The Unknown Navy: Canada's World War II Merchant Navy

Dean F. Oliver is the assistant director of the Centre for International
and Security Studies at York University in Toronto.

In recent years, Canada’s smaller, nonacademic presses have carved out
a well-deserved niche for themselves in the field of military history,
publishing a wide array of picture books, operational histories,
memoirs, and biographies. From both a scholarly and a literary
perspective, much of this output is of dubious value. Other works,
including several excellent first-hand accounts (e.g., those by W.W.
Frazer and Jack Watts reviewed elsewhere in this volume), are to be
taken seriously. This offering from Vanwell by Robert Halford, a
merchant seaman from 1943 to 1946, falls into the latter group, despite
some obvious weaknesses.

The first full monograph on the wartime merchant navy, it is an
interesting methodological stew containing three distinct sections:
narrative, personal memoir, and oral history. Inasmuch as the life of a
merchant seaman on the storm-tossed, U-boat-infested North Atlantic
during World War II can be generalized, the latter two sections are
rather typical fare. A collection of brief anecdotes and war stories
(Halford’s alone through the conclusion of naval training, numerous
others’ thereafter), they convey both the humor and the tragedy of the
war at sea without bridging entirely the gap between wartime sailor and
contemporary citizen that makes all but the best war memoirs an
unemotional exercise in sympathetic curiosity. The chapter “Winter
North Atlantic” comes closest to spanning this divide, but the
book’s real value lies in its narrative sketch of the merchant navy
itself, including a short epilogue on the fleet’s postwar demise.

Here too the structure is more than a little awkward. Separate sections
deal with the union, the vessels, the shipbuilders, and the personnel
problems, and the chronology cannot be followed without much
backtracking, repetition, and page turning. However, even a slightly
garbled version of what is admittedly a complicated story is valuable
enough, and Halford’s study provides a wealth of personal,
statistical, and technical detail not available elsewhere. This will not
be the last word on the “unknown navy,” but it is a very useful
beginning.