Nimbus Publishing's Corvette Navy

Every summer I have the tradition of reading something nautical. Along the way I have gotten rather obsessed with a part of World War 2 we rarely consider in the modeling hobby: the long, dangerous, but vital work of escorting convoys across the North Atlantic.

As my eyes and sanity permit, I build 1/700 ships, and I've been thinking about a diorama with a transport, U-Boat, and some escorts. Destroyers usually come to mind, but the hardest and most hazardous tasks fell to corvettes, ships often just over 200' long. Canada, I've learned, did a lot of heavy-lifting with their ships, distinctive for the maple leaves painted on their funnels, either bearing floral names (like other Flower Class ships) or place names that are quite evocative, such as Moose Jaw. As I've family in the Maritimes, when I visit I try to learn about their war. Again and again, histories there draw me back to the escort runs.

I cannot imagine how these small ships handled in ferocious weather, but several books can help here. I began by reading The Cruel Sea, a 1951 novel by Nicholas Monsarrat. I followed that with The Good Shepherd, C.S. Forster's masterful 1955 story of a novice captain who must lead a convoy through a wolf-pack. Tom Hanks recently starred in a film version, Greyhound.

I find fiction a good way to pass the hours, but to really understand what happened, nothing quite measures up to the first-hand accounts of those who fought along the convoy routes. Thus Corvette Navy pretty much jumped into my hands at a small bookshop in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia this summer. I had planned to see the Sackville, the only remaining Canadian corvette, now at anchor in Halifax. See it I did, though deck-tours were not yet started for the season. It simply amazes me how 80 or so sailors put to sea crammed into such small craft, with most of the crew as volunteers and not professional Navy men. James R. Lamb was one such sailor, joining up in 1939 and by VE day, he had been captain of two escort vessels. He describes a war whose tactics evolved on the fly, in ways that violated all the received wisdom on prewar training. It was also, he notes, a war that did not get a lot of press or praise at home.

Our author, in fact, holds much of the professional pre-war Canadian Navy in scorn: by his account, they disdained the convoy work, building instead posh careers ashore and, by war's end, on capital ships. He's a bit kinder to the Royal and US Navies, who often sailed alongside the Canadian escorts and paid a terrible price in ships, men, and material. Lamb pulls no punches about the bad treatment that fighting sailors got from civilians and desk-bound military in Halifax, a usual point of departure for escorts. He contrasts that with the warm reception for crews in Northern Ireland and St. John's Newfoundland, or "Newfyjohn" to the Royal Canadian Navy. Along the way he describes several memorable officers and ships, at sea and in port.

That depiction of a gone world may stick with me longer than battle stories, as well as the power of seas that could and did capsize escorts. I'll never forget the image of the young women who lined the quays to wave a tearful farewell, when the convoy escorts left Ireland a final time in 1945. Conversely, I wouldn't mind forgetting the tragic story of HMS Candytuft, a corvette whose boilers exploded, scalding to death most of its crew.

The details of shore-life and convoy escort are gritty, from the carnal needs of sailors to rotting human flotsam adrift from sunken transports and U-boats. We get a clear sense of how young men bunked, ate, stayed seasick, found romance, wasted money on shore, died from or endured conditions unimaginable on larger vessels. You won't find deck plans or camo schemes here, but you might suddenly reflect anew, when building ship models, on who sailed the originals and the price they paid.

Lamb provides a few vivid accounts of hunting submarines, of a stricken transport carrying chemical weapons that killed all its survivors, and of how in 1943, Germany's hunters became the hunted. For Overlord, Lamb's ship joined the armada off France to sweep for mines and provide ASW patrols in the Bay of Biscay. Except for a few awful weeks when the Germans deployed acoustic torpedoes and went directly after the escorts (defeated by dragging lengths of pipe behind ships) the momentum of the war had shifted and Lamb was eager to have it end. He'd seen enough death, some of it through poor seamanship or vainglorious commanders who, in one incident, attacked friendly ships off Normandy before verifying the target.

The end of the book is bittersweet, as Lamb helps with the surrender of German forces on the Channel Islands, then takes his corvette Camrose back to Canada. There he commands it to the bitter end, supervising as the armament is removed and then sailing into its final berth before scrapping. He's sad to lose the fleet of Canadian corvettes, bound for the smelters, but happy to leave behind the war.

It's a war we don't often read about, but I highly recommend the book to those with an interest in the topic and who want to go beyond the melodrama of even well written fiction.

Joe Essid

July 2023

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