The Ship That Voted No and Other Stories of Ships and the Sea

J.L. Granatstein is a professor of history at York University, the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s, and the author of The Good
Fight.

This brief collection of stories of ships and the sea has its charms.
There is little real scholarship here, but the author has an eye for a
good tale. How many Canadians realize that in World War II, the crew of
HMCS Uganda, serving in the Pacific theatre after V-E Day, was given the
option of deciding whether it would continue to fight? Thanks to the
government’s (wise) political decision that only volunteers would
serve against Japan, Uganda’s captain had the shame of seeing a
substantial majority opt out of the war, enough to force the ship home.
How many remember the RCN mutinies during and shortly after the war? The
RCN’s tendency to think of itself as the Royal Navy, the habit of its
officers to ape the Brits, provoked sitdown strikes, refusals to work,
and other disobedient acts. It stretches matters a bit to call this
mutiny, but the investigations that followed started Canada on the road
to a Canadianized navy. Keene’s stories help bring these and other
lost events to life.