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Lookout - Here Comes the Navy!
By
Bob Orrick
There was a time when Canada's senior service - the navy - was billed as the third largest in the world. [Actually, that claim was in error, the navy was the third largest of the Allied Forces at the end of World War Two and not necessarily 'in the world.'] No matter, the Royal Canadian Navy [RCN] with the support of the Royal Canadian Navy Reserve [RCNR] and the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve [RCNVR] along with the West Coast Fishermen auxiliary fleet, was a pretty formidable surface force. Canada's corvettes did yeoman duty during the longest battle of the Second World War, the Battle of the Atlantic, and the then-new Tribal class destroyers with HMCS Haida in the fore, showed that Canada's sailors were not to be taken lightly despite the British navy's continual putdown of its 'colonial' upstart. The British ensured that its navy had the best and newest equipment almost always at the expense of the colonials from North America. For a time, some of Canada's corvettes sailed the Atlantic on convoy duty with wooden gun barrels for their four-inch main armament. The same sorry state extended to radar; the Canadians did their level best with second-rate and often second-hand equipment while the British took the best for themselves. While that might be understood as outdated policy of master over servant , it riles a bit when the British then turned around and condemned the RCN for what the British claimed was inefficiency brought on by lack of adequate equipment. Who said the British were our friends? Hell, we saved their bacon with the convoys and our fliers flew marvellously well in the Battle of Britain and our bomber boys showed how to get the damn job done. Later, a snarly Montgomery had to concede that the Canadians - those damn colonials - were a bit of all right after all. So, the British condemned Canadians all the while accepting their badly needed help. Sounds a bit like a lord of the manor lumping of his servants scenario.
Let us now move forward to today's Canadian navy. Long gone are the corvettes and the workhorse Tribals; these have been replaced by frigates that carry helicopters. This idea, incidentally, was the brainchild of Canada. In the early-to-mid 1950s, the RCN experimented with helicopters launched from a Prestonian class frigate, HMCS Buckingham. The frigate had a suitable platform welded to its quarterdeck above the squid well [ahead throwing anti-submarine bombs] and a small Bell helo was launched and recovered from it. The idea blossomed and became policy and was accepted by several other navies. Today, Canada's ships in the Persian Gulf carry a much larger Sea King helicopter fitted with anti-submarine detection devices but in the Persian Gulf are used more in a surface search mode. The choppers are vectored to an area to be searched for surface ships that might be operating in contravention of United Nations rules; that is, carrying contraband or fleeing terrorists.
Imagine, if you will, one of these large birds hovering over a surface ship, stopped to be searched. The ship's crew is none too pleased with the situation and begins to display some resistance. But first, a flashback.
When the Liberals ousted the Conservatives from office a decade ago, they immediately cancelled the Tories' helicopter acquisition programme. The cost to the Canadian taxpayer was hundreds of millions of dollars. Not to worry said the Liberals and they certainly did not. Today Canada's navy has to make do with Sea King choppers that have airframes that are beyond the legal limit of endurance and are held together with what the Prairie farmers of the Dirty Thirties used on their equally outdated equipment - bailing wire and a lot of gut-wrenching fear.
Now, back to the present. The chopper hovers between twenty and thirty feet above the rolling deck of the stopped merchantman. The civilian crew looks up - not in horror because they know of the Liberal's screw-up with the navy's helicopter replacement programme - but with humour. What, they ask, can a sad, old, much-patched-up Sea King helicopter do to us? The answer is not long in coming. As the transgressors look skyward, all the while shielding their eyes to the glaring sun that looks down from on high with much mirth, they begin to change from human forms of laughter to cowering, frightened, insignificant, snivelling lads. For above them the Sea King had begun to shed its parts; bits and pieces of the chopper come raining down on the seaborne civilians and they begin to plead for mercy. They do not want to become martyrs for their cause that way; to die by the hand of some unseen Liberal politician in far off Ottawa as hunks of steel shred from the falling Sea King slice into their unprotected bodies. No, to be a martyr is to encase the body in dynamite, drive a car into a crowd of innocent Israelis then detonate the entire affair and blow everyone to wherever their particular twisted god wants them to be blown to. To die onboard a ship at sea as hunks of rotor blades slash off heads and hands and legs and other bits of an outdated war machine from an earlier era cover the area with hot, molten metal is not the martyr's way to claim headlines round the world.
So, perhaps in a twisted, demented way the Liberals in Ottawa have struck a blow for Canada's navy. Perhaps this was their vaunted long-range plan to beef up the RCN's helicopter programme. Send the forty-plus year old machines to the Persian Gulf onboard frigates to fall apart as they hover over a ship suspected of carrying contraband.
Only in Ottawa, you say.
[The idea for this came from a reader in Chemanius; thanks Hank, long may the RCN reign.]
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Bob Orrick is a private tutor of English grammar, literature, poetry and Canadian history to off-shore youngsters. His pupils hail from such places as Taiwan, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea and Venezuela. He was previously in international marketing, was a ministerial assistant to a provincial cabinet minister, spent a few years as a reporter then editor of a community newspaper and enjoyed a career in the Royal Canadian Navy.
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