Canada’s Navy 2nd Edition By Marc Milne ISBN 0802096042 978-0802096043

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ISBN 10:0802096042 

ISBN 13:978-0802096043

Author:Marc Milne

From its eighteenth-century roots in exploration and trade, to the major conflicts of the First and Second World Wars, through to current roles in multinational operations with United Nations and NATO forces, Canada’s navy – now celebrating its one hundredth anniversary – has been an expression of Canadian nationhood and a catalyst in the complex process of national unity.

In the second edition of Canada’s Navy, Marc Milner brings his classic work up to date and looks back at one hundred years of the Navy in Canada. With supplementary photos, updated sources, a new preface and epilogue, and an additional chapter on the Navy’s global reach from 1991 to 2010, this edition carries Canadian Naval history into the twenty-first century. Milner brings effortless prose and exacting attention to detail to his comprehensive and accessible examination of this fascinating Canadian organization. This much-needed update of Canada’s Navy will continue to provoke discussion about the past and future of the country’s naval forces and their evolving role in the interwoven issues of maritime politics and economics, defence and strategy, and national and foreign policy

Table of content:

1. •  Part One The Orphan Service

     On 26 July 1881 the first warship owned by the young Dominion of Canada, HMS Charybdis, cast her anchor in the harbour at Saint John, New Brunswick. An aged, wooden, steam-auxiliary-powered corvette, Charybdis had been acquired in some haste from the British Admiralty, which had already decided she was not worth repairing. But she would do as a training ship for a fledgling service. Stripped of guns and refitted just enough to cross the Atlantic, Charybdis left Portsmouth on 16 June and, after a rough passage, arrived at Sydney on 18 July to take on coal. There she was met…

      

     On 21 October 1910 – 105 years to the day after Nelson’s great victory at Trafalgar, and nearly 30 years since Charybdis’s infamous arrival at Saint John – His Majesty’s Canadian Ship Niobe arrived off Halifax harbour. There she was met by the little Fisheries Protection Service cruiser Canada, carrying the new navy’s first officer cadets and Rear-Admiral Charles Kingsmill, director of the Naval Service. Kingsmill went aboard Niobe and his broad pennant was raised. Canada then led Niobe up the harbour where, at 12:45 pm, the cruiser came to anchor off the naval dockyard. Salutes were fired, dignitaries including..

     matter what the constitutional historians may say,’ Don Goodspeed once wrote, ‘it was on Easter Monday, April 9, 1917, and not on any other date, that Canada became a nation.’² On that day 30,000 Canadian infantry, backed by 70,000 other members of the Canadian Corps, more than a thousand guns, and two years of bitter experience on the Western Front, captured the previously uncapturable Vimy Ridge. It was the first unqualified British victory in nearly three years of war. Church bells rang throughout the empire. More Canadian victories followed: Hill 70, Passchendaele, Amiens, the Hundred Days Campaign. In the…

      

     As powerful U-cruisers preyed on the fishing fleet and spread havoc along Canada’s east coast in the late summer of 1918, the empire’s senior statesmen met in London to discuss the future of imperial defence. The lines were quickly drawn. The Admiralty asserted its belief that the only viable maritime strategy was a unified imperial naval policy: ‘a single navy at all times under a central authority.’ Canada’s prime minister, Sir Robert Borden, flatly rejected the notion. ‘The experience gained in this war,’ he responded on behalf of all the dominion governments except Newfoundland, ‘has shown that in time of.

2. Part Two Finding a Role

    

   In the aftermath of the first Czech crisis, Mackenzie King went to Bermuda on holiday, where he spent two long afternoons chatting with Admiral Sir Sydney Meyrick about war plans for the western Atlantic. Meyrick was deeply impressed with King’s concern over naval preparedness. Indeed, as he reported, King believed that the ‘readiness shown by the British Navy was a very big factor in the avoidance of war’ during the recent crisis.² Such an interest in things military was uncharacteristic of the prime minister.

   Yet King believed that should war come, a large navy could keep Canada out of trouble.

    

   The Japanese onslaught in the Pacific turned a desperate European conflict into a global war. With two battalions in the ill-fated Hong Kong garrison, Canadians were caught in the maelstrom from the outset. Once again the British Columbia coastline was undefended in war and the province’s citizens clamoured for action. Japanese citizens were stripped of their possessions and removed from the Pacific coast to internment camps, while a massive expansion was planned for the Royal Canadian Air Force. As one British official observed ruefully of the Canadian plan for scores of home-defence fighter squadrons, ‘Vancouver is fighting with its back…

    

   Without doubt, 1943 was the most complex and difficult year in the navy’s first century. The war had thrust enormous expansion on the service, and its operations were now vital to the whole Allied war effort. By 1943 the RCN had nearly two hundred warships of all types in service and nearly as many building. Half (some 48 per cent) the escorts protecting the main Atlantic convoys were RCN. But the size of the RCN by 1943 was no accident, nor was it the result of some natural law. Naval expansion since September 1939 was aided and abetted by a…

    

   Victory over the U-boats in the summer of 1943, coupled with British manpower shortages, provided the RCN with a chance to fulfil its standing ambition to be a big-ship navy. ‘The acquisition of such ships before the end of the war,’ Paymaster Lieutenant G.F. Todd explained in his November 1943 paper, ‘would offer the RCN an opportunity to win battle honours with them, and so greatly enhance the chances of their acceptance by public opinion as part of the post-war Canadian Navy.’² By the summer of 1945 the dream was nearly a reality. The cruisers were in service, and light…

   In 1945 the greatest obstacles to the completion of the RCN’s scheme for a balanced fleet built around two light fleet aircraft carriers were peace and Mackenzie King. By 1944 King was already wary of the navy’s ambitions, especially of the cost of maintaining naval aviation. The navy had hoped to use the Pacific war to build that fleet and then, having won battle honours, to convince King and the country to keep it. But the navy reckoned without the completeness and suddenness of the Allied victory in the summer of 1945, and without King’s own desire to trim its… 

    

   The Second World War catapulted the RCN into national and international prominence, and the navy used that opportunity to win the public recognition and legitimacy denied it before 1939. In no small way, the decision to concentrate on anti-submarine warfare in 1947 was the most important event in Canadian naval history. It marked the end of the professional navy’s ambitions to participate in the forefront of major fleet operations and its acceptance – however tentatively – of the ‘national’ experience of the small-ship war. Moreover, by embracing the nation as the wellspring of naval support and legitimacy, the RCN had….

3. Part Three Securing a Place

   In early 1950 the fleet had only five fully operational warships: the carrier Magnificent and the destroyers Huron, Micmac, Cayuga, and Sioux. The cruiser Ontario, Tribal Class destroyer Athabaskan, Second World War frigates Antigonish, Beaconhill, LaHulloise, and Swansea, and the Algerine Class minesweeper Portage were busy training personnel. Manpower strength was a little over 7000, building to the newly authorized ceiling of 9600.² Eight years later the RCN had some fifty warships in commission with a personnel strength of nearly 20,000. By 1958 the navy was big, bold, and brash. Its fleet, its weapons, equipment, and scientific innovation were all…

    

   By 1958 the RCN had nearly 20,000 personnel and forty-seven warships in service, with six ships refitting and a further half-dozen building or on order. By the time of the fiftieth anniversary celebrations in 1960 the navy was at its peak of peacetime strength. The big question of the day was whether that strength could be sustained. More than half the fleet was war built, obsolescent, and nearly worn out. Indeed, by 1960 the battle over the ultimate peacetime structure of the RCN was joined. With the prospect of nuclear annihilation looming and the Canadian economy stalled, money became tight…

    

   The first sixty years of Canadian naval history are something of a paradox. During those decades Canada fought two world wars, the Korean War, and an apprehended war against the Communist bloc. All these conflicts demonstrated the unquestioned importance of naval forces. Yet those same years were characterized by recurring crises over the navy’s size, purpose, identity, and, until 1939, its very existence.

   The Cold War eventually ended debate over the need for a navy, but the other questions remained. In fact, the navy and the government had almost always been at odds over what kind of fleet the country…

    

   Hellyer’s reforms proved to be just the beginning of more than two decades of decline for the Canadian navy. By the early 1980s the fleet was so obsolete that it could no longer defend even itself in Canadian waters. Only its residual anti-submarine capability remained of value to NATO, so when Canadian formations exercised in wartime scenarios, British and American ships provided the needed ‘escorts.’ As one officer confided in 1980, in a real war the best the Canadian navy could hope for was to be trapped in Halifax harbour by mines: with any luck, by the time Americans arrived…

    

   In the early 1980s the navy reached its lowest point since 1946. Much of the fleet was over two decades old, and some ships were approaching thirty years of service. Only the DDH 280 Class and the submarines could fight a modern war. The navy’s decrepit state, and green uniforms, became a national embarrassment. One editorial cartoon quipped that the navy was now vulnerable to Soviet ‘rust-seeking missiles.’ Apart from a high level of professionalism, which years of neglect, reorganization, and unification did not destroy, what sustained the navy’s spirit through those dreadful years was the knowledge that new ships…

    

   Despite a few crises in Africa, the perennial problem of the middle east, and the simmering situation in the Balkans, the world was remarkably peaceful after the Cold War ended. In the west, in particular, a mood of optimism prevailed. The American historian Francis Fukayama even talked about ‘the end of history,’ as a new era of peace and stability appeared to dawn. Then on the morning of 11 September 2001 everything changed, when airliners loaded with fuel and passengers crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. The whole world watched in stun

4. Epilogue

    

   The first century of Canadian naval history leaves a complex legacy. In many ways the one constant is the always vexed relationship between the state, the country, and the armed forces, of which the navy is a part. Canadians, George Stanley wrote in the middle of the last century, are an unmilitary people who have not been shy about fighting wars. Although the myth that every Canadian is a good, natural soldier has waned since the mid-20th century, Canadian attitudes towards professional soldiers, sailors, and airmen remain fickle at best. This is particularly so for the Canadian navy which, by…

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