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The Royal Canadian Navy & New Perspectives on the Second World War

Keynote Address

After the War – Canada’s Navy Post 1945
Vice-Admiral Glenn V Davidson

To Canada, the Navy Battle of the Atlantic Sunday is deeply important, and it is in every way its national day of naval commemoration. It is no celebration of a single glorious victory, but quite a solemn day of remembrance, as a long desperate fight, and the losses it entailed are remembered. Certainly, it was often a fight of little ships, impeded by poor equipment and inadequate training but it was also a fight of incredible courage and accomplishment by a Navy of almost entirely hostilities only sailors who learned as they went… and how incredibly well they learned.

In a great many ways, Canada’s Navy was truly born in this Battle of the Atlantic and so while the losses are remembered, and those who went before are thanked, Canada’s heritage is also celebrated and pride is taken in its national accomplishments. Battle of the Atlantic Sunday is a solemn and important day for Canada’s Navy, but it is a good day, a great day, and one that is uplifting.

The authors, researchers and the whole team at Canada’s Directorate of History and Heritage (DHH) should be congratulated for what they have accomplished with both volumes of the Official History of the RCN in the Second World War. Their research is meticulous, their perspective balanced, their presentation splendid and their narratives thoroughly readable.

There is a penchant for ‘myth busting’ in Canada these days, and journalistic and editorial convention is all too often inclined to seek the negative side of a great story, to diminish heroes and heroic accomplishments, and to recast events in the mould of today’s values. There is none of that in these works. Theirs is an excellent history, which explains what happened and why, and puts many complex and partly understood subjects in perspective, some for the first time. It is also clear that these works have been written by people who understand ships and the sea, and naval ships and sailors in particular.

Regardless of the advantages of deeper research, greater objectivity, and wider perspective inherent in an official history which arrives at a dignified distance from the events of its narrative, publishing sixty odd years after the fact may generate the unwelcome and rather unkind ‘so what’ question, perhaps followed by ‘why now?’ and ‘how is this relevant?’ from heartless accountants, harried generals, and adolescent Ministerial assistants.

The ‘why now’ question is pretty easy, so instead I shall focus on the ‘so what’ and ‘relevancy’ issues.

It has been said before that a nation (or a Navy) that does not know its history has no soul. Even if one accepts the wisdom that Navies have glorious traditions, Armies are replete with customs and ceremonial, and Air Forces generally reflect an accumulation of bad habits, then it is part of any Service’s responsibility to ensure that its own history, its successes and its failures must not only be taught but embedded in the culture. Successive generations cannot live in the past, or glory in another nation’s history, but must learn from the past, have confidence in their own abilities and use this solid foundation to prepare for whatever may come. 

It follows directly that any historical record (including an official history) in and of itself may make wonderful reading, but the practical value lies in what you learn from it, what lessons you take away and how you apply them. Obviously, there must be a sense of selection about this, and there must be a division between the topical, the timeless and the merely interesting. Scholars of the First World War will probably continue to debate the tactics and decision-making at Jutland for another ninety years.

If however one looks beyond the entertaining study of historical tactics and examines the impact on commanders of new or ill-understood weapons systems (or more precisely the fear of them), of deplorable failures in communications and miserable situational awareness, and of the strengths and pitfalls of pre-planned responses, then there are the makings of some timeless lessons, albeit lessons which generations of officers have studied to bits since 1916. 

Objectively, the greatest story is how Jellicoe and later Beatty kept the Fleet morale and efficiency so extraordinarily high for four solid years largely spent in and around the dark and wind of Scapa Flow: the most remote and desolate anchorage imaginable, at about the latitude of Northernmost Labrador, with nowhere to go and nothing for the sailors to do if they ever got ashore. Here is a study on leadership waiting to be written.

‘So what’ and ‘how is this relevant’ to Canada’s Navy since the Second World War?

Three simple and lasting lessons that should be taken from the experience in the Second World War are: look after your sailors – treat them as individuals, train them well and pay attention to their welfare; build a Canadian Navy for Canada – make it relevant for Canadians and attractive for their government, and ensure the navy is balanced and can be sustained; and define what is required and build in capability for changed roles and evolving threats.

It seems it took the Canadians quite some time to come to grips with all these and to practically apply them in the years after 1945. The statistics of Canadian wartime expansion are staggering. The demobilization was even more dramatic, as over 80,000 personnel were released and over 300 ships paid off in about a year. By 1947 the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) was down to some 4,000 personnel, with an operational fleet of a small carrier and two destroyers on the East Coast and a couple of destroyers in the Pacific. It did not sustain a fleet in being, and it started to rebuild the post war Navy having lost 95 per cent of the officers and sailors with wartime experience.

Who stayed? An interesting lot. There were a certain number of RCNR and RCNVR officers who re-enlisted after the war for a variety of reasons. Some were extremely solid officers and sailors, others perhaps less so. 

Of particular significance, a large portion of the pre-war regular Navy officers, simply carried on with their careers, and having gained tremendous operational experience and several promotions, moved to implement the plans for a post war Navy which had been initiated as the War wound down. They had learned some things well after six years of war. Among them, the theory of and need for a balanced fleet (although the definition of this varied), the certain knowledge that all future operations at sea would require air capability deployed with the fleet, a greatly enhanced knowledge of anti-submarine operations and of the Atlantic operating environment. Some had learned a good deal about Canada, about Canadians and about dealing with Canadians. Others had not.

While there was a sense that the United States Navy was clearly an ascendant power, most of the post-war generation of senior Canadian Naval officers, all trained schooled and mentored in Britain and with ‘big ship’ time behind them, clearly felt that the ‘Royal Navy’ was the ‘Real Navy’ and sought to make Canada’s Navy conform with the standards and attitudes of another nation and another age. These officers had brilliant experience in the RN which was unobtainable in Canada, they saw the world, and all seemed to look back on this experience fondly. The issue really was that sometimes they did not bring the right lessons home to Canada. 

Admiral Grant, the Chief of the Naval Staff (CNS) in 1949, when testifying before the Mainguy Commission (assembled to investigate the mutinies on board three ships that spring) said that ‘Canada’ flashes on the shoulder spoiled the uniform, and declared that he had never worn them and never would! Similar attitudes in commanding and executive officers at sea, such as the refusal to implement ship’s welfare committees, cavalier disregard for sailors rest and personal time, failure to address basic hygiene and accommodation issues, and attempts to sustain an artificial and un-Canadian caste barrier between officers and sailors led to the problems in the first place. Clearly, this is not meant to characterize the entire Royal Navy (RN), and obviously good RN ships were not run like this either. Problems arose, however, when officers tried to replicate one service in another and to export their British experience to Canada. 

In many senses, the sailors and the population of Canada had moved on during the War, but the officer corps had not. It was actually the Minister of National Defence, Brooke Claxton, who ordered the Navy to paint Maple Leaves on the ships funnels in 1949 (as had been done during the war), not the naval leadership. This unhappy time was best characterized by the words of one of the commission members, Louis Audette who years afterward, said, ‘I don’t think the officers were wicked. I think they were just fools’.

He was right, of course, and while the RCN did move quite quickly after mid-1949 to implement essential and lasting changes, the culture was slow to adjust. The Wardroom in Stadacona, built in the 1950s, had two huge murals in its grand ballroom: one of the Armada and the other of Trafalgar, both of course major events in Canadian naval history. These were impossible to move, and stayed in place until the wardroom was rebuilt only a couple of years ago. The Armada is now gone, replaced by a splendid painting of Assiniboine duelling it out with a surfaced U-boat. Trafalgar was kept, however, partly because it is a stirring painting, but mainly out of pure nostalgia. Few paintings can have been so regularly ‘improved’ by late night amateur artists, and over the years floating barrels have been inserted to cover up crude periscopes, and puffy clouds contrived to obscure post Nelsonian maritime patrol aircraft.

The message is simply that culture and personality did get in the way after the war, and the RCN struggled unnecessarily to deal with the lessons it should have learned.
 There is a remarkable and complex story to be told of what Canada’s Navy did in the ensuing decades, how it prospered, how it declined but survived and how it rebuilt and arrived at the extremely capable, well balanced fleet it has today. This will not be addressed in detail here, and Volume Three of the official history must be looked forward to for full coverage of the post-war evolution.

The post-war years can be broken down into three broad periods: 1946-1964: The Great Postwar Growth and Peak of the RCN, 1964-1980: The Decline, and 1980-present: The Rebuilding and Rebirth of the Canadian Navy.

1946-1964: The Great Postwar Growth and Peak of the RCN

The Canadians did rebuild and very successfully. The RCN grew to a peak of over forty ships and 20,000 personnel, centred on a light fleet carrier (operating three in total: Warrior, Magnificent and Bonaventure). It became the NATO leader in ASW and developed a brilliant record of design and technological innovation (St. Laurent and follow-on classes, the pressurized citadel, variable depth sonar, the helicopter haul down system to marry large helicopters with small decks, surface piercing hydrofoil, extensive work in passive acoustics. It built and deployed a naval icebreaker to the Arctic in the early 1950s – a capability it has never had since. In this same period, it gradually repatriated most of its training and a distinct Canadian naval identity became more and more evident.

But it was not all golden. Fleet capability was limited, half the ships were Second World War conversions, there was no Auxiliary Oil Replenishment (AOR) support for the carrier or ASW forces (an extraordinary gap in light of Second World War experience with convoy escort and continual endurance problems) and apart from the early deployment of Sea Furies and Banshees in the carriers, no fleet Anti-Air Warfare (AAW) capability. It had plans for a balanced capability, including a General Purpose Frigate (GPF) and even toyed with a nuclear submarine programme in the early 60s. But the balanced fleet eluded them, and the Navy faced a roller coaster ride of government engagement and declining investment in defence  (defence spending went from some 40 per cent on capital in the early 1950s to a third of that or about 13 per cent by 1963). The net result was that the Navy moved to a niche capability in ASW. A broad niche to be sure, but a niche nonetheless, which limited what it could do, make them dependant on external support for air and surface defence, and in the face of a growing nuclear submarine threat, made active surface ASW increasingly ineffective, and tied its hands for about thirty years. 

Nonetheless throughout this early period, the RCN was in most assessments, with the carrier and its shore-based air assets, a credible and effective ASW Navy. At the height of the Cuban missile crisis, the Flag Officer Atlantic, Admiral Dyer, had twenty-five surface ships deployed in a sector 1,000 by 250 miles and they obtained over 130 Soviet sub-contacts in a three week period in and near the zone.

This period effectively ended in 1964 after the Hellyer Defence White Paper, with integration of NDHQ, elimination of the CNS position, and the CF embarked on the road to Unification.

1964-1980: The Decline

There may be a widespread sense among those who came later that the events of 1964-68 marked the nadir of the Canadian Navy. Certainly they were traumatic years, with the effective decapitation of the navy’s leadership and the retirement or firing of a whole generation of flag officers. They also marked the end of the RCN, which ceased to exist on 1 February 1968, and the unification of the CF. The rest of this period was no great shakes either, and it actually bottomed out a bit later, in the early 1970s.

While the AORs and Designator Destroyer Helicopter (DDH) 280s were introduced in the late 1960s-early 70s, the Navy lost the last carrier, Bonaventure, in 1970, and with it the manifestation of its credibility at sea. The carrier was undoubtedly unaffordable and her demise inevitable, but her departure was a huge practical and symbolic blow. When she went, the Canadian Navy entered a period of capability stagnation and professional decline. These were miserable years for officers and sailors who wanted to make a career of the Navy, who saw good people leaving in droves, ships locked in early 1950s’ technology, and combat relevance evaporate. It saw the Navy dying of malnutrition and neglect all around them.

Some people perhaps associate these dismal years with the green uniform. It was another sign, and compounded the malaise, but those who wore just got on with the job. These years were more a time when officers had to improvise and pretend to train with systems designed for another threat, when the shadow of Viet Nam hung over them and the military was unpopular, when there was simply no money for fuel or training, and no interest in doing anything about it on the part of the government despite every evidence that the Cold War was chilling and the Soviet Navy was extending its reach dramatically. The Prime Minister of Canada for much of this period was a great sceptic of the military and widely believed to hold the view that the forces were ‘at best a waste of money and at worst a haven for simple minded… conservatism’,  to quote Marc Milner. To the same PM’s credit, while he may always have harboured grave doubts about the military, it was on his watch that defence spending turned around, the ship replacement programme was authorized (in 1977), and the framework for reinvestment in defence established.

So, yes, it was a rotten time to join, but join they did, and some stayed, and with the blessing of talented and visionary leaders the Navy survived and the foundation was laid for renewal of the fleet and revitalization of the Navy.

1980-present: The Rebuilding and Rebirth of the Canadian Navy

The past twenty-seven years, by contrast, have overall been a great time for Canada’s Navy. Things started to happen however and from 1980-84 the defence budget almost doubled in the face of appalling economic conditions in Canada. In the fleet, the destroyer life extension programme started as well as upgrades to communications equipment (secure UHF in 1981, Satellite Communications a bit later), new Operations Room displays replaced the plot tables, experimental towed array in a DDH in 1983 when for the first time in two decades surface ships could again have the ASW tactical advantage. These were all great steps and signs of things to come. And the Canadian Navy has not looked back since.

Much of the success achieved can be credited to a generation of inspired naval officers who joined in the 1950s, who were extremely competent, and ruthlessly efficient. Admirals like Dan Mainguy, Nigel Brodeur, Jim Wood, Chuck Thomas, Andy Fulton. These officers had tremendous political savvy, were extremely skilled at working the approval and procurement systems, and were brilliant opportunists to boot. They read the governments of the day very well, played the procurement rules meticulously, made the case for the Navy using arguments that governments understood (political leverage, industrial benefits, regional appeal), and outmanoeuvred the opposition (political, bureaucratic and military) at every step. Admiral Thomas can be remembered as snarling at a group of officers: ‘Don’t bother me with this crap about the Russians… it’s the Army that’s our enemy’. They also moved early to establish an expanded naval presence in Quebec, primarily through the naval reserve, and starting in 1980 began to introduce mixed gender crews to the ships. This is just the way they are today, but twenty-seven years ago these were big steps, and visionary steps that put the Navy in a position of confidence with the Government.

Certainly there was an element of luck and timing in this, but it all worked. Since the early 1990s the Navy has commissioned twenty-eight new ships (twelve CPFs, twelve MCDVs, four SSKs) all astutely named after Canadian cities, and with close ties to cities across the country. Add the vintage two AORs and three DDHs, and the fleet size at thirty-three main units is not far off where we were in the 1960s. The comparison stops there, however.

In the space of a very few years, the RCN has moved from a rust-out fleet to one that was not only state-of-the-art but leading-edge in firepower, command and control, and engineering capability. This all arrived with a ‘big bang’.

The Canadian Navy has great young serving men and women. The quality it attracts, the training they receive, the professional standards and conduct they demonstrate, their education and intellectual capacity, and their actual operational experience in the Adriatic, the Gulf and elsewhere is simply magnificent, and far beyond that of former generations. They are completely at ease with themselves, and have a natural comfort with rank, gender, language, race and cultural differences that is a microcosm of Canada, and a model for societies anywhere. They make the ops rooms dance, and handle their ships with panache. Yes, they all seem to have been born with ball-caps on their heads, and the only uniform they seem to posses is blue naval combat dress. But they are immensely competent and contribute immeasurably to Canadian national pride.

Today’s Navy is vastly improved. It is proud, it has experience, a solid competence and a toughness that is pervasive. This is a navy that is comfortable in its own skin, that can integrate seamlessly with a high-end carrier group, run any operation, add huge value in any mission or any force, and which is a great strategic asset for the Government of Canada.

There is, emphatically, no nostalgia for the past. The Second World War is a long way behind us, but the fleet today, and the men and women who serve it are in many ways the natural successors to the sailors and VR officers of the Second World War Navy. It came of age through adversity, and it has finally learned and applied those lessons from that time. The Navy’s story after 1945 is an important one, and a great part of Canada’s overall history. It needs to be ‘on the record’ and we should very much look forward to Volume Three of the official history of the Canadian Navy.

Vice-Admiral Glenn V Davidson is Canada’s Military Representative to NATO. This article is based on the Vice Admiral’s keynote address at the RUSI conference, The Royal Canadian Navy & New Perspectives on the Second World War, on 4 May 2007.