En Route to Nanaimo
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- Medium: Video
- Owner: Veterans Affairs Canada and Testaments of Honour
- Duration: 3:19
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En Route to Nanaimo
Near the end of the war, Mr. D’Aoust shipped out on HMCS Sioux. He left on a patrol mission from Halifax to Nanaimo. He describes it as a once-in-a-lifetime trip.
Roch Daoust
Roch D’Aoust was born on April 23, 1924, in Alfred, Ontario. When the war broke out, he worked for the war industry in Québec: ammunition manufacturing in Brownsburg, nitro-cotton manufacturing in Valleyfield and shipbuilding in Montréal. Then in 1944, he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy. He did his basic training on HMCS Donnacona and was later transferred to Cornwallis, N.S. to complete his training. He then shipped out on board HMCS Fundy, a minesweeper. The Fundy headed a group of three small ships that made sure passage was free and safe for the large convoys of ships sailing between Canada and Europe. In addition to destroying mines, the Fundy saved a number of casualties from passenger ships sunk by enemy submarines. Finally, he joined the crew of the HMCS Sioux, a destroyer intended to fight Japan but the war ended while the Sioux was on mission in the Pacific.
Transcription
We hadn’t left Halifax yet when they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, but we were told to go anyway because they’d need us for . . . as police and things like that.
That’s why we made the trip and our captain told us, “Men, the war is over but we’re going anyway.” From Shelbourne, Nova Scotia, we sailed south. The first thing we knew, we were between Panama and . . . not Panama, but between Cuba and Haiti, (inaudible) passage. We were heading south. We kept going. We got close to the Equator and then we finally made it to Long Beach, California.
He said, “Boys, here you’re going to meet actresses, because we’re here for two or three weeks.” God damn! Were we happy! They had anchored our boat quite far from Long Beach, but they would give us rides. We had the time of our lives. We had our Canada badges here, and the Americans . . . because the Americans and the English, you have to admit they don’t always like each other too much. But with the Canadians, cars would stop in front of us on the street and they would say. “Hop in, sailors, we’ll show you around.” It was a party for 18 days. We went all around San Fernando Valley, all the actors and actresses’ homes, it was fantastic!
After a while we had to move on. We left Long Beach and stopped in San Pedro and fuelled up and took on oil. It was the holiday season. So the captain said, “We’re going to take the youngest sailor on the boat and make him captain. He’ll give orders to the captain, to me, and to all my officers, and they had better listen.” That was a lot of fun too. Then we arrived in Nanaimo.
I was eight or nine months in Victoria in a lodging camp. You stayed where you wanted to, and they’d pay your room and board, waiting discharge. So at some point we were maybe a dozen men in a Canadian National coach, and we came back to Montréal, HMCS Donnacona, and that’s where I got my discharge.
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