ships were now equipped with radar, so we could detect surfaced submarines during the long winter nights or when it was foggy, which was a lot of the time.
On top of that, our commanders changed the way we operated. Instead of working solo, our ships were organized into co-ordinated escort groups, using our ASDIC and radar to seek out U-boats and then working collectively to destroy them. Gradually we started to give the Germans as good as we got, and the tally of German submarines destroyed by Allied forces began to grow.
German bombers were still taking their toll on us as well. We were especially afraid of the Focke-Wulf 200 Kurier. Originally built as a commercial plane to fly passengers from Europe to North America, its long operational radius gave it the ability to bomb convoys as far out as Iceland. Since our fighter planes lacked the range to square off against them over the Atlantic to counter that threat, the British built CAM ships — merchant vessels with one catapult-launched Hawker Hurricane fighter on each. It was a peculiar looking arrangement that I saw used in action only once. As we were passing east of Iceland, the radar picked up an incoming German bomber. The Hurricane was catapulted into the air and quickly climbed up into a cloud bank. In the distance we saw the lumbering Focke-Wulf 200 approach the convoy. Not expecting to encounter a fighter plane out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the German bomber made what seemed like an almost leisurely approach, coming in low and slow, taking its time picking out its first victim. When the Focke-Wulf was still about 4 nautical miles away, the Hurricane darted out of the cloud cover and pounced.
The German gunners were caught completely off guard as the Hurricane poured rounds from its eight machine guns into one of the Focke-Wulf’s engines for a good four seconds before there was any return fire.
The bomber banked sharply. The nimble Hurricane bobbed and weaved to avoid the German gunners’ defensive fire, all the while firing off bursts from its machine guns each time there was an opening. Smoke began to pour out of one of the Fw 200’s engines. Then flames began to lick down from the engine cowling toward the back of the wing.
The Hurricane pilot must have guessed what was about to happen next, because he banked away sharply just as the Fw 200 exploded in a huge fireball half a mile above the waves. No parachutes appeared, and the flaming wreckage fell like a load of scrap metal straight into the ocean.
For the Hurricane pilot, though, the drama wasn’t over yet. None of our ships had a flight deck for him to make a return landing on. We watched as the Hurricane looped around behind the convoy, coming up from the rear, all the while intentionally losing speed and altitude. When he was a couple thousand feet ahead of the lead ship, he slid the canopy back, rolled the Hurricane upside down and dropped straight out. The Hurricane continued flying on its own for a few seconds until, pilotless, it began to nose in toward the water, hitting the waves and tearing itself to pieces. Meanwhile the pilot’s parachute opened and our lead ship made straight for him.
The pilot splashed down into the water, his parachute landing on top of him. Then I couldn’t see anything else because the lead ship was blocking my view.
The motor
launch had arrived on the scene less than two minutes after the British pilot hit the water, but we found out afterward that it was too late. Buffetted by the waves, the pilot had been caught in his parachute lines and pulled under. He drowned before the motor launch crew could free him. He had shot down the German bomber and prevented it from sinking our ships and killing who knows how many sailors. But he lost his own life in the process. Clearly, the CAM ships were a desperate stopgap measure.
Then the Allies began to patrol the shipping lanes with a few small escort carriers. They only held a handful of planes each, but unlike on the CAM ships, the planes could take off and return safely after their missions. The escort carriers were spread very thinly throughout the North Atlantic, not nearly enough to fully cover the route, and their single-engine aircraft carried only a handful of depth charges. We still lacked proper cover from the heavy, land-based bombers whose massive loads of depth charges terrified the U-boats so much that they submerged on sight. But the presence of even a small number of fighters helped keep the Fw 200s away, and those fighters and the light bombers could spot submerged U-boats and lead our destroyers and corvettes to their targets.
* * *
For the next several months we began to breathe a sigh of relief as the convoys we escorted across the Atlantic got through unscathed, other than a few submarine scares here and there.
Soon the balance tipped again though, because now the Germans were building more U-boats than ever. Despite our best efforts we lost more than a hundred ships per month during the fall of 1942.
Then we caught a break in January and February of 1943. Things were going well for our side all around. The Russians finally defeated the Germans at Stalingrad, a long, brutal battle that had gone on for months. The convoys we’d escorted had carried a lot of the supplies on the first leg of the journey to Russia’s Red Army, so it was a relief to hear that it was having an effect. In North Africa as well, the Allied armies were pushing back Rommel’s famed Afrika Korps. All that combat meant that more supplies than ever were needed.
On the North Atlantic, things were going our way too. The recent winter storms had been so vicious that they kept the U-boats out of action much of the time. Once again we were chipping ice and frozen puke off our ships with every spare second we had, but at least we didn’t have to worry about getting blown to bits by Nazi submarines. During one of those storms, so much sea water poured into our mess deck that every last item in our storage lockers was soaked. I came off watch to find my spare uniform, my pens, notebooks, all of Aileen’s letters — everything I had that wasn’t on my back — floating in grimy salt water. All the ink had bled and I couldn’t make out a single word of the letters. The only consolation was that when I got to Greenock, I would see Aileen and have a couple of weeks’ reprieve from it all. And she would write me new letters to replace the ones that had been obliterated by the sea water.
Chapter Eleven
February 1943
As soon as we arrived in port I took the train to Glasgow, then walked from the station through the side streets toward Bell Lane. As I recognized familiar streets near Aileen’s house, I found myself walking faster. No matter how bad a crossing had been, I could always count on having a good time and feeling like myself again once I was with Aileen. I passed the intersection where Ken and I had always parted ways, then headed up the street and rounded the corner to Bell Lane. For a moment I thought I’d made a wrong turn. The scene in front of me was partly familiar … but partly made no sense at all. I stopped and stared, unable to understand what I was seeing.
In the middle of Bell Lane was a gaping crater. I was confused. I checked the metal street sign affixed to the brick row house on the corner beside me. It read Bell Lane, all right. But some of the houses that were supposed to be there were missing. Then I felt panicky. I ran down the street, counting off the house numbers as I went. They stopped at 33 and didn’t resume until 41, on the other side of the roped off, rubble-strewn area. There was no 37 Bell Lane. No door, no door knocker. Just a crater filled with bricks, timber and other debris. That couldn’t be possible, I told myself. It didn’t make any sense.
It was the middle of the afternoon and there was no one else out on the quiet street. I pounded on a few doors, but nobody answered. I began running, retracing my steps, searching my memory for some recollection of a police station or a fire station. Before I’d reached the end of the block, an old, white-haired man emerged from his house with a small terrier on the end of a leash. I pointed toward the crater, trying to form words that would not come out. He furrowed his brow as he looked at me.
“What happened there?” I blurted out.
The old man sighed. “German air raid.”
I couldn’t catch my breath. My heart was racing. I already knew what he was going to say, but I kept wishing that somehow it would turn out differently, so I listened carefully to his explanation.
“The Germans were bombing Greenock,” he said. “One of their planes was damaged by our anti-aircraft fire and dumped its bombs prematurely — to lighten its load and make it back to base, I suppose. Those homes took a direct hit from one of the five-hundred-pound bombs. None of us were in the air raid shelters because we weren’t the ones under attack. The plane just happened to be flying overhead. It was a terrible explosion. Even though my house is at the other end of the street, it felt like the roof was coming down on me. Blew out all the windows.”
It was then I noticed that he had a number of small cuts on his face and hands from where the broken glass had hit him.
I could picture the scene because it was so much like what had happened when I’d shot the bomber with my Oerlikon. This German plane hadn’t even targeted the houses; it was just a horrible chance occurrence.
My mind raced, trying to imagine some way that the outcome could have been less catastrophic than it appeared to be. Maybe Aileen was working at the munitions factory when it happened. Maybe her father was at work too. Her mother could have been out shopping, and Jimmy at school.
“What happened to the people who lived here?” I asked.
He shook his head. His expression was grim. “No survivors. None from any of the homes that were hit directly.” His face softened. “Did you know any of them?”
Just the question alone, his use of the past tense did instead of the present do, was enough to make me feel like I was sinking in quicksand with the world collapsing in on top of me. “Yes. The Hendersons,” I managed. “Aileen. Her brother Jimmy. Her parents.”
The old man looked at me sadly. “I’m sorry, son,” he began. “Didn’t know them well. They seemed like nice people.”
I looked back toward the crater.
“Would you like to have a cup of tea?” he asked.
“Thank you, no,” I replied.
I felt dizzy, like the earth was opening up beneath me and swallowing me whole along with those houses. I staggered away. The man tried to talk to me, but I had this strange sensation, like I was outside of my own body. All I could hear was my blood pounding in my head.
I walked and walked and walked until I had calmed down enough to find a police station, where I related the details. The police only confirmed what the old man had told me. There were no survivors. The funerals had been three weeks ago.
I tried to picture where I would have been at that time on that particular day, anything to somehow make it all connect. But it didn’t. I couldn’t believe this was really happening. I would never see Aileen’s grin ever again, never gaze into her brown eyes, smell her perfume or see her glide around the dance floor, feel the warmth of her body against mine, or her kiss on my lips. I would never see Jimmy, that gap-toothed little boy with the red hair, or the pleasant couple who had been so kind to me after the harrowing experience of my first major convoy battle.
It just didn’t seem possible. But of course I knew it was. It was very possible. By now I had seen dozens of people get killed. They had probably all had loved ones too, so why sh
ould I or Aileen be any different from anybody else?
I didn’t know what to do with myself alone in Glasgow, so I returned to barracks and asked to be reassigned to the next ship heading to Halifax.
It was an uneventful crossing in which HQ managed to divert us around all the wolf packs. I was almost disappointed. I wanted to fire a shell into a U-boat and watch it sink, or blast a German bomber out of the sky. Make some Germans pay for what they did to Aileen.
Chapter Twelve
Spring 1943
When I got back to Halifax and went ashore, the first thing I decided to do was to get away from the base and clear my head. Going to the Ajax Club was no longer an option, because the hoity-toity, holier-than-thou crowd in Halifax had pressured the city into shutting it down ages ago.
As I walked to the gates I ran into Fontaine, my shipmate from my first voyage across. I asked him if he wanted to go with me to see a movie.
“Sounds good, but I’m on duty in two hours,” he answered. “Maybe tomorrow?”
“Sure thing,” I replied.
Then I left the base and walked toward the one theatre in the entire city. When I arrived there was already a lineup around the block, and an usher said there was no more room. Since there was nothing else to do, I went for a walk instead, just trying to distract myself, really, from thinking about what had happened to Aileen.
I hadn’t gone very far before I saw that Halifax had taken on the appearance of a prison camp. There seemed to be shore patrol everywhere, hanging out on every street corner and in front of every restaurant, pestering sailors for ID papers. It didn’t make any sense. We were locked in a life-and-death struggle with Hitler’s U-boats, and meanwhile, here were these guys who never took a step off dry land, bossing us and throwing their weight around, but basically contributing zilch to the war effort.