by Edward Kay
More than twice as fast as a corvette, the Mohawk had six 4.7-inch guns to the Wildrose’s single 4-inch gun. In addition, it had six of the new 40-millimetre guns, a weapon that could fire 2-pound explosive shells almost as fast as a machine gun. It was much better suited to doing battle close to the heavily defended European mainland.
Once aboard, I was happy to discover that Ken was part of the crew. We worked different gun stations now, but when we were off watch we got to pass the time together, playing cards or talking while we sunned ourselves on the deck. For a time we were stationed off Spain and in the Mediterranean, and Ken joked about getting paid to work on his tan. And destroyers were much more watertight than corvettes, so we never got soaked when we slept. The Mohawk was an altogether more civilized vessel to serve on.
On August 27, 1943, we were off the coast of France when our radar picked up a formation of Luftwaffe bombers heading our way. Ken and I were at our gun positions. His station was just forward of mine. There were no Allied fighter planes in the area to drive away the bombers, but we weren’t panicking. By now I had a lot of confidence in our new 40-millimetre Bofors gun. It was a devastating anti-aircraft weapon. Each one fired 120 shells a minute, and just a single well-placed round could take out a German plane.
The Luftwaffe bombers soon appeared on the horizon — twin-engine Dornier 217s. Our long-range 4.7-inch guns opened up on them. That seemed to be having the intended effect, because the bombers kept their distance to avoid the flak bursts, and one even dropped its bomb toward the open ocean. I thought that meant the plane had been hit by our flak, and was lightening its load. But then I noticed something odd. Instead of falling into the water, the “bomb” that the plane had dropped kept coming our way. As it got closer I could see that it had stubby wings and some kind of rocket engine emitting a plume of smoke. It was closing fast — I guessed around 600 miles an hour, three times faster than a German bomber.
When it got within range we opened up with the Bofors guns. But it was coming in so fast I couldn’t track it properly, and neither could Ken or any of the other gunners. Every shell I fired seemed to explode hundreds of feet behind it. We couldn’t even swivel our guns fast enough to keep up to this thing. Then as it hurtled toward us I had a sickening realization: its trajectory was carrying it right toward Ken’s gun station.
“Come on, Kenny, get it! Get it!” I shouted into the roar of our guns. But everything that he, I and all the other gunners fired suddenly felt maddeningly slow. Then came the moment when I realized we were really not going to get away from this thing. It fell below the level of my gun and a fraction of a second later came a roar and a deafening crash like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.
The world went black.
When I regained consciousness, there was smoke everywhere. The emergency klaxon alarm was ringing. I got to my knees, grabbed onto my gun and hauled myself to my feet. My head was pounding and I felt weak and nauseated. I peered out cautiously from behind my gun position and saw that Ken’s gun turret was completely gone. Then I looked down and saw that I was totally covered in blood and bits of flesh and guts. I thought I’d been wounded, but I couldn’t feel any bleeding anywhere. I realized I didn’t have a scratch. Beside me was part of a body. There was nothing left of it from the waist up. I could see feet, legs and a belt around the top of the trousers. But above that there was nothing, just a piece of a spinal column sticking out. Then I realized what I was looking at. Ken … The gore that was covering me was Ken.
The dizziness became overwhelming and I started to black out. I fell to my knees and vomited into the blood and the debris. Then I passed out.
When I came to, I was in the sick bay.
I looked down at myself and saw that they’d stripped my uniform off, washed the blood and gore off me and put me into clean underwear and a T-shirt.
“You’ve had a severe concussion,” said a medic. “But you’re lucky to be alive. I’m sorry about your friend. Five other guys on the gun crew died too.”
They buried Ken’s remains at sea that same afternoon, along with the bodies of the other victims. I awoke in the night, still in the sick bay, sweating and throwing up from the concussion. They had given me some kind of painkiller and I couldn’t tell if I was asleep or awake half the time. Strange images and thoughts drifted into my mind. As I slipped in and out of consciousness, I had a memory of the day that I’d told Ken the answers to the aircraft identification test in Scotland. I knew if I hadn’t done that, he would have washed out and been assigned to some other duty. Maybe then he’d still be alive. Or maybe he just would have been killed sooner. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Then I slipped into the dark of unconsciousness again.
* * *
When we got back to port, they put me in hospital for observation. Once the doctors were sure that I was okay, the brass sent me on leave, then reassigned me to training duty, because they figured I needed a break. I found myself back in Halifax once again, training recruits who had shown an aptitude for gunnery.
But as spring of 1944 came, I was restless. In one of her letters, my mom mentioned that Jack Byers was in Italy, fighting the Germans in the invasion that had started there the previous September. The Germans were putting up ferocious resistance, but Jack and the rest of them were gradually pushing them back and were now closing in on Rome. We knew an invasion of Western Europe was coming too. We all knew it. We didn’t know exactly where or when it would happen, but everybody talked about it.
In April I requested a combat posting and was given one, on a fast, very powerful Tribal class destroyer. On the evening of June 5, 1944, we were sent out into the English Channel. It was only when we were approaching the battle zone that we were told what was happening. The Allies had just launched the biggest sea invasion in history, and it was our job to make sure that no German submarines got anywhere near our troop ships and landing craft.
As the dawn sky began to lighten over the horizon shortly after 0500 hours, I could make out the dark forms of hundreds of ships heading east. The Allied air forces appeared overhead to make sure that the sky was clear of German bombers, while down below we were on full alert to hunt U-boats. The Navy did such a good job of it that not a single German sub managed to break through our protective screen during the invasion.
The Allied landing we took part in was called D-Day. Thousands and thousands of Allied troops poured onto the shores of Normandy, and soon had established a solid beachhead and had begun driving the Nazis inland. Over the coming months, we heard about the big land battles going on, first in France, then the Low Countries and finally Germany itself. We heard reports from the Eastern Front too, where the Russians were pounding the once-mighty German army into submission and forcing them back toward Berlin. Our soldiers in Italy were driving the Germans farther and farther north. The Nazi empire was crumbling.
That didn’t mean that the world was becoming any less dangerous. Just a few weeks after the D-Day landing, I got a letter from my mom. It started off like always, saying that she hoped I was well. But then she wrote, Billy, I’ve got some news to tell you, and I’m afraid it isn’t good. It’s about your friend Jack Byers. I didn’t have to read any further to know what she was going to tell me. Not with everything that was going on all around me. But I continued reading. Apparently he was in a tank that was part of the advance on Rome. It hit a mine that the Germans had buried in a field. They say he died instantly.
I had that familiar, sad sinking feeling that I was starting to get too used to. But it only increased my determination to finish this thing. And it made Hitler and the Nazis seem crazier than ever to me — insane really. Because despite the iron noose tightening around them, the Nazis seemed determined not to surrender without laying waste to Europe. With Allied troops now pushing in on them from all directions, they began firing V-1 flying bombs at England. Each carried a couple thousand pounds of explosives. Allied fighters were just fast enough to catch them, but the Nazi
s sent them over by the thousands, so despite the success of the Allied defences, it wasn’t possible to stop all the V-1s. The killing was temporarily halted when Allied troops overran the German launch sites in Europe, by which time the V-1s had killed more than six thousand people.
I took some satisfaction knowing that we had safely shepherded a lot of the aircraft fuel, food, equipment and weapons that our troops had used in their successful campaign to put those launch sites out of action and keep driving the Nazis all the way back to Berlin.
Even then though, the Nazis weren’t finished with their pointless destruction. We began hearing about mysterious explosions in London. At first the government said they were gas main ruptures, but in November Winston Churchill admitted that the British capital had been under attack by a new weapon, the V-2 ballistic missile, which flew so fast — several times the speed of sound — that there was literally no defence against it except to stop it at its source. So again we were kept busy protecting the precious cargoes of materiel that our troops needed to press home the attack and put Hitler out of business once and for all.
* * *
Over the fall and winter of 1944 and into 1945, our convoy escort work continued as busily as always. Our armies in Europe had an insatiable need for tanks, guns, equipment and supplies. All those civilians in Great Britain still needed to be fed too. We continued to encounter German subs and patrol planes, but they grew fewer and fewer, and their crews seemed to have less will to fight.
Allied scientists developed ways to jam the radio-control frequencies of the flying bombs like the one that tore through the Mohawk, so they became less of a threat. But we had seen first-hand that when it came to killing people, the Nazis had a particular talent for technical innovation. We never let down our guard. Even as 1945 began, it felt like a race against time to defeat them in case they had something new and even more deadly up their sleeve.
Chapter Fourteen
Spring 1945
On May 2, 1945, I was in the barracks in Halifax when I heard a CBC radio broadcast describing a link-up between Soviet and American troops on German soil, and Hitler’s rumoured death. But still the German forces refused to surrender, and shortly afterward we learned that Admiral Doenitz, who had spearheaded the U-boat campaign for most of the war, had taken over from Hitler. So we got our orders to escort another supply convoy that was forming up in Halifax Harbour.
Five days later we were less than 20 nautical miles from port, preparing to join the convoy that was now about to set sail. It was almost the exact spot where only three weeks earlier a U-boat had sunk our minesweeper HMCS Esquimalt, killing forty-four men. I was checking my Bofors gun when I heard somebody whoop in the radio room.
“The war is over!” someone shouted. “Doenitz has surrendered.”
“We’ve finally beaten the bastards!” shouted someone else.
A cheer went up all over the ship. We hugged each other and threw our caps in the air. We had a tot of rum to celebrate. But we couldn’t be sure that all the U-boats had received the order to stand down, so even though we were ordered back to port, we stood ready to fight until we had entered Halifax Harbour and passed Georges Island.
When we docked, instead of jubilation I could feel tension in the air. A lot of sailors were resentful of the way they had been treated by the locals, and had let it be known that when the war was over there would be a “day of reckoning” for Halifax. Rear Admiral Murray, who was commander-in-chief, thought it was just talk. He gave his sailors shore leave to enjoy their victory, won at such a high cost in sweat, blood and toil, with instructions to celebrate in a “reasonable manner.”
But as always, the authorities in Halifax made the wrong move. Instead of letting the sailors blow off steam and enjoy the victory they’d paid such a high price for, they closed the bars, restaurants, beer and liquor stores. Guys were roaming the streets with nowhere to go and nothing to do. The result was predictable: locals and sailors alike looted the beer and liquor stores and got drunk. A two-day orgy of looting and vandalism broke out.
I was still on active duty, so I didn’t take part in any of it. From the dockyard where our ship was anchored I could hear windows smashing and the roar of the mob. As night fell it seemed like the violence might spill over into the dockyard. My captain put me on sentry duty. He pulled out a Colt .45 pistol, removed the ammo clip, then handed the gun to me.
“Stand at the top of the gangplank,” he said, “And if any drunks come along looking to start trouble, you make sure they see that Colt forty-five.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, and took up my position.
I stood at the top of the gangplank, looking as tough and dangerous as I could, but nobody came around looking for trouble. By 2300 hours that night, things settled down. The drunks had tired themselves out, the city and the sailors all went to bed to sleep it off. And for me, the Battle of the Atlantic was over.
Epilogue
The war didn’t end when we beat the Nazis. Even after Hitler committed suicide and Germany surrendered, their ally Japan stubbornly refused to capitulate, though the Japanese seemed to have little chance of winning. Japan had a serious fuel shortage, had lost most of its ships and aircraft by then and possessed very few seasoned crew to man what little it had left. On top of that, now the Japanese would have the full weight of the Allies thrown at them. But just like with Hitler, Japan’s leaders didn’t seem to care how many of their soldiers or civilians were killed.
After Victory in Europe (V-E) day, the Pacific War was considered a bit of a sideshow in Canada, and the RCN soon began to discharge sailors. Only those who had volunteered for Pacific service were asked to continue the fight against the Japanese. I’d heard about the things the Japanese did to our guys in Hong Kong, how they’d mistreated them, starved them and tortured them. And I’d heard about the atrocities the Japanese Imperial Army had committed in the places they conquered. This war wouldn’t really be over for me until we’d given them a good drubbing and settled it once and for all. I understood how guys would want to go home after so many years in the war, but I had to finish the job. So I volunteered for the RCN’s Pacific contingent.
For those of us who stayed on, all the talk was now about the Pacific War, which was shaping up to be a long and drawn-out battle to invade and occupy the Japanese mainland itself. The recent invasion of the Japanese island of Okinawa had been successful, but came at tremendous loss of life.
We suspected it would be just as rough for those of us coming late to the Pacific War. Since the Japanese were running out of trained fighter pilots, fuel and aircraft, in desperation they developed “kamikaze” tactics. They gave a recruit minimal training as a pilot, then put him into an airplane loaded with bombs and ordered him to crash into an Allied warship in a suicide attack.
I knew that as an anti-aircraft gunner it would fall to me to stop the kamikazes. I was up for the task, but I had to admit that it was a daunting prospect to go up against these fanatics. I had seen newsreel footage of kamikaze attacks on American ships, and I wasn’t looking forward to meeting them in battle. Seeing them reminded me of that day on the Mohawk when we were attacked by the guided missile and I’d lost Ken. But this was worse. You could jam a flying bomb’s radio guidance system now, rendering them useless to the enemy. But there was nothing you could do to stop a living human being who was determined to crash his plane into you, except blast him out of the sky before he got to you.
On August 7 I was aboard a destroyer near Esquimalt, on a training run, when we heard the news that the United States had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. The radio announcer said it was equal to 20,000 tons of TNT. The American president, Harry Truman, insisted that unless the Japanese surrendered, more atomic bombs would follow. But the Japanese refused to lay down their arms.
On August 9 I heard that the Americans had dropped a second atomic bomb, this one on the city of Nagasaki. Six days later came an announcement over the ship’s public address system th
at Japan had surrendered. This time, I was really going home.
* * *
I never returned to Iroquois to live. By the time the war ended, the rest of my family had followed George and Don to Ottawa. Partly it was because the federal government had expanded so much that there were far more jobs there than in Iroquois. And partly it was because my father had had a heart attack in 1943 while I was on convoy duty. My parents hadn’t told me at the time, because they didn’t want me to worry. I think the years of constant anxiety about earning a living during the Depression had taken their toll on him. After that he needed regular care, and the nearest heart specialist was in Ottawa.
As for my birthplace of Iroquois, it ceased to exist not long after the war. To make way for the St. Lawrence Seaway, crews flattened nearly every building in the town — including the stone house that had been in my family since they moved to Canada from Ireland a century earlier — so that they wouldn’t be navigation hazards to ships. They built a new town that kept the name Iroquois, but that’s all that’s left of the original town — the name.
It strikes me as a strange coincidence that so many of the people and places that were such a big part of my life are now beneath the water. My hometown, the house I lived in, the streets and fields I played in as a kid, the school I went to, are all gone, covered over by water. Ken and my other Navy comrades and the merchant sailors who died in combat are all under water too, claimed by the sea. All of my vanquished enemies — the German submariners and their U-boats — have disappeared into the sea. The sea even took Aileen’s letters away from me, washed her words right off the pages, as though she had never thought them, never written them.
It’s like none of it ever happened. Except that I know it happened. Because I remember it all. And because we are free.
Historical Note