Convoys of World War II: Dangerous Missions on the North Atlantic

Gordon Turner is the author of Empress of Britain: Canadian Pacific’s
Greatest Ship and the editor of SeaFare, a quarterly newsletter on sea
travel.

This slender volume contains the stories of nine sailors who served in
the Royal Canadian Navy, Canada’s merchant marine, and Britain’s
Royal Navy during World War II. The common thread is that they all
participated in convoy duty on the North Atlantic. The author
interviewed these now elderly veterans and recorded their recollections
of events that occurred more than 60 years ago. Their stories tell of
miserable weather, picking up survivors from blazing tankers, hurling
depth charges at German U-boats, and landing on enemy beaches in the
Mediterranean. We read also of the sailors’ reasons for going to sea,
their training—or lack of it—and life aboard tiny ships with cramped
quarters that pitched and rolled in the frequently stormy seas.

Some chapters read fairly well, but others are rather flat. The author
is not always sure of nautical terminology, a problem that undermines
her accounts. She writes of “the aft [of a ship],” apparently not
realizing that “aft” is an adjective, not a noun. Ships are
sometimes “she,” sometimes “it.” The author places an incorrect
“the” in front of “HMCS.” The River Foyle is wrongly called
“the Foil River.”

The attempt to record the sailors’ stories is commendable, but the
book falls short of what it might have been.