Emergency in Halifax
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- Medium: Video
- Owner: Veterans Affairs Canada and Testaments of Honour
- Duration: 3:16
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Emergency in Halifax
German submarines near Halifax threaten to sink ships transporting goods. An extremely important message must be sent to England.
Marie Duchesnay-Marra
Marie Duschesnay-Marra was born in Québec on October 14, 1920. Her father, a First World War veteran, fought with Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry before being injured in the Battle of Ypres. She was educated by the Ursulines and then attended business college. Early during the Second World War she worked in Québec City as a civilian employee for the Navy but she subsequently enlisted in the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service (WRCNS) in June 1943. The members of this service are often referred to as WREN, an easily pronounced adaptation of the acronym WRCNS. She took further Morse code training and she was transferred to Halifax, where she worked as a cryptographer (cipher expert) in the message centre. She continued her work in Ottawa and Gaspé before being demobilized in August 1945. Mrs. Duschesnay-Marra has had a long carreer as a cryptographer for various agencies of the Canadian government here and overseas.
Transcription
Emergency in Halifax
One night in Halifax, at two o’clock in the morning, Admiral Murray came by, because in the building where I was working they had combined operations: army, airforce and navy. The German submarines were right outside Halifax and we had convoys leaving all the time, constantly. There were ships from New York, Boston and North Carolina, going by Halifax before crossing via Newfoundland. The convoys were escorted by destroyers and other warships, and sometimes there were 200 commercial ships in a convoy, carrying everything you could imagine: food, wool, wheat, everything you could think of. Naturally, the Germans were chasing them because they wanted to sink them. That night the Admiral came down, and we had to notify the English admiralty in London. We didn’t have time to encode. We had to pass the message immediately because the ships had to scatter. Listen to me, I sound like the Admiral, but it’s what happened. The convoy had to be diverted. Each ship in a convoy has a certain position. At 12 degrees [inaudible], the Arthabaska and everything, because they were reading everything, then they went in zigzag formation to keep the submarines from torpedoing them. Well, they told me to sit down at the machine and in those days, we didn’t have satellites, we had cables running under the sea, with pulsations. So when you typed, it went out normally, but when you were receiving something, it went bbb, bbb, nice and smooth, like that. There was the Admiral and his staff standing behind me, the little French Canadian who didn’t speak English very well and who understood written English better than spoken English. I was always afraid of missing a word because if I missed the word, I missed the meaning of the sentence, but I finally started reading a bit better. Then he started dictating to me. I was very, very nervous and humbled by it all, and we were waiting for the answer, which came uncoded, to scatter the ships. All within the space of, I don’t know, a breath. It was that fast. The men were prepared. They had to be prepared all the time, at all times. On alert. It was on alert all the time, always urgent, always “most immediate,” top secret, and it was really something being involved in work like that.
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