Description
Mr. Matheos describes how, despite given the opportunity to become a naval specialist, he opted to remain an Ordinary Seaman.
James Matheos
James Matheos was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan on September 9, 1924. He was one of three children. His father, a Greek immigrant, was a restaurateur. Mr. Matheos joined the Royal Canadian Navy in 1942, with the intention of “seeing the world.” After training in Victoria, British Columbia he served aboard HMCS Sans Peur, a converted British Admiralty yacht, and spent the war in the dual role of patrolling for U-boats off Halifax, and training naval recruits.
Transcript
You had an opportunity to specialize in gunnery, in seamanship, and there were a lot of other branches that you could opt out to if you qualified and if you liked that kind of work, whatever it might be. You could apply and get a chance to be an electrician or be whatever it is if you had that type of experience. I thought I’d like gunnery for a while and I took a gunnery course and we went up to Comox for rifle practice and stuff like that, but then I decided that I really didn’t like that anyway so I just went back to an ordinary seaman. I was a little concerned cause there was two guys on there doing anti-submarine work and I thought, if something happens to those guys, they’ve got nobody. So I went and worked on the screen a bit and learned a little about that which wasn’t an official task, but it was just something that Norm let me do because he was a top radar man. Anti-submarine detection and the anti-submarine detection we had was very sophisticated and became very popular in the Navy too.
Meta Data
Choosing the Navy
Medium
Video
Owner
Veterans Affairs Canada
War, Conflict or Mission
Second World War
Person Interviewed
James Matheos
Units/Ship
415 Squadron
Military Rank
Ordinary Seaman
Occupation
Deck Crew
Duration
1:37