世界航海/海軍歷史 原汁生肉 The Royal Canadian Navy - Sinking you, but politely

The Royal Canadian Navy is a relatively recently founded service, but that doesn't preclude it from being interesting and informative to learn about. As with most British colonies in the 18th and 19th century, naval defence had largely been a matter for the Royal Navy directly. Even when a war directly affected Canada, such as the War of 1812, it was the Royal Navy that ordered and then commanded the ships that defended it on the Great Lakes, although many Canadian volunteers would serve on these and later other ships in the Royal Navy, there were no specifically Canadian naval vessels. However, this was not a policy that would remain popular forever, in part because of the growing sense of Canadian national identity, but also in part because of the changing political and technological environment. These factors often intertwined with one another, then one reinforcing the other. One of the biggest concerns Canadians had was that the only real threat to Canada was the USA, both directly militarily and less directly via low-key treaty violations. In the past, the nature of ships in general meant that a Royal Navy squadron on the North America Station generally had to stay there. Even if a crisis broke out elsewhere, the sheer journey time involved, combined with the roving nature of enemy frigates in the Age of Sail, meant that the situation would generally be over long before those ships would reasonably have been expected to get to the crisis point, and in any case, enemy ships might show off at the Canadian coasts anyway, and so the ships would just stay in place. With the advent of steam power and advances in speed of both ships and communications, the British ships could be called away at any time, since they'd be able to make it in time to contribute to a given problem's resolution, even if that problem happened to be half a world away, or at least a cover for other ships that might have gone to respond. Of course, these problems might not have anything to do with Canada, but would still leave the Canadian coast open to interference from the US, or anyone else who fancied their chances. Indeed, a couple of incidents in the late 19th century would see the Canadian coast void of much of the Royal Navy's presence, as the Empire redeployed to a more distant threat. Additionally, as the power of the US grew somewhat, and other more major threats to British rule began to emerge, the Empire became less inclined to slap down every instance of American violation of various agreements and treaties, such as fishing deals, calculating that on a grand scale it just wasn't worth the antagonism to provoke a confrontation. Of course, when it's your waters being violated by US ships, such as the US fishing fleet, it mattered an awful lot more to you than it did to an officer in the UK, who was mainly worried about trying to set the Russians against the French, and set everybody else in Europe at each other's throats, to ensure that there wasn't a war about some random bit of Africa that everybody wanted, and Britain had called dibs on. Of course, the extensive imperial domains were in part, thanks to the UK getting off the ground first in the Industrial Revolution, and as other nations began to play catch-up, they also wanted to get in on the idea of making their national anthem the final boss music for many less developed nations. This of course would lead to rivalry, which extended into naval building races, and these in turn cost money. For the Royal Navy, it was preferable to then ask the colonies to contribute towards the Royal Navy's own build program. This allowed them to have a much larger fleet under a single command, that could then focus overwhelming power at the point of trouble, even if it left other areas temporarily exposed. This would lead to three developments in the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the first two of which would occur in Canada. There was an abortive attempt in the early 1880s to acquire an actual military vessel to start training a corps of naval officers. However, it turned out an old worn-out corvette that predated the ironclad itself was more liability than benefit, and the poor thing, which was an earlier HMS Charybdis, was rapidly returned and consigned to the breaker's yard, although not before causing no end of problems for local shipping and drowning a couple of people thanks to her literally rotten condition. Also in the 1880s, partially in response to that fiasco and also the ongoing concerns about the USA's peacetime conduct, Canada also restarted its Fisheries Protection Service, giving it a quasi-navy with which to enforce treaty agreements and such in peacetime, since the vessels belonged directly to Canada and they were armed, just not quite as heavily as actual warships and without a direct military remit, although the concept was there to be able to make the now much smaller step from a Fisheries Protection Service to a full navy if necessary. Two of these ships, Canada and Vigilant, were ordered specifically for training purposes to narrow that gap between an armed Fisheries Protection Service and an actual navy still further. The third development was the rise of Germany, whose increasing fleet was seen as a direct challenge to the supremacy of the Royal Navy and kicked off a massive building spree. In order to offset the equally massive cost, the UK turned to the colonies and dominions to support the growth of the Royal Navy under the principle of collective protection beneath a single flag. This then set in motion another set of three outcomes, this time internal and political. One held that Canada should not contribute and should instead maintain a small navy of its own for local purposes only. Another held that Canada's contribution should be its own navy, somewhat larger, and that in the event of actual war, this should be placed under the command of the Royal Navy. Finally, the third option called for Canada to maintain its own small battle squadron and contribute to the Royal Navy's defence fund. Canada could maintain a mixed force of cruisers and destroyers with its existing infrastructure, but not battleships or battlecruisers, and so the contribution would ensure that Canadian battleships or possibly battlecruisers would still exist. Various incidents in the 1900s accelerated the discussion. Australia got its own navy and promptly ordered a battlecruiser, and the Royal Navy began drawing in from a larger global presence to a smaller one with a massive concentration of force in European waters, leaving significant naval infrastructure in Canada up for grabs, infrastructure that a potential new Royal Canadian Navy could use without the need for having to put in massive investment into brand new facilities. Of these, the middle option won out, although there was a concerted effort by the Go Big or Go Home Party to see Canada almost paying for three additional Queen Elizabeth-class battleships before that was shot down in the Canadian Senate. This would then lead to an agreement to form a navy which would be based around a single armoured cruiser, four light cruisers, and a half-flotilla of destroyers, all to be built in Canada, with a couple of full-on Royal Navy warships provided to them to accelerate the training of a new corps of naval sailors before the new Canadian-built ships hit the water. And thus, on 4 May 1910, the Royal Canadian Navy came into existence, where the full title, including the Royal moniker, would have to wait until the following year to receive a cent from Buckingham Palace. They largely copied the paperwork from the Royal Navy as this was easier and would improve interoperability. The first two ships to bear the HMCS, or His or Her Majesty's Canadian Navy ship, depending on who was training in the UK at the time, were the Niobe, a large 11,000-ton first-class protected cruiser that had been primarily designed for trade protection, and the Rainbow, a smaller second-class protected cruiser of just over 3,500 tons, designed more for peacetime station-keeping and escort of convoys. This also immediately began the Royal Canadian Navy's great tradition and problem of having to maintain a force in two completely separate oceans, with the larger Niobe assigned to the more important Atlantic, and the Rainbow making her way over to the lesser theatre, at the time, of the Pacific. This took a considerable amount of time since the Panama Canal didn't actually exist at this point. Political shenanigans in Canada then briefly took over, and with the effort to pay for dreadnoughts shot down, as mentioned previously, and political changes leading to a fair degree of apathy, Canada actually ended up entering the First World War with nothing to show for all its efforts, except for the two ex-Royal Navy ships that were now pulling service largely as the world's biggest and most heavily armed fisheries protection vessels. This would change, though, as the various declarations of war in Europe meant a navy was quite clearly required. Two days after the war officially started, the Royal Canadian Navy purchased a pair of submarines from British Columbia, one of the Canadian provinces who'd taken it upon themselves to buy them in turn from the USA, where they had been under construction for Chile before the order had fallen through. The Royal Canadian Navy thus temporarily became the most submarine-heavy navy in existence, with 50% of their active service vessels being of the underwater persuasion. This happy state of affairs was almost immediately ruined by pressing a couple of government ships into service, although the founding two ships didn't last too long. Rainbow sailed south as an apparent deterrent to Von Spee's East Asia Squadron, keeping an eye on things off the coast of California and luckily just avoiding an encounter with SMS Leipzig when she'd had to head home with the fuel. She would keep up these patrols for most of the war, but once Von Spee's ships had been destroyed, the main worry was German merchant raiders, ships that she could easily deal with. But the ship was deactivated in 1917 after the annihilation of any remaining German presence in the Pacific made her role somewhat low priority, whilst her crew was badly needed in the Atlantic. 1914 in Halifax found Niobe and the rest of the Royal Canadian Navy such as it was, preparing for various duties, blocking the eastern passage into the harbour past McNab Island, placing anti-torpedo and anti-submarine net defences, sorting out minesweeping efforts, and laying out a line of buoys for the so-called war channel, the approved method of entering and exiting the area without hitting anything particularly explosive or dangerous, as well as sorting out how they were going to stop and search shipping. This,along with more land-based administrative duties, was almost entirely complete within a couple of weeks, which also left the Royal Canadian Navy in control of basically any coastal radio transmitter with a signal strength sufficient to reach out any significant distance to sea. Niobe herself, who had been allowed to deteriorate in the period between 1910 and 1914, was not in the best of shapes, although at the very start of the war she was in the process of being patched up. A mix of Royal Canadian Navy, Royal Navy and reservist officers and men were assembled, in part from a pair of small British sloops that Rainbow had escorted up the west coast, whereupon they were paid off and the men transferred. Niobe slotted into the Royal Navy's blockading squadron, which sat off New York, waiting for one of the more than three dozen large German ships caught there to try and break out. Whilst these breakout attempts were rare, stopping and searching a number of other ships yielded up a steady harvest of Germans trying to head back home to join the war effort, at least in the early months of the war. However, her stay in dock had only just about rendered her seaworthy and not really patched up much of the damage from the previous years of neglect. And so by late 1915, she'd been turned into a depot ship in Halifax, where she was shortly thereafter damaged by the Halifax explosion in 1917, an incident which will need its own coverage at some point. The two submarines, CC1 and CC2, had likewise short lives. They patrolled the Pacific along with Rainbow at first, before being reassigned to the Atlantic, but they wore themselves out undertaking the voyage. But it wasn't all doom and gloom. During the war, the Royal Canadian Navy would receive well over a hundred new ships. Granted, most of them were naval trawlers, drifters, minesweepers and patrol boats, plus a yacht that was turned into a torpedo boat. But it did provide plenty of Royal Canadian Navy officers and men with sea experience, alongside many more who'd enlisted with or been seconded to the Royal Navy itself, and with the war over, would return to Canada with a wealth of experience from serving aboard larger ships. The duration of the war also opened up exciting lines of work, such as scouting their own coasts for German agents trying to set up submarine supply bases, as well as giving a minor boost to Canadian shipbuilding, which was called into service to provide the RCN with a number of patrol craft in order to keep an eye out for the occasional U-boat that did pop up in the area. Predictably, with the end of the conflict, the Royal Canadian Navy's numbers went into something of a freefall. Things looked up briefly, as in 1920 they received two modern submarines, two modern destroyers, and a relatively modern small light cruiser to form the core of a new ocean-going force. Angelico's mission around the empire had recommended that they actually have three light cruisers, a full flotilla of destroyers, and another one of submarines, but continued budget cuts saw the one cruiser, HMCS Aurora, and the two submarines back out of service within a couple of years, although the exercises and visits that she undertook in her brief career under the Canadian flag would prove useful. And the destroyers were also gone before their decade was out, albeit they were replaced, but it left the Royal Canadian Navy at a strength of just a few hundred men, not counting the reserves. Honestly, the threat of Germany was gone, and whilst the first few years of the 1920s looked like the USA might take its place as a threat to imperial interests, the fact was that no realistic naval program, no matter how ambitious, would allow the RCN to square off with even a smaller part of the fleet that the USN now possessed. Plus the advent of the Washington Treaty meant that potential conflict was not a usable basis upon which to build a navy, at least in Canada. From this rather low point, despite the ongoing Great Depression, things gradually began to look up for the Royal Canadian Navy, as the 1930s rolled around with the fleet starting to expand, in part thanks to the continued efforts of a number of Royal Canadian officers who would continue to point out to the politicians that Canada's economy relied upon the sea in terms of both trade and resources to a huge extent, and that Canada should be able to defend its own interests in this field. The first ships to help in this regard being a pair of destroyers that would have the honour to be the first ships actually ordered specifically and officially for the Royal Canadian Navy, the HMCS Saguenay and HMCS Skeena, part of the River class of destroyers that were fractionally smaller but slightly longer range variants of the then current Royal Navy A class. The River class moniker was then taken on subsequently for a series of destroyers that came from the Royal Navy's 1930s early alphabet series, which were all broadly similar, and a number of which the Royal Canadian Navy would later come to own. But that's getting ahead of ourselves a bit. Whilst the Royal Canadian Navy now stood at a whole four significant size surface ships, and their smaller craft were actually finding themselves a lot of work on everything from fishery protection to installing fuel depots for around the world flights, to intel gathering on Russian and Japanese activities in the Pacific, the latter of which included the vital information that there was a church to be found on the Kamchatka Peninsula in 1924, and this indicated that the new Soviet state-mandated atheism was taking a while to spread. Although what importance this report had to naval matters is somewhat more difficult to determine. Funding was still kept fairly short. As the 1930s drew to a close, further vessels were finally being acquired, with four more ex-Royal Navy C class destroyers being transferred over, balanced by the scrapping of the two ships that had been acquired in the late 1920s, with another C class in the process of transfer just as World War II broke out, leaving the total primary combat strength of the Royal Canadian Navy as World War II hit first gear as seven destroyers plus a handful of minesweepers and auxiliaries. The 1930s had led to a decision to base the Royal Canadian Navy's primary warship strength on destroyers as opposed to cruisers on the grounds that they could get more destroyers on their limited funding, and these therefore could be in more places. In the event of an enemy cruiser showing up, multiple destroyers could swarm it, and for taking on armed merchant raiders and enemy shipping in general, a good destroyer ought to be more than sufficient. And critically, destroyers were also much better anti-submarine warfare than cruisers were. Plans for a wider range of small ships at the time's sloops were also drawn up, although again funding issues would prevent these from being taken forward immediately. One critical change that came about as the Royal Canadian Navy's destroyers ranged overseas in the mid-1930s had been the upgrading of the wireless and telegraph network to allow constant contact with the decision-making centres of Canada, as a number of incidents in the early part of the decade showed that about the only place Royal Canadian Navy ships could reliably maintain contact with at the time was Halifax. A plan drawn up to mobilise the fleet during the Abyssinian crisis didn't lead anywhere in reality, but the exercise had also been beneficial to determine both the number and type of supplies that the Navy would need and also how quickly it could switch to a war footing. But from such humble beginnings are great things made. This time around, it was clear that major escort forces would be needed for the transatlantic convoys right from the start, and men would be required to man them. With the Canadian shipbuilding infrastructure still able to handle fair numbers of smaller ships and only a handful of mid-sized ships, the route for expansion was clear, and once the shipyards began cranking out new ships, a surprising number would end up in Canadian hands. And when I say shipyards, I don't mean British yards. Whilst a number of new Royal Canadian Navy ships would indeed originate from across the Atlantic, mainly a variety of destroyers, many of the frigates and corvettes that would make up the bulk of the Royal Canadian Navy's wartime strength would come from Canada's own shipbuilding industry, including the wonderfully but also worryingly named HMCS Asbestos, a flower class corvette. On the more offensive side of things, the RCN would eventually come to end up in possession of a total of nine much larger tribal class destroyers, which would see extensive work marauding off the coasts of occupied Europe, with just under half of these being products of the Halifax shipyards. Along with the usual smaller craft like minesweepers and motor torpedo boats, the Royal Canadian Navy would balloon to include around 120 corvettes, almost 70 frigates, and largely thanks to transfers of both British and American-built ships, the latter part of the destroyers-for-bases deal via the UK, a total of around 40 destroyers would also fly the Royal Canadian Navy flag, albeit none of these numbers would all be in service at the same time due to ongoing wartime losses. On the larger side of things, the RCN would also come to acquire a trio of armed merchant cruisers, and latterly a pair of cruisers, whilst also providing the actual crew for a pair of escort carriers that would however still carry the HMS rather than HMCS designation, partly because the RCN had no significant naval aviation component, and so flight groups were made up from the fleet air arm, but also because legal stipulations regarding the American-built ships meant they technically couldn't be sold on or given away. These latter two vessels would establish a core of Royal Canadian Navy crew familiar with carrier operations, which would be vital in the immediate post-war environment. Thanks to a combination of explosive growth, relatively few losses, and of course the somewhat sharp reduction in the number of Axis naval vessels still afloat, the Royal Canadian Navy would end up becoming the third largest navy on the planet as the war progressed, at least by numbers of active combatant hulls. There would also be a fair number of Royal Canadian Navy and Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve officers and men serving in the Royal Navy itself, and who generally acquitted themselves very well in incidents ranging from Dunkirk to the Battle of the Denmark Strait, to the raid on the St. Nazaire dry docks, and to the sinking of the Scharnhorst. There would also be a small but vital force of just over a hundred Royal Canadian Navy members serving on and commanding motor torpedo boats and motor gunboats in the vicious ongoing war in the Channel and Mediterranean between the Allied small craft and their Axis counterparts. As one might expect from a force that went from a handful of combat ships to well over 200 corvette and upward-sized vessels in a matter of a few years, the vast majority of the RCN's personnel were relatively inexperienced, many having signed up for the war's duration only, leading to some initial problems due to inexperience, especially given that convoy escort duty, the RCN's primary task, was not an especially forgiving environment. But they learned quickly and would rapidly build a reputation for effective and thorough work, which I think can be illustrated by one particular incident. In the summer of 1942, the Royal Canadian Navy faced something of a problem. The majority of the oil that it and the country as a whole used came from fields whose ports were in and around the Caribbean. But this was also at the tail end of what the U-boats called the second happy time, when a lack of convoys off the American coast led to a backlit shooting gallery for the Kriegsmarine submarines. Between this and a relative lack of escorts for the vital transatlantic convoys, oil shipments to Canada were being cut down at an alarming rate, to the point that some Canadian east coast areas were down to a mere two weeks' oil reserves. To try and remedy this, the RCN's Vice Admiral Nellis or Nells, possibly, sent a half dozen escort ships made up of four corvettes and two destroyers to the Caribbean to escort a number of convoys that had a heavy tanker presence. One leg of these would be the Tor or T-A-W convoys, taking ships from Trinidad northward through the Caribbean where they could be handed off to other convoys headed further into the Atlantic. On August 24, 1942, convoy Tor 15 was assembling with a rather mixed escort force. An old US destroyer, the USS Lee, headed the force, and with it was the Dutch minelayer-turned-gunboat-turned-escort ship Jan van Brekel, and the main bulk of the escort force being three Royal Canadian Navy corvettes, Halifax, Snowbury, which would later be immortalised as that plastic kit, and Oakville. The course was set for Aruba, then on to Cuba, then Key West, where the convoy would merge with another one which would then head for New York under a new designation, and from there to Halifax, the port, not the corvette that was already part of the escort force. First blood went to the Kriegsmarine, with U-558 and U-164 each claiming a kill, but being driven off by orbiting PBY Catalinas, which in the closer waters of the Caribbean could provide much more consistent and constant air cover. Meeting up with further tankers, by the 26th, the convoy had reached a position adjacent to Cuba, and was making good time north when it was spotted by the veteran U-94, under the leadership of Oberleutnant Otto Itz, who decided to first let other U-boats in the area know of the approaching targets before diving and heading in for his own attack. However, his transmission was intercepted and triangulated, so the convoy escorts fanned out, having been informed of this, and thus anticipating the threat. Along with the much larger Type 9 U-511, the smaller Type 7 U-94 launched its assault in the darkness of the 27th. The bigger U-boat managed a spread of four torpedoes, which would eventually score two kills and badly damage a third ship, all of which were vital tankers. The U-94, meanwhile, managed to sneak between the Oakville and Snowbury, but was spotted by an orbiting PBY, which hit the sub with a quartet of depth charges which blew off the sub's hydroplanes. Aboard Oakville, the call to action stations was sounded, and the flower-class corvette swung around and headed straight for the now-collapsing columns of water, with her ASDIC set pinging away furiously. Beneath the waves, finding the sub out of control, U-94 was trying to blow its ballast tanks as Oakville lobbed depth charges across its projected path. The sub breached the waves, and Oakville steered a course to ram, a not inconsiderable risk given that Oakville was only 20% heavier than her target, and was built to merchant standards. The corvette struck the sub a glancing blow, before wheeling around and opening fire, the ship's 4-inch gun poking a meat hole in the conning tower, whilst her lighter weapons raked the rest of the sub. Another shot from the 4-inch gun sent the submarine's 88mm deck gun to the bottom, and Oakville steamed around in a circle and came in for another go, again managing a glancing strike. Now too close to fire any guns down on their target, the crew reached for anything they could find. In this case, empty Coca-Cola bottles stored on the deck were numerous and proved easy to throw, and so a shower of bottles and broken glass was soon cascading down on the submarine. As Oakville pulled away, another pattern of depth charges was unleashed. It was pretty much impossible to get wrong, and sure enough, a fountain of water erupted from directly below the sub. Unsurprisingly, this furious assault led to the U-boat commander ordering his crew to abandon ship. Meanwhile, outside, the Oakville had come around again, and with the sub disabled, it was third time lucky, hitting the U-boat square on, just after the rather Swiss-cheesed conning tower. The only slight problem was that, unlike a WWI battleship or cruiser, the Oakville had no ram bow, just a gentle curve, and with its rather full hull proportions, it tended to raise its bow when it was operating at speed. Thus, the ram was less a big impact and stop, and rather more of a slow motion running over. The crew feeling three separate crashes reverberate through the ship, as first the bow rode up and over the submarine, then the ASDIC dome sheared off, and finally the ship's single propeller sliced through the submarine's outer hull, as Oakville completed its transit across the enemy sub. Surveying the results, Oakville's captain decided that he was decidedly unimpressed, and with no sign of the German crew just yet, and his own ship filling with water from a number of hull breaches, thanks to scraping over the U-94, he called for a boarding party, and headed to lay his ship alongside the enemy. The ship's boarding party was something of a startling sight. Having just been woken up by the alarm call to action, given that it was the middle of the night, the dozen strong group assembled, carrying pistols, grenades and torches, but thanks to the rapid summons and tropical environment, most of them were just wearing a steel helmet and gas mask, along with shorts or underwear, and not much else, save for the occasional life belt. Lacking only the silver spray paint needed to complete the image, they assembled on the fo'c'sle just in time to all be knocked out by the four-inch gun crew, who,apparently oblivious to all else, were industriously clearing out a jam, and ended up discharging the artillery right over their heads. Only two of the men actually regained consciousness before the Oakville, rapidly losing power, drifted away from U-94. Dazed and more than a little concussed, these two men, Hal Lawrence and Art Powell, jumped over the side of the ship, the ten-foot drop snapping Lawrence's belt on landing and leaving him clad in nought but his gas mask and a life belt, although he'd also picked up a length of chain from somewhere. His day didn't get much better, as a wave promptly washed him overboard, causing him to lose the chain, but luckily for him, Powell hauled him back onto the submarine, as the drifting Oakville plastered the sub's conning tower with machine gun fire as the range opened up again. As the two men approached the conning tower and the machine gun fire slackened, two German officers emerged, took one look at the mostly naked, mask-wearing, pistol-wielding Canadians, and upon being directed to stand at the aft end of their submarine, decided it was actually far safer to just jump into the sea and swim for safety. Realising their predicament as two lone men, the Royal Canadian Navy crew ordered the next Germans to appear to stay inside, but whether through a misplaced sense of bravado and duty, simply not understanding the situation, or possibly even the language, or just wanting to get out of the sub, those two U-boat crew kept on coming, and both ended up being shot. After checking that no other hatches were about to spring open and get them flanked, the rest of the available German crew were ordered out in a more controlled fashion, where Powell kept them covered on the aft of the sub, as Lawrence headed into the ship to try and recover any sensitive items like code books, logs, or maybe even the sub's Enigma machine. However, the crew had been thorough in disposing of such things in the brief interval of time that they'd had to do so, and all the valves aboard U-94 had also been opened. After a brief swim around the rapidly filling control room, it was clear that nothing could be done to save the sub, and with the crash of collapsing bulkheads echoing behind him, Lawrence emerged, and the two Canadians directed their new prisoners over the side as U-94 slipped away beneath them. Even as off in the distance, the thump of U-511's torpedoes hitting home rolled out over the waves. Some Germans, including the first two who'd gone overboard, swam for the Oakville and reached it, whilst the majority, including Lawrence and Powell, were picked up by the USS Lee, which had come to assist. The only slight complication at this stage was convincing the US crew that Lawrence, who was now naked and covered with a mixture of blood and oil, was not in fact a German submariner. This ended up being accomplished by a long stream of invective that he'd picked up in earlier service in the Royal Navy, where, without repetition, he spent several minutes questioning the legitimacy and ancestry of the men herding him in with the Germans, plus their ancestors back several generations, which would eventually grant him a clean-up, some clothes, and a swift return to the stricken Oakville, as it was rapidly concluded that there was no German who was likely to know that many English curse words. Whereupon he was then told that, well, Oakville's still at action station, so he'd better get up to the bridge and take his watch post. The rather battered Oakville was duly detached from the convoy to make repairs, and the convoy itself would reach its destination with no further losses. I think this pretty much encapsulates the full range of the determined efforts of Royal Canadian Navy sailors to ensure the safety of their charges. In addition to the U-94, the Royal Canadian Navy would claim another 26 U-boats and several dozen regular Axis ships sunk or captured over the course of the war, at the cost of 24 of their own vessels of various sizes. Most of the Canadian destroyers would also be involved in escort duties of some sort or another, including protecting and supporting forces at the Normandy landings. The exception to this would be the Canadian tribal class, which could often be found alongside their Royal Navy counterparts engaged in a vicious series of fights with German destroyers and torpedo boats ranging up and down the Channel and the French coast with occasional forays into the Arctic, and whose exploits will likewise merit a video of their own at some point. Whilst the U-boat threat would continue through to the end of the war, it was diminishing as an overall issue from mid-1943 onwards, and so in 1944, focus had started to shift, navally at least, to the Pacific, although the Royal Canadian Navy would also have a strong showing in the intervening period operating landing craft and the like on the North African, Sicilian, Italian and D-Day beaches, where of course one of the five beaches was primarily taken by Canadian troops. A somewhat more successful operation than the raid on Dieppe, which had also seen significant Canadian involvement. Some of the chaos of that particular day was summed up by Sub-Lieutenant D. Ramsey, Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve, who saw the following. He said, There was an armed German trawler blown clear out of the water by one of our destroyers. A five-inch shell went right through from one side to the other of the boat next to me without exploding. The boat officer, Skipper Jones, Royal Navy Reserve, an ex-trawlerman, as you can guess, screaming invective at the gerry and coming out once in a while with the famous Jonesian saying, Get stuffed! And a large house full of gerry machine gunners pasting hell out of anybody who dared to come near the beach. There was a Junkers 88 whose wing was cut in half by able-bodied seaman Mitchinson of Ontario in the boat astern. A plane swooping down low behind a destroyer and letting go a 2,000-pound bomb which ricocheted over the mast and burst about 10 yards on the starboard bow. And peeking over the coxswain's box and looking into the smoking cannon of an Me 109, I'm here to state that that was a very close call. It was a little bit chaotic on Dieppe Beach, to be perfectly honest. But as the end of the war against Germany approached, attention would inevitably begin to focus on Japan. At the end of 1944, some Royal Canadian Navy ships were already deployed with the British Pacific Fleet. Joining the many Canadian personnel already serving with the Royal Navy in the Pacific War. Ottawa was also laying plans to expand the Royal Canadian Navy's capabilities beyond its anti-submarine orientation. The war in the Pacific was expected to culminate with a massive invasion of Japan itself. And this would need a rather different Navy than that that was required for Atlantic operations. There was much less need for huge numbers of convoy escorts in the Pacific of 1944 and 45. Well, unless you happen to be Japan. But since Canada was on the other side, that didn't really matter too much. As a result, the Royal Canadian Navy would begin to pivot towards a more oceanic-looking Navy. Looking to acquire or build larger destroyers, such as the Tribals. And also acquiring a pair of ex-Royal Navy cruisers. One slightly used, the other basically new. With plans to take on significantly more heavy surface assets from the Royal Navy, including two carriers. But once again, circumstances, in this case, the end of the war, intervened. And the plan was massively shrunk down to operating one carrier, the Warrior, swapping it out for a better one that wasn't doubling as a refrigeration ship in fairly short order. Plus refitting the larger destroyers and other ships that the Royal Canadian Navy already had. But within a couple of years of the war's end, the vast majority of the smaller ships that had made up the bulk of the RCN's wartime numerical strength had been sold, scrapped or sent to the reserves, as the RCN would reorient itself for a new role in what was rapidly becoming the Cold War. That's it for this video. Thanks for watching. If you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review, let us know in the comments below. Don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry-doc questions.