It Was a Terrible Mistake

I decided I would become a professional anti-submarine officer and then people would actually listen to me and do as I told them, instead of doing something different and taking eight hours and risking the ship while doing it. But that’s just my opinion. His was probably quite different. Anyway, I applied to do a specialist course and become a professional anti-submarine officer, because in the navy, you could become an acknowledged expert by doing extra training in particular things. Like, you could be a gunnery expert, signals communication, and anti-submarine was one of them. It took six weeks for to be approved by the British to let me into their school. So I then went to their training school and became a professional anti-submarine officer. I’m not sure I learned anything there at all, but at least I had AS after my name which, you know ... Now, my purpose, my purpose in doing this was so that people would listen to what I had to say, ‘cause I had a high opinion of myself. As a hunter, I was a very good hunter when I was a kid in Manitoba. I used to guide people from Winnipeg, you know, when I was 14 years old. I knew how to chase things down, ducks, geese, deer, you name it. And submarines to me was just another quarry; there was a right way and a wrong way to do it. So my plan was to sink the entire German U-boat fleet after I’d qualified. Well, it didn’t work out like that, funny enough. Because instead of being left in a ship with all it’s armament and depth charges, I was sent to Halifax to train other people to be anti-submarine people. It was a terrible mistake and after two weeks of - I was issued a class of people - after two weeks I said to my boss, I wasn’t going to accept this nonsense. So I said to my boss that I was going to fail the whole class, that they had been badly selected. Tthey were basically irresponsible, not fit to be in the anti-submarine branch. Now, instead of firing the class they fired me, which is what my purpose was.