Welcome to this page which is a tribute to the Canadian World War Two minesweeper HMCS Bras d'Or and the men who served on her. When Canada declared war on Germany on September 10th, 1939, the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) was tiny in size and possessed only a few ships. There was a desperate need for naval vessels to undertake the many duties involved in protecting Canada's coastline, but until Canadian shipyards began producing new minesweepers and corvettes later in the war, the RCN had to make do with whatever ships they could find. Along with fishing trawlers from the Fisherman's Reserve the navy requisitioned a collection of ships from such sources as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, various government departments and even obliging owners of private luxury yachts. One of the new vessels-- a government-owned lightship in her civilian career -- was converted into the minesweeper HMCS (His Majesty's Canadian Ship) Bras d'Or .

	Built to WWI-era plans, the 265-ton trawler had been in government service for 13 years when World War Two began. She was named Bras d'Or after Bras d'Or Lake, the arm of the Atlantic Ocean which nearly cuts the island of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia in two.
The famous inventor Alexander Graham Bell had his summer home at Baddeck on the shore of Bras d'Or Lake. In 1917 Bell and one of his partners, F. W. Baldwin, began testing their fast new hydrofoil watercraft, the HD-4, on the waters of the lake.
Photo Courtesy of: The Canadian Naval Chronicle 1939-1945 by Commander Fraser McKee and Captain Robert Darlington. Vanwell Publishing: St. Catharine's, Ontario, c1996.

Unable to spare members of its permanent navy to command the newly converted vessels, the RCN looked instead to skilled seamen from the Fisherman's Reserve and Merchant (Mercantile) Marine to provide captains and officers whenever possible. To fill the other positions on board these new naval auxiliaries, the RCN relied on the thousands of enthusiastic young men who volunteered to join the navy from all across Canada. The duties undertaken by auxiliaries were varied -- Bras d'Or, for example, found herself practising minesweeping, escorting local merchant ships, patrolling for enemy submarines and even capturing an enemy freighter, the Italian Capo Noli, when Italy declared war against the Allies on June 10th, 1940. On the night of October 19th, 1940, only four months after her celebrated capture of Capo Noli, Bras d'Or was on routine patrol duty in the St. Lawrence River when she was ordered to escort a Rumanian freighter, Ingener N. Vlassopol from Baie Comeau, Quebec to the port of Sydney, Nova Scotia. Sydney, situated on Cape Breton Island, was the port where the slower merchant ships assembled before they set out in convoy for the United Kingdom. Romania had just recently been occupied by German troops, and the Canadian authorities wanted to make sure that Ingener N. Vlassopol didn't slip away to deliver her cargo to an enemy country. The two ships travelled down river together but in the Gulf of St. Lawrence they ran into a terrible storm and heavy seas which eventually separated them. The little minesweeper and the thirty men aboard her disappeared into the storm and in spite of rigorous searching efforts no trace was ever found of them.

The following newspaper clipping from a Montreal, Quebec newspaper would have been the first information released to the public about the suspected loss of HMCS Bras d'Or. The four men whose photos are shown -- Lieutenant (Engineering) Malcolm Cumming, age 45; Telegraphist Ib Korning, age 19; Able Seaman Joseph Emile Richard Pelletier, age 33; and Ordinary Signalman John Joseph Stasin, age 20 -- all came from the Montreal area. Bras d'Or's commanding officer, Lieutenant Charles A. Hornsby came from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The following two clippings focus on the minesweeper's Engineer Lieutenant Malcolm Cumming of Verdun, Quebec. Malcolm's nephew, Bill Lavery, has made all these clippings available in the hope that they will help put a human face on the tragedy.

	Malcolm Cumming's parents lived in Westbrook, Maine, and this article is from a Westbrook newspaper. Portland is a nearby city. During the war the shipyard at South Portland built many Liberty Ships, one of which, the SS Jeremiah O'Brien is a living memorial now berthed at San Francisco.
	In order to differentiate the old permanent navy personnel from the new volunteer wartime-only sailors, the navy used the terms Royal Canadian Naval Reserve (RCNR) for reservists who like Malcolm Cumming and C.A. Hornsby had previous seamanship experience. For the others who had little or no experience, but who soon formed the majority, the navy used the term Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve (RCNVR). The RCNVR officers wore wavy gold bands on their uniform cuffs and because they so greatly outnumbered the other RCN and RCNR officers, this wartime Canadian navy came to be dubbed the "Wavy Navy".

HMCS Bras d'Or was not the only vessel to be lost in the St. Lawrence during World War Two. Between May 1942 and November 1944 in what historians now refer to as the "Battle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence", a total of 19 merchant ships and 4 naval ships were sunk in the St. Lawrence River and Gulf by a few German U-boats. At least 340 people -- 136 of them aboard the Newfoundland ferry SS Caribou -- died as a result of these attacks.

In the years following the war the sacrifice of the little minesweeper Bras d'Or was not forgotten and in 1961 the Canadian Navy christened its revolutionary new hydrofoil HMCS Bras d'Or. By choosing the name Bras D'Or the Navy paid tribute to Bell and Baldwin's earlier hydrofoil, the HD-4, and honoured the memory of the first HMCS Bras d'Or and her gallant men.

IN MEMORIAM
Walter G. Armes George W. Brenton Walter J. Brown Joseph P.L. Burton Harold G. Chaddock Harold G. Clancy Elward R. Conrad Malcolm Cumming Joseph F. D'Entremont William J. Doherty Gerald K. Ellis Gilbert B. Gordon John W. Hacker Leonard Hill Walter M. Hillier	Charles A. Hornsby Hugh J.F. Jones William D. Keating Ib Korning Clarence L. May Harry Murphy Joseph E.R. Pelletier Guy D. Pettipas Herman Ruel John J. Stasin Joseph E. Stewart Gordon W. Walters Matthew Watson Miles L. Webb James L. Young