Second World War

Rapid Expansion

The “corvette navy” of the RCNVR and the Battle of the Atlantic against the German U-boats are remembered as the major contributions of the RCN, but that was not nearly the sum of the navy’s accomplishments. In 1941, with the fate of Great Britain uncertain and the U.S. not yet committed to joining the war, the growing competence of the RCN and the possible requirement to defend home waters prompted the building of a strong national navy. Defeat of the U-boats remained a priority, but the government ordered the acquisition of cruisers and powerful Tribal-class destroyers in addition to scores of anti-submarine corvettes and other escorts.

The naval college was re-opened to ensure the training of officers in Canada. The rapid, thirtyfold expansion (to some 96,000 sailors of all ranks by war’s end, as well as some 6,500 women), plus the effort to get large numbers of ships to sea—often before they were fully combat effective—led to an equipment and training crisis in the spring of 1943. This resulted in the dismissal of the chief of naval staff, Vice Admiral Percy Nelles.

This also meant the RCN itself was not a major element in the critical Atlantic convoy battles of May 1943. However, recognition of the RCN’s contribution to the war effort is better measured by the Allied decision in March 1943 to create the Canadian Northwest Atlantic as a separate area of joint RCN–Royal Canadian Air Force responsibility. Under the command of Rear Admiral Leonard Murray, this placed the RCN in charge of all northern Atlantic convoy operations through the end of the war. It remains the only major theatre of the war to have been commanded by a Canadian.

World’s Fourth-Largest Fleet

The U-boats remained a potent enemy, and, during the last two years of the war, more than 100 escorts joined the fight in the Atlantic, most of them new, more capable frigates. Additionally, the Tribal-class destroyers were broken in on the Murmansk Run (the convoy voyage to northern Russia) and later patrolled the English Channel in support of the D-Day landings. Canadian minesweepers helped to clear the approaches to the Normandy beaches, and Canadian landing ships and anti-aircraft cruisers participated in the assaults on the Aleutian Islands, Sicily, and Italy, Normandy, southern France, Greece, and in the liberation of Hong Kong.

Canadian sailors also manned two British escort carriers (the RCN’s own light aircraft carriers would not be ready until after Victory in Japan Day), and the first of the Canadian cruisers joined the British Pacific fleet to support operations against the Japanese home islands.

In total, Canadian warships destroyed 42 enemy surface ships and, either alone or with other ships and aircraft, sunk 33 submarines. The RCN lost 31 ships and suffered 1,990 fatalities. At the end of the war, the RCN was the fourth-largest fleet in the world—behind only those of the U.S., Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—with more than 400 warships. Although the RCN had no battleships or submarines, Canadian sailors served with distinction on both types of vessels in the Royal Navy.

Postwar Stresses

Planning for an orderly transition to a peacetime structure was thrown into disarray by postwar cuts that shrunk RCN ranks to fewer than 6,500 by April 1946. The navy’s near collapse was characterized by a series of “incidents” in the late winter of 1949 when sailors in the deployed destroyers Athabaskan and Crescent and the carrier Magnificent staged brief strikes. These actions, wrongly cast as “mutinies” and as the fault of an uncaring officer corps steeped in British values, were quickly resolved by ships’ captains and are better understood as a reaction to the stresses of attempting radical reorganization within a stringent budget.

NATO and Korea

Indeed, in the midst of this, the RCN was proving its operational viability. The aircraft carrier Magnificent was earmarked as Canada’s military commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) after its formation in 1949. Only a year later, when North Korea attacked the South, Canada quickly dispatched three destroyers to the region and maintained that number on station and in rotation for the duration of the war, a major accomplishment for a destroyer force of only eight ships. (See Korean War.)

The nature of naval warfare changed significantly in the late 1950s and early 1960s due to the evolving threat of Soviet nuclear submarines and long-range aviation (see Cold War). To counter the submarines, RCN naval architects designed the St. Laurent class of destroyer-escorts and spearheaded such major innovations as variable-depth sonar, the hydrofoil, and the helicopter-carrying destroyer.

Ice Breaking and Air Cover

The icebreaker Labrador, laid down in 1948, made several voyages to the Arctic and established a visible military presence in this increasingly important region before being transferred to the Coast Guard. To provide air cover for the fleet, the British-built carrier Bonaventure, with an angled deck and jet fighters, was commissioned in 1957.

As the first Canada-United States naval cooperation agreements were framed, senior naval staff reached the far-sighted decision that all ships, equipment, and communications systems would be compatible with the U.S. Navy. These measures were all in place when the Atlantic fleet embarked on patrols during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, in response to a direct and considerable challenge to continental security.