A small corvette ship bearing Nanaimo’s name saved sailors’ lives and was witness to the signing of a charter credited as the forerunner of the Declaration by United Nations.
In the early days of the Second World War, a new class of ship was needed by the British Royal Navy to escort ship convoys, delivering materials needed to fight the war in Europe, and provide protection against German U-Boats and enemy aircraft that took a heavy toll on shipping crossing the North Atlantic. HMCS Nanaimo K101 was one of 122 Flower-class corvette ships built in Canada – 294 were built in total in Canada, the U.K. and Australia – to counter the German U-boats during the Battle of the Atlantic – the Second World War’s longest battle, lasting from Sept. 3, 1939, until May 8, 1945 – at which Canada played a central role.
"By 1940 continental Europe, from France to Norway, had been occupied by German forces. Britain stood alone and the sea lanes across the Atlantic were its only lifeline. Supplying that critical lifeline were convoys of merchant ships bringing vital food, fuel and war material from North America. The role of the Royal Canadian Navy escorts including the tireless Flower-class corvettes like HMCS Nanaimo was to protect the merchant ships against enemy submarine attacks and ensure the safe and timely arrival of the convoy at its destination," noted a release from the Canadian Naval Memorial Trust. "The escorts played a crucial role in ensuring Allied victory at sea during the pivotal Battle of the Atlantic."
The Flower-class corvettes were a design that could be built quickly and cheaply in small civilian shipyards and also incorporated propulsion systems and other marine technologies with which mariners were already familiar, helping to cut training and deployment times.
Canada’s Flower-class corvettes were named after Canadian cities near where they were constructed. HMCS Nanaimo K101 was built by Yarrows shipyard in 1940, commissioned in Esquimalt in the spring of 1941, and arrived at Halifax in the fall of 1941 to be assigned to Newfoundland Command, according to For Posterity’s Sake: A Royal Canadian Navy Historical Project online library.
Yarrows built five corvettes from 1940-41, and throughout the war launched 17 frigates, two civilian wartime freighters and three landing ships that were completed and delivered as the war ended, according to Nauticapedia.
In August 1941, HMCS Nanaimo joined other naval ships in Placentia Bay, Nfld., to serve as part of the escort to HMS Prince of Wales where British prime minister Winston Churchill and U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Atlantic Charter. The document, according to the United Nations website, is considered the origin of the Charter of the United Nations. In its eighth paragraph, the Atlantic Charter refers to the future “establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security.”
HMCS Nanaimo made three round trips between Halifax and Iceland escorting ship convoys before escorting a convoy to Londonderry, Northern Ireland, in February 1942 and returning to Canada in March 1942, the ship’s last Atlantic crossing, before it was assigned to the Western Local Escort Force to escort shipping in North American coastal waters.
In June 1942, the British steam merchant ship SS Port Nicholson, its holds filled with automobile parts and military stores, while sailing from Halifax to Boston, was struck by two torpedoes from U-Boat U-87 about 160 kilometres off Portland, Maine. Two men were killed when the first torpedo struck the ship’s engine room. A second torpedo hit the ship’s stern causing it to “settle by the stern” according to accounts recorded in For Posterity’s Sake and in Uboat.net.
HMCS Nanaimo retrieved SS Port Nicholson’s master, 80 crew and four gunners.
At dawn, several hours after it was struck, SS Port Nicholson was still afloat, so the ship’s master, chief engineer, one officer and three enlisted men from HMCS Nanaimo formed a boarding party to see if the ship could be salvaged, but after they boarded, increasingly rough seas broke the Port Nicholson’s already weakened bulkheads and caused the ship to start sinking rapidly. According to the accounts, the boarding party's lifeboat overturned in the suction of the sinking ship, drowning the ship’s master, chief engineer, the officer and one enlisted man from HMCS Nanaimo. The two survivors were picked up by the Nanaimo and brought to Boston.
In December of 1944, HMCS Nanaimo arrived at Esquimalt where it underwent a refit until February 1945. The refit left the ship as one of the few corvettes with its original short fo'c's'le, instead of the longer upgraded structure received by other craft of its type.
HMCS Nanaimo was paid off for disposal at Esquimalt in the fall of 1945 and sold for mercantile use, converted to a whale catcher – the Flower-class corvette design was based on whale catcher craft of the 1930s – at Kiel, Germany, in 1953, and served as the Dutch-flagged Rene W. Vinke. The ship was broken up in South Africa in 1966.
The Kingston Class coastal defence vessel, HMCS Nanaimo 702, has served in honour of its predecessor since it was commissioned in 1997.
To learn more about Second World War-era Corvette ships, visit http://naval-encyclopedia.com and Military History Now.
This week marks 80 years since the end of the Battle of the Atlantic.
