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.