The Canadian navy used them to find and destroy enemy submarines using the corvette's single four-inch cannon. The tiny corvettes - 190 feet long and 33 feet wide - were built rapidly. How much would the U-boat warfare reduce our imports and shipping? Would it ever reach the point where our life would be destroyed? Here was the slow, cold drawing of lines on charts, which showed potential strangulation."īy 1941, Allied supply ships were lost to U-boats faster than they were being built and Canada launched a major naval recruiting and shipbuilding program to help. "The only thing that ever really frightened me was the U-boat peril. At the height of the U-boat war from 1942 to 43, up to up to one hundred supply ships were sunk each month.įor British Prime Minister Churchill, Nazi U-boats were the hand around his countrys throat. Each month hundreds of ships left North America, bringing tons of food, lumber, iron, steel and oil to England the supplies were the life blood of the Allied war effort. But they were Canadas only defence against the massive fleet of German submarines that were stalking Allied supply ships in the North Atlantic.Įarly in the war - before Canada launched its large fleet of corvettes - it became apparent that the Allies (countries fighting Germany) needed a naval presence in the North Atlantic. Seamen joked that corvettes were so unstable that they would roll in wet grass. Ones joints ache and ache from the continuous battle of trying to remain upright." An Atlantic so rough that it seems impossible that we can continue to take this unending pounding and still remain in one piece. I cannot imagine a more miserable existence than this of being caught on a corvette in the Atlantic. With little training and unstable ships, Canadian sailors face the dreaded German U-boats on the high seasĭuring the Second World War, a prairie boy named Frank Curry found himself aboard a cheap, leaky ship called a corvette, as he and thousands of other inexperienced Canadian sailors went up against the dreaded German submarine, the U-boat.Ī prairie boy named Frank Curry found himself fighting German U-boats in the North Atlantic during the Second World War.
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