The First and Last Voyage

of the Fort Crevier, Part One

John Garside at the age of 17 years, 3months during Basic Seamanship Training

My destiny with the SS Fort Crevier was set in motion in 1942, when, as a 17 year old, I joined the Royal Navy. After graduating from the gunnery school H.M.S. Wellesley in the Spring of 1943, I was assigned to the DEMS pool in Hull. A week later I was drafted to the R.M.S. Queen Elizabeth as a working gunner for the five day trip to Halifax, Nova Scotia. On arrival I was paid off and assigned to the DEMS pool in that city. I had been in Halifax about a month when I was assigned to a ship in Montreal. There were five of us drafted to the SS Fort Crevier, a brand new 10,000 ton merchant ship built in Montreal. The journey to Montreal was by train and, as I recall, took about two and a half days. We had a great time and were treated like royalty by the other travelers. On arrival in Montreal we were told that the ship was not ready for us and we were housed in a downtown hotel, given a week's supply of food vouchers, and told to report back to the office in a week. The Fort Crevier, although brand new, was a coal fired steam ship. Our quarters were roomy, clean, and quite comfortable. We had our own showers and head as well as a separate mess deck. After taking on bunkers, we headed down river to Quebec where we were loaded with ammunition, tanks and other war material. Finally we topped up with grain and set out for Halifax to join a convoy for the United Kingdom.

As we entered the Bay of Gaspé we ran into my first full blown gale. Just as I was getting over my fear, the fire bars in the boilers melted and we lost the fire and of course steam. We were wallowing around badly when the call "all hands on deck" was made. Now it's one thing reading about that call in a novel, when you are reading at home by the fireside, and something else again when you are in the middle of a raging storm at sea. We rolled so hard that our life boats, which were swung out on their davits as was the custom in war time, filled with water causing the davits to curl like pretzels and we were ordered to cut them loose. I was hanging onto a line which was tied to a merchant seaman, while he hung over the side cutting at the rope falls holding up the boats. Another seaman secured a line to me and there we were with the seas breaking over the top of us. As I write this, I can feel these many years later how scared I really was. Eventually a deep sea tug got a line on us and we were towed safely into Halifax.

	This photo is of one of Fort Crevier's sister-ships, SS Bowness Park.
Although Bowness Park was an oil-fired "Victory" model and Ft. Crevier was a coal-burning "North Sands" type, the two ships looked nearly identical and carried the same armament.
This photo is from The Unknown Navy: Canada's World War II Merchant Navy Robert G. Halford, Vanwell Publishing, 1995.

A month later the storm damage was repaired, but we still needed lifeboats before we'd be ready to join a convoy for home. Finally, one day in late October of 1943 we had another call for "All Hands". This time our Captain had a proposition to put to the crew. In as much as our cargo was badly needed in England, he was prepared to install extra life rafts and join a convoy that would get us to England for Christmas IF we would agree to sail without life boats. It was a crew decision, we could not be forced to sail without boats. After surprisingly little discussion, a secret ballot was taken. The outcome was that we joined the next convoy to U.K. which left around the middle of November 1943 and I was about to start doing the job for which I was being paid.

My job as a DEMS gunner was to take care of the ships armament, to man the guns and teach merchant seaman to assist in operating the guns. The Fort Crevier had a modern high angle low angle four inch gun on the stern, on the monkey island she had two 1914 vintage Lewis guns that fired 303 ammunition and we also had two gun tubs containing Hotchkiss machine guns, also 1914 vintage. Our total ammunition supply consisted of ten four inch shells and about fifty thousand rounds of 303 ammunition. The Lewis guns had magazines that held 150 rounds. Our training indicated that if attacked by a dive bomber, we'd have about ten seconds from the time the plane started to dive before it was within our range, and that it would be in range for six seconds. Given the rate of fire of a Lewis gun, a burst of six seconds would empty the gun. Many gunners developed the system of wait for the dive then, squeeze and duck. No one wanted to be fighting to change magazines with a plane still firing at them.

The Hotchkiss gun fired a strip holding fifty rounds of ammunition. That also took about five seconds. There was so much flash from the gun that if fired at night it blinded any one within fifty feet and lit up the ship like a floodlight.

Usually on the first day out to sea the gunners would have a "shoot" to test the guns. On this trip because of our lack of ammunition we decided that the guns would probably be OK and we had better save the ammo.

The convoy consisted of about sixty ships of all shapes, sizes, and speeds. We of course were limited to the speed of the slowest ship. In this case six knots. As I recall, our escorts consisted of an old U.S. navy four stacker (part of Roosevelt's Lend Lease), a tribal class destroyer, two corvettes and a deep sea tug whose only purpose was to pick up survivors.

Although desperately needed and appreciated, the old "four stacker" destroyers were so unseaworthy that naval author James B. Lamb described them as "the most dubious gift since the Greeks left that wooden horse for the Trojans". This photo of a camouflaged four stacker is from Canadians and the Second World War, 1939-45 published by Reader's Digest in 1986.

We were happy to have the tug along because we knew that no one else would stop to pick up survivors. The first night out we lost two ships on the outer edge of the convoy; both of them were tankers. I will never forget that sight. In any event, we knew we were in for it. At six knots, there was no way of running from the attacking subs. Then we got a break -- the weather picked up, and before you could shake a stick, the winds were up to gale force making the Bay of Gaspé look like a pond. Below decks it was very uncomfortable to say the least and on deck it was downright dangerous. The good news was knowing the submarines could not operate in that weather. The convoy of course went to hell in a hand basket and scattered all over the ocean, and the lookouts, mostly gunners, had a terrible time trying to stay dry and move about the ship to their look-out stations. The waves were somewhere between fifty and sixty feet tall and we were literally tossed around like a cork. During the daylight hours we would occasionally get a glimpse of another ship which was all we wanted, we sure didn't want to get too close.

The storm lasted four days and it took another four before the seas got back to normal. The destroyers did a lot of running around looking for lost sheep and eventually we were back together and in about the same position we were in when the storm started. We now had another kind of company however. High above us and well out of range of our guns circled a German Focke-Wulf Condor passing on our position to any subs in the area. That night we lost four ships.

The crossing, that normally would have taken ten days, stretched to thirty, most of it through pretty foul weather The only attacks we had were in good weather so we prayed for bad. The surviving members of the convoy finally arrived in Liverpool and after a fun trip up the Manchester ship canal we arrived in Manchester ten days before Christmas.

The young recuperate quickly, I was eighteen at that time, and so after having seven days Christmas leave, strutting around with a western ocean roll, I was ready for sea again.