Just thought I'd should mention a little gem of a book i recently read. War At Sea: A Canadian Seaman On The North Atlantic, by Frank Curry.
In many respects, it's unremarkable. It's a little repetitive and there's not much in the way of broader insights about the effect of the war on Canadian society. Curry seems almost entirely uninterested in providing much background about himself or with providing us with even the months in which events are occurring.
On the other hand, it is a highly engaging first-person account of what it was like to be an ASDIC (Sonar) operator on a Canadian corvette in the North Atlantic during World War II. You really get a feel for what he was experiencing when reading his anecdotes. For instance; I won't ever forget that sailors experience a real charge when they get the smell of land close by after a long ocean journey. There's other stories; some of them tragic, like the iron ore freighters destroyed by magnetic mines off the coast of Nova Scotia, or the harrowing rescue of an injured worker aboard a floating drydock in the middle of a North Atlantic storm. Or the tension of a four-day mission to guard a ship as it repaired a break in the North Atlantic telegraph cable.
Curry was in London when Hitler's "Vengeance" weapons (the V1 and V2) were being fired at the city in the war's last days. Here is Curry's account of the first days of missiles and rockets:
As night came and darkness descended, bombs continued to arrive from the southeast. Now, in the darkness, their roaring engines and great flaming sheets of fire took on a diabolical cast. At midnight, I stood alone in Leicester Square as a bomb approached. There it was, low over the rooftops, a monster sent b the very devil. Its roaring engine shook the buildings surrounding the square; then it shut off and there were a few moments of piercing silence that seemed a lifetime Finally it exploded, just across the square, behind the first row of buildings. It was as if the end of the world had arrived, and when I continued toward my hostel, I was in a state of shock.I've never read such a compelling description of the sight of these early rockets.
It's a nice little book if you're into that sort of thing.
4 comments:
hi thwap... as you may know I grew up by the sea and I'm attracted like a duck to large bodies of water. But the thought of facing the wrath of the North Atlantic in one of those tiny corvettes makes my knees buckle. So needless to say I greatly admire the courage of all those who did. One of my grandfathers was a bomber pilot and that too took enormous courage.
Thank goodness I never had to choose between them because I don't know what I would have done...
Curry was a first-generation Canadian. His parents came from Ireland. (Northern Ireland.)
In another way, the book gives a little portrait of Canadian demographics at the time. He's from Winnipeg, but his ship-mates are from all over. He does a lot of tramping around Nova Scotia and he's posted out of St. John's, Newfoundland.
He also wanders around Ireland, England and Scotland while ashore.
Before we make decisions to send our troops into harm's way, thwap, we should read what those who have been there tell us about it.
Owen,
What is it about "conservatives" and chicken hawks?
harper, MacKay, Baird, ...
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