The Battle of the St. Lawrence (19 page)

When on September 13, 1939, Canada received from the Admiralty the plans for what was originally called “patrol vessel, whaler type” (a variant of
Southern Pride,
a whaler designed by William Reed of Smith’s Dock Co., Ltd., in Yorkshire), the country hadn’t built a significant ship in almost twenty years. The dockyards that undertook to build what Churchill dubbed “the cheap, but Nasties”
(Charlottetown
cost $532,000) had barely survived the long dark years of the Depression by doing repair work.

Though slightly revived by the small rearmament program begun in 1936 when the King government more than doubled the Naval Estimates to $4.8 million (funds that ensured that when war broke out in 1939, Canada possessed six modern destroyers, enough to mount a credible defence against surface attacks on the east coast), the Canada that undertook to build and launch twenty-eight corvettes before the end of 1940 hardly possessed either the industrial plant or the experienced personnel required for such a project. Of the Great Lakes yards that built dozens of corvettes and minesweepers, the “History of the British Admiralty Technical Mission in Canada” (1946) wrote, “Without having dealt with them, no one brought up to Admiralty practice could begin to appreciate the primitive nature of all these yards…. In one there was no drawing office at all.” Of Canada’s machine-tool industry, the
sine qua non
of a shipbuilding industry, the “History” wrote that it was “relatively small, and that tooling of plants largely depends on U.S. and U.K. sources: this applies particularly to the specialized tools
required for fire [gunnery] control”—sources that were hard-pressed to meet their own demands.

Valves—or, to be more precise, the lack of valves—caused the “most serious bottleneck in production, owing to the small number of firms manufacturing them and the very large requirements of very varied sizes and designs.” This bottleneck was broken by the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association, which “set up an organization for producing them in the workshops of their numerous subsidiary companies.” Fan motors, cabling, electrical fittings and a hundred other components were difficult to get or were not being manufactured to the specifications required for a warship. The size and diversity of the electrical industry, the “History” concluded, corresponded to Canada’s small population:

In 1940, every one of the hundreds of thousands of tons of steel that thousands of men and women turned into corvettes and minesweepers had to be imported from the then-neutral United States. Until the Parker Fountain Pen Co. began capitalizing on its experience with small tubing to build hundreds of thousands of electrical fuses, few could be found. The same was true for ignition switches until the Renfrew Electric and Refrigeration Company stepped in. Cansfield Electric designed and built marine electrical equipment. Boilers and triple-expansion steam engines capable of producing 2,750 BHP and 185 rpm, enough to drive a corvette at 16 knots but rarely ordered during the 1930s, were manufactured by Dominion Engineers.

In 1940 stocks of building materials were so low at the Kingston yard, recalled Page in a 1990 interview, that he had to send a crew to scour the
farms outside Kingston to find the planking needed to build staging for the riveters and welders working on Hulls 17 and 18. Naval guns were in such short supply that the first of the fourteen corvettes to sail for England crossed the Atlantic with grey-painted wooden dowels sticking out of their gun turrets. By the time they reached the English Western Approaches, the “guns” were drooping, a sight that prompted an admiral to exclaim, “My God! Since when are we clubbing the enemy to death?”

McCorquodale’s men began where shipbuilders since the Phoenicians have begun—with the keel. In the 1860s, when Kingston Shipyards built 1,223-ton sailing ships, the phrase “her keel was laid” was literally true. Cut from huge trees, keels were rough-hewn timbers hundreds of feet long laid in the middle of a slipway.

The materials McCorquodale’s men worked with were considerably less romantic. Scores of angle bars, similar to T-brackets, were riveted to steel plates, which were then riveted to still more, L-shaped angle bars called channels to form the 208 foot 4 inch keel.

To a layperson, riveting resembles nothing so much as nailing, with all the attendant possibilities of pieces working loose. However, according to Francis MacLaughlin, “riveting not only joins plates and bars but also squeezes them together. They are squeezed so tight as to form a watertight bond. There are two reasons that rivets are red hot when driven into the hole. The first is so it is malleable. The second is because as it cools and shrinks, the bulbous head and flattened end are pulled closer together, therefore pulling the two pieces of steel (plates and/or bars) closely together.”

The riveting never stopped. Once the keel was in place, the frames that form the skeleton of the ship were erected and fastened—with rivets—to the keel. Next, the bulkheads (solid transverse walls) were placed wherever watertight divisions were needed.
⁴
And they too were riveted into place. Then the prefabricated pieces of decking were put in place and riveted. All the time this was going on, McCorquodale’s men were riveting hundreds of steel plates onto the outer lip of the frames to form the ship’s hull.

The pounding of pneumatic hammers flattening out the stems of thousands of rivets wasn’t the worst noise. “Riveting was noisy,” recalls
MacLaughlin, “but even worse was the chipping. Red-hot rivets were pushed into the hole and then a backer would put a heavy backing hammer against the head while the riveter would use the pneumatic hammer to flatten and spread out the end.

“Chipping was necessary when overlapping plates made a watertight seal impossible. Chipping was done with a high-speed pneumatic-driven chisel, similar to a riveting gun. Instead of the staccato sound of a riveting gun, chipping guns caused a high-pitched screech. The metallic screech of metal on metal was awful. Only the man with the chipping gun had any ear protection. The rest of us simply had to put up with it.”

In the days leading up to the scheduled launch date of September 10, McCorquodale’s men put down their pneumatic hammers, electric arc welding guns, asbestos blowers and cutting torches, and reverted to the same techniques used to launch Drake’s
Golden Hind
three centuries earlier. For eighty-five days, Hull 20 had been sitting on 12 × 12 × 4 inch building blocks, one line running directly under the keel and four others running six and nine feet out toward each side.

The process of lifting the ship from these blocks and sliding her into Lake Ontario began with the installation of a series of ropes that anchored her on her starboard side. Then launching ways were placed under her keel. Each long, well-worn timber sloped from under her keel into the waters of Lake Ontario. The installation of the butter boards came next. Slightly wider than the gap between the launching ways and the keel, these heavily greased boards were driven by sledgehammers into the gap between the ways and the keel, lifting the hull from the building blocks.

The launch itself was a civic affair. People gathered. Military bands from Fort Henry played. Dignitaries gave speeches praising the men of the Kingston Shipyards and appealing for people to purchase more war bonds. Then, at the appointed time, the trigger was thrown and the ropes anchoring the hull were cut.

“For a moment,” recalls MacLaughlin, who in 1944 rode a later corvette down from the ways, “nothing happened. And then she started to slide sideways towards the open lake, gathering speed as she moved. At the end of the ways, she tipped into the water, portside bilge first, with a gigantic splash that resembled a tidal wave moving away from the ship.”

Over the next eighty-five days before “No. 20” sailed from Kingston to Quebec City for commissioning and final outfitting, McCorquodale’s men worked on it day and night. Thousands of feet of wire and piping were snaked through her. Fuel tanks, which held enough oil to travel 4,000 miles at 12 knots, were constructed; to save weight, and thus fuel, the outer wall of the fuel tanks was the ¾-inch plating of the hull. Messes, storerooms, wardrooms and ammunition lockers were formed by welding bulkheads in place. The frames for the watertight doors, one in each transverse bulkhead, were riveted in place. Above her deck, a bridge arose that would hold the asdic hut, radar and steering. Two racks from which depth charges could be rolled were welded to her stern. On each side, 100 feet from the stern, depth-charge throwers were riveted and welded into place. Ahead of the bridge, a raised round steel plate was readied to receive a 4-inch gun. Work went on continuously all over the ship except for several hours on the day her power plant was installed: two huge Scotch boilers and a three-stage reciprocating steam engine, which had taken 10,000 man-hours to build.

“The day the boilers were hoisted from the railroad siding that ran close to the berth where the hull was brought after the launching, all other work on her had to stop. We never had an accident,” recalls MacLaughlin, “but moving it was dangerous work. If one of the cables of the Shear Legs snapped, it would have cut a man in two.

“We didn’t lift the boilers and engines with a crane like the ones you see today building skyscrapers. Instead, we had something called a ‘Shear Legs.’ The Shear Legs consisted of two heavy steel posts that pivoted on the ground and were joined at the top by steel beams. Their only movement was from the vertical to overhanging the water (and thus over the corvette’s hull, into which the Shear Legs could lower engines and boilers). The movement was controlled by a steel cable going to steam-driven winches well back on the dock. The railroad siding came under the Shear Legs,” recalls MacLaughlin.

“And, of course, we didn’t have walkie-talkies to communicate with the drive house. Instead, the foreman directing used hand signals. After making sure that everyone was clear, he’d twirl his fingers and the hoisting would begin; he used the baseball safe signal for ‘stop.’ If he wanted a bit more height, he’d tweet his thumb and forefinger together.”

“Once the boiler or engine was hoisted, the winch man paid out the steel tackle, and the top of the Shear Legs would begin to pitch out over the hull of the ship. The hoist tackle would be paid out and the engine or boiler would start to sink into the hull. After it disappeared from view, men down in the hold manhandled it until it was over the fittings that had been drilled in huge blocks of steel. Then the word came up from below to lower it again. Their aim had to be perfect—there was maybe an eighth of an inch leeway,” recalls MacLaughlin.

DECEMBER 13, 1941

The cold wind whipping off the St. Lawrence carried away the last words of the centuries-old invocation, “May God bless this ship and all who sail in her,” spoken by Commander L. J. M. Gauvreau, the naval officer in charge at Quebec. Led by their captain, Lieutenant John Willard Bonner, RCN, the officers and ratings who would serve on the newly commissioned HMCS
Charlottetown
marched onto the cold and darkened ship. It was a solemn moment, recalls Ray MacAuley, then an eighteen-year-old able seaman. He had joined the navy two weeks before work began on
Char-lottetown
‘s keel. “We knew that these same words had been spoken before thousands of American and British sailors, men just like us, men killed at Pearl Harbor and just two days earlier when Japanese dive-bombers sank HMS
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse.
”

As the last member of the crew stepped off the gangplank, Bonner’s ship came alive, throbbing as his engineers engaged her triple-steam reciprocating engine, powering the dynamos. Then lights—up in the bridge, above the hatchways, down the passageways. Moments later, the coxswain stationed at the mast ran up the commissioning pennant and the White Ensign. Two days later, fearing that
Charlottetown,
its equally new sister ship HMCS
Fredericton
and the Bangor minesweeper HMCS
Vegreville
would be locked in by the ice accumulating in the basin beneath the heights of Quebec, Commander Gauvreau ordered Bonner to lead the other two ships to Halifax.

The forty-six-year-old Bonner was a most unlikely warrior. He was a former RCMP captain who had spent not a little time pursuing “Uncle Iff” Skinner—Skinner, before becoming captain of HMCS
Arrowhead,
was a rum-runner from Newfoundland. And, like Lieutenant Commander Norman Smith of HMCS
Raccoon,
Bonner spent years commanding United Fruit ships. Ready to retire the year the war broke out, he entered the navy instead, taking command of
Charlottetown’s
sister ship, HMCS
Rimouski.
Bonner was also a devoted family man. His daughter, Marilyn Whyte, recalls the story of a physical exam during which Bonner was asked to remove his false teeth; Bonner replied to the stunned medical corpsman that the perfect teeth in his mouth were his own.