Remembering our Merchantmen

“The Canadian Merchant Marine had only forty-one ocean-going merchant ships at the outbreak of the Second World War. During the war this fleet underwent tremendous expansion as Canadian shipyards produced 403 merchant vessels. Most of these were taken over by Great Britain and the United States but a significant number sailed under the Canadian flag. The cost of the war was high, fifty-eight Canadian-registry merchant ships were lost to enemy action, or probable enemy action, and 1,146 Canadian merchant sailors perished at sea or in Axis prison camps. In addition, six Canadian Government owned, but British-registered, merchant ships and eight Newfoundland-registered merchant ships were lost to enemy action. Many other vessels serving the war effort were lost at sea to marine causes or accident.”

The above appears on the web at: family heritage a page that also lists many details of the ships lost and damaged.

The smallest vessel listed is the Lucille M of 54 gross tons, (the size of a boat about 25m long) owned by Frederick Sutherland. She was shelled by U89 off Cape Sable. The 11 crew escaped, including the four wounded, and rowed 100 miles to shore at Shelburne, Nova Scotia.
The largest vessel listed is Canadian Pacific’s Empress of Britain of 42,300 tons. She was torpedoed by U32 off Ireland on 28 October 1940 after being bombed by German aircraft. There were few casualties.

For many of the ships that were lost, it is reported that there was no loss of life, and presumably they were rescued by other ships. All 36 crew of the Canadian Cruiser of Canadian Tramp Shipping were taken prisoner after being sunk by the German battleship Gneisenau in February 1941. One man later escaped from the POW camp to Spain. The crews of some ships were not so lucky. All on board Imperial Oil’s Victolite, 45 crew and 2 DEMS gunners, were lost in February 1942. The Canadian Government-owned Bic Island  was sunk and all of its crew were lost as well as the survivors she had rescued from the SS Gurney E Newlin and SS Sourabaya.

the above is is just a random selection of the entries on the website.

At the left is shown Roy’s model of Canadian Pacific’s British-registered Beaverford in her peacetime colours. Included in the list on the above website, this vessel was lost with all of the crew on 5 November 1940. By that time she had made 16 wartime crossings of the North Atlantic and had survived a U-Boat attack on convoy HX 55 in July 1940.When the German battleship Admiral Scheer attacked convoy HX 84 eastbound in the North Atlantic, Beaverford was one of several ships sunk.

Most of Beaverford‘s crew were from Britain but three were Canadians including one of her two gunners.Tower Hill Memorial, the UK Merchant Navy monument in London, records the names of all 77 members of Beaverford‘s crew who were killed when she was sunk. The names of the three Canadians in her crew, Clifford Carter, Laughlin Elwood Stewart, William Lane Thibideau, are also inscribed on the Sailors’ Memorial at Point Pleasant Park in Halifax, Nova Scotia which overlooks the harbour mouth whence Beaverford made her final departure in 1940.

Canadian Pacific lost 4 of the 5 vessels of the “Beaver” class during the war.