It Meant Being in Bad Weather off Iceland.

I’d been in the navy three years before the war started and I had been terribly busy. You know, when you’re a junior you’re not kicked around, but you have a lot of things to learn. So I was awfully busy. Then the war came along and I got even busier. I was in the destroyer Fame for eight months and we were extremely active. At that time, the Germans were busy capturing Europe and we were trying to prevent them. And we were in various actions off the Norwegian coast and preventing, blockading their country, stopping merchant ships at sea to cut off all the German traffic. And that’s what we did in Fame for about eight months, which meant being in bad weather between England and Iceland, blockading Europe, Northern Europe. And then I was sent back to Canada and I joined our destroyer, the St. Laurent. And I was in the St. Laurent for about a year. And it was a pretty exciting year, because within a month of coming back to Canada, we were back in England again, because the Germans started their real war to capture Europe at that time. And we were rushed over there and took part in the evacuations. People will have heard of Dunkirk. That was one of the many places people were evacuated from. It was the main one really. The idea was to rescue the British Army and the French Army from being captured by the Germans. We took an active part. There was a great deal of action by German bombers and stuff, to prevent us evacuating people. One morning, we went alongside a wharf in France at a place called Saint-Valery-en-Caux, which is now a resort town, it was then perhaps. We were waiting to rescue a British Army group that was said to be there. And we were driven off by German artillery and no soldiers ever arrived. And then we were attacked by bombers when we were along side the wharf. But to give you an idea of the violence of it, the destroyers, a destroyer is made to be in the front rank whenever there is a fight going on, because they’re powerful and they’re fast and so on. The British had 77 destroyers and we had, three Canadians were in it, but including those there were 77 and there were only 6 destroyers out of that whole lot, were serviceable at the end of the Dunkirk thing. All the rest were - some were sunk, beaten up, bombed and out of action. And we were one of the ones that wasn’t, but we came awfully close.